Coimbatore, Apr 3: Prakash Karat was on Thursday re-elected as General Secretary of the CPM by the 19th party Congress which also reconstituted the Politburo replacing veteran leaders Jyoti Basu and Harkishen Singh Surjeet.

Basu will be a special invitee to the Politburo while ailing Surjeet, a former General Secretary, will be a special invitee to the Central Committee.

Both Basu and Surjeet have been members of the Politburo for 44 years since 1964, when the CPM was formed after the split in the Communist Party of India.

R Umanath is also not there in the newly-constituted Politburo. He will continue to be a member of the Central Committee, the highest decision making body of the party.

Kerala Home Minister Kodiyeri Balakrishnan, CITU General Secretary Mohd Amin and Bengal minister Nirupam Sen are the new entrants in the 15-member Politburo elected by the party Congress on its last day here.

Besides Karat, the party Congress retained Kerala Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan, his West Bengal and Tripura counterparts Buddadeb Bhattacharjee and Manik Sarkar, Sitaram Yechury, CITU President M K Pandhe, Pinarayi Vijayan, S Ramachanran Pillai and Biman Bose in the Politburo.

K Varadarajan, B V Raghavulu and Brinda Karat are the other members.

The party Congress also elected a 87-member new Central Committee, inducting 17 new members.

The members include Kerala Finance Minister Thomas Issac and Bengal Minister Gautam Deb.