Under his leadership, the CPI(M)-led Left Front came to power in a landslide victory in the 1977 election, and remained the dominant force in West Bengal politics for several decades following Dasgupta's death.

Promode Dasgupta was born in July 1910 in a Baidya family in Kaurpur village in the undivided Bengal of British India; it is now a part of Bangladesh.

[1] In a 1978 article written during the first year of the Left Front government, India Today compared the personalities and leadership styles of Chief Minister Jyoti Basu and Promode Dasgupta.

It described the former as an urbane, mild-mannered statesman from a prosperous family who had attended Calcutta's top schools and studied law in Britain, where his conversion to Marxism had occurred.

In contrast, India Today characterised Dasgupta as a "homespun Marxist" whose "life has been devoted to the single-minded aim of strengthening the CPM" in West Bengal.

He lives simply in a single room provided by the party and has his meals at the common hall of the CPM district office at Alimuddin Street, off Lower Circular Road, Calcutta.