ON THE HOT SEAT: CPI(M) chief Prakash Karat is a man under fire.

Karat under fire as Left reviews poll debacle

Central committee meet this week

Arup Chanda | West Bengal | 15 June 2009 |

Murmurs of discontent within the Left is getting stronger against a leadership which is being seen as one which has failed. But will it lead to any changes?

Beqaraar karke hamein yu na jahiye, aapko hamari kasam lauut aaiye. (Don’t leave us so restless; for our sake please come back). Is this a message for all those disgruntled voters who have drifted away from the Communists? This hello tune on a senior Communist leader reflects the current mood in the Left camp even as they undertake a review of what went wrong with Election 2009.

Review meetings have already been held in the states of Kerala and West Bengal with the CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat presiding over both. The next round of meetings will be held in Delhi when the CPI(M) central committee meets on June 20 and 21 after the Politburo meeting on June 19.

The meetings are likely to be stormy to say the least. It may not be unprecedented as it would remind old-timers of the meetings in the late 40s and in 1979, when many state committees particularly West Bengal had revolted against the central party leadership.

At the meetings of the Kerala and West Bengal state committees too, large sections of leaders in both these committees challenged Karat’s political line of withdrawing support to the UPA government on the issue of the nuclear deal with the US and also to try and cobble up a third front which proved to be a non-starter from the beginning.

The central committee meeting in Delhi may not exactly witness a revolt but surely an uproar against the tactical line followed by the CPI(M) central leadership. However, according to the party constitution, a general secretary, elected by the party congress, cannot be removed by the central committee except under special circumstances.

There had been two precedents – when PC Joshi was removed as secretary of the undivided Communist Party of India (CPI) and P Sundaraiah offered to step down after severe criticism following the fiasco of the Telengana struggle in Andhra Pradesh.

Though CPI(M) leaders have been publicly claiming that Karat remains the unchallenged party general secretary, many senior leaders are questioning his political maturity and political strategy.

Echoing the former CPI(M) central committee member and Lok Sabha speaker, Somnath Chatterjee, who was expelled by the party and who described the central leadership of being “narcissists living in ivory towers,” leaders who have personally led mass struggles and have risen from the ranks feel the present leadership are a “bunch of armchair revolutionaries who at the most had led student unions.”

The situation within the Kerala CPI(M) is quite pathetic. In 2004, the Left had won 18 out of the total 20 Lok Sabha seats. This time it managed only four. The reason is now more or less clear. The infighting in public between Kerala Chief Minister VS Achutanandan and CPI(M) state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan because of which both were suspended from the Politburo but did not seem to have  learnt a lesson, was one of the major reason for the Left debacle in the state.

Even after the drubbing at the hustings, the Kerala CPI(M) does not seem to pay any heed to the writing on the wall ahead of the 2011 state Assembly polls.

The fight has now come out in the open after the Kerala governor gave a nod to the CBI to register a case against Vijayan for having awarded contracts to a Canadian company when he was power minister almost two decades ago. Known as the “SNC Lavlin corruption case,” it has sharpened the divide within the party.

Several posters asking Achuthanandan to “resign and go” were plastered across Thiruvananthapuram even as the CPI(M) leadership behaved like an ostrich and refuted media reports of friction among its leaders over Achuthanandan defending the governor’s action against Pinarayi Vijayan in the SNC Lavalin scam.

Achuthanandan has gone on record to say that Governor RS Gavai’s go ahead to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to prosecute CPI-M state ecretary Vijayan in the Rs 300 crore (Rs 3 billion) corruption case was “not surprising.”

Just a day before, state home minister Kodiyeri Balakrishnan had criticised the governor’s decision calling it a violation of the constitution and democratic rules.

However, when asked about his opinion, Achuthanandan contradicted Balakrishnan and said: “Don’t you know that there have been several instances in the past where governors have taken such a stand?”

The CPI(M)-led Kerala ministry too is divided and six ministers who support Vijayan went to the party leader’s house and expressed their desire to step down in protest against Achuthanandan’s comments.

Kerala finance minister Thomas Isaac also met Karat and conveyed the discontentment among party cadres over the tussle between Achuthanandan and Vijayan.

While the Kerala affair witness a serious assault by various factions from the state, many will charge the central leadership of having sat idle and let the situation drift. They feel that both leaders should have been removed and the state handed over to a leader with a clean image such as Isaac Thomas.

But the bomb is likely to be dropped by members from the West Bengal committee. They are not only cut up with the central leadership but are also blaming the party’s faulty policy of acquiring land in the state for setting up industry. The West Bengal government led by Politburo member and Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya has been under severe attack.

A senior central committee member from West Bengal said, “This is an irony. We were repeatedly voted to power because of our land reforms and our land policy. Today we are being voted out because of the state government’s desperate attempt to acquire land for industry. We seem to have diluted our land policy and adopted one which is akin to rightist parties.”

The majority of West Bengal central committee members also feel that it was wrong to withdraw support to the UPA government on the nuclear deal as the party was not able to convince the masses about its stand. “The fact remains that for a common man nuclear only means an atom bomb. Not only the people, even our cadres did not know the details of the deal and we could not explain to the people what we wanted to say,” a senior leader pointed out.

These dissidents feel the CPI(M) should have stalled Parliament if necessary on the nuke deal to register its protest but not withdrew support to the government.

Moreover, the so-called third front which Karat was so enthusiastically pursuing, remained a non-starter. On this issue Karat will face severe flak particularly as he personally went out of his way to win over a “politically slipper customer” like BSP supremo Mayawati. Mayawati did not enter into any electoral alliance with the Left but also fielded candidates against the Left in West Bengal. It was more like a school-boy trying to hug an unwilling school girl at a dance whom he had described only last year as “pernicious.”

The central committee member alo pointed out, “Mayawati’s political credentials are well known. We the Left parties even said she could become prime minister. This is what happens when fronts are being formed just for electoral gains and not time tested through common struggles as we did in west Bengal and despite differences on issues it is still intact. Leaders like Jyoti Basu had always pointed out this fact but the new central leadership seemed to be in a hurry without assessing ground realities.”

For the CPI(M) it is a “wake up call” as Politburo member Sitaram Yechury has described the recent poll debacle. But for Karat, who has remained quiet since the Lok Sabha election results, the central committee meeting will be the first test in which his leadership is likely to be challenged.