Consensus at CPI(M) meet

Party seeks to ride its Kerala model to relevance

On the face of it, the recently-concluded party congress of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] in Kannur was the party’s last chance to revitalise itself at the national level and formulate plans for effective interventions against the Bharatiya Janata Party’s — and by extension, the Sangh Parivar’s — burgeoning stranglehold on the diverse Indian society, which the combine is desperate to homogenise.

Expectedly, the party congress demonstrated an unprecedented ‘united resolve’, in the words of the re-elected general secretary Sitaram Yechury, to reverse its receding influence among the people and to close ranks with like-minded regional secular and democratic forces to stall the BJP’s advance. But that’s easier said than done and the CPI(M), at its nadir electorally, knows it rather well. However, what lends the party the moral confidence is the victory of the farmers’ agitation in which it was a key player and its role in ‘secularising’ and ‘expanding’ the struggle against the Citizenship Amendment Act-National Register of Citizens (CAA-NRC) regime. Ironically, this period also saw the party membership and representation in Parliament drop catastrophically. But its fall wasn’t an instantaneous and unforeseen occurrence.

The CPI(M) had, at its last two party congresses and the Kolkata Plenum of 2015, resolved to build a Left and democratic forces’ unity to put up resistance against growing assault on democratic and constitutional institutions. In fact, the call to better the quality of party membership was first made at the Salkia Plenum in 1978. Taking a realistic, critical look at itself, the 23rd party congress at Kannur admitted the leadership’s failure to act on several such decisions taken earlier. At the close of the congress, the party leaders said that there was a sense of urgency now. The old, oft-asked question about whether it should ally with the Congress didn’t drown the discussions as the Congress was itself in tatters and the closer danger of the BJP was felt at the doorstep. The political resolution, therefore, focused on independently building the party and forging State-level understandings with the Left, secular and democratic forces around a common minimum programme.

But the proof of the pudding will be in the implementation of the policy and it will be a long time coming. The work has been kick-started, though, as seen on the sidelines of the party congress when Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin was roped in to set the ball rolling on the coming together of non-BJP parties leading State governments to fight for safeguarding India’s federal structure and fiscal federalism. There will be many such issues like the question of caste census, privatisation of public sector companies like the Life Insurance Corporation of India, the new labour codes and other livelihood issues around which it’s expected to rally other regional forces to organise mass campaigns.

Meanwhile, the party will be projecting the back-to-back term won by the government led by it in Kerala as a success of its alternative economic policies and development plans. The assertion of its faith in the Kerala government by way of a resolution at the party congress, however, has been viewed with a fair degree of scepticism even by Left sympathisers. It’s rumoured, and rightly so, that the Kerala unit of the party now wields the organisational clout to prevail over its central leadership and has therefore, succeeded in dodging a discussion on the debatable ‘New Kerala’ document endorsed by the Kerala unit of the party which calls for private investment in health and education. Nor did the party congress mull over the contradiction in the party fighting the bullet train project in Maharashtra while obstinately pushing the semi-high speed rail project in Kerala.

Also read | CPI(M) congress political resolution sticks to BJP as bête noire

As it parades Kerala as a model worth emulating, the CPI(M) will have to reconcile with these contradictions to stay true to its ideals and be relevant nationally.