Kerala continues to hog the limelight at CPI(M) Party Congress

CPI(M) Party Congress discusses Kerala government achievements, strategies to counter BJP, and support for upcoming general strike.

Discussions at the CPI(M) Party Congress in the temple city on Thursday continued to revolve around the attainments of the Left Democratic Front government in Kerala. 

K.K. Ragesh and M. Anilkumar from Kerala who participated in the discussions on the political review and political-tactical line presented by Polit Bureau coordinator Prakash Karat spoke about the Nava Keralam (renewed Kerala) project, specifically on the Kerala Development and Innovation Strategic Council (K-DISC), the strategic thinktank advisory body of the CPI(M)-led State government, and the initiatives being undertaken by the government to further welfare schemes while trying to plugs the gaps in infrastructure creation aimed at increasing productivity.

The argument was that these initiatives strengthened the party’s standing and showcased an alternative roadmap to development at a time when a hostile Centre was trying to throw a spanner in the works of non-BJP States. 

The politics of the times driven by fast-paced, high-end technology demanded new ways to reach out to the youth, it was maintained.

Debashish Chakraborty spoke about the flagging fortunes of the party in West Bengal where an active intervention in people’s struggles was needed to restore the people’s faith in it. The BJP’s authoritarian ways were blamed for the party’s loss of clout in Tripura. It was argued that the BJP garnered strength in these States by deft social engineering and a clever use of communal equations.  

A general complaint was that the party had not done enough to publicise and popularise the achievements of the LDF government in Kerala in the States where its strength had eroded considerably. There was a general consensus on the need for the party to strengthen itself even as it sought to be part of broad-based State-specific political arrangements to defeat the BJP.  

A resolution on the need to draw in wide sections of people besides secular and democratic organisations to counter the “diabolic communal attacks of the BJP-RSS combine” against the Muslim community and another one extending support to the May 20 general strike called by trade unions against the implementation of the four Labour Codes were passed by the Party Congress on Thursday.