Yechury highlights mistakes made by state comrades: discarding an electoral analysis drawn up by the state committee

A source in the party said that with the central committee adopting a poll review prepped by the politburo, it was impossible for him to stand by the state committee

Sitaram Yechury.: File photo

Devadeep Purohit, Arkamoy Datta Majumdar   |   TT  |  Calcutta   |   13.08.21, 02:18 AM: CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury on Thursday used a review of the Bengal election results to highlight the mistakes made by his Bengal comrades in their approach to the Assembly polls in which the party could not bag a single seat.

The review had already been adopted by the central committee, the party’s highest decision-making body.

“Sitaram was furious. He kept accusing the state leadership of not conforming to the party line. There was hardly any defence from the state leaders,” said a CPM leader who was present at the state committee meeting.

“Even after coming back to power with a landslide victory, look at Trinamul’s groundwork. What are you doing? You are not even able to identify the issues properly,” a source quoted Yechury as telling the Bengal comrades while wondering how they could be oblivious to the decay in the party’s organisational abilities.

The CPM general secretary has always been aligned with his colleagues from Bengal and had often lent his weight behind the so-called Bengal line in times of debates on the political-tactical line. But he was unsparing this time.

A source in the party said that with the central committee (CC) adopting the review that the politburo had prepared — after discarding an electoral analysis drawn up by the state committee — it was practically impossible for Yechury to stand by the state committee that has been accused of flouting the party line.

The report adopted by the central committee says: “During the course of the campaign, the seat adjustment with the Congress party and the Indian Secular Front were projected under the terminology of Sanjukta Morcha as a United Front calling for an alternative government. This was wrong and not in consonance with the CC understanding.”

A segment of state leaders want to carry on with this electoral understanding. Their line came under fire from Yechury as the central committee’s view was laid on the table.

This central committee note, a party source said, is going to be a bitter pill that the Bengal unit will have to swallow in all subsequent discussions — to be carried out across districts — on the Assembly poll outcome.

The review of the election results did not restrict itself to the alliance the state unit had entered into. It highlighted how state CPM leaders had overestimated the anti-incumbency against Trinamul and how the ruling party’s attempts at tackling the people’s grievances were brushed aside as “dole politics”.

Over the past few years, the CPM has often tried to criticise Mamata’s pro-poor measures as “dole politics”. A section in the party never approved of this line but got overruled in various forums.

Now that the central committee has castigated this approach, it will be interesting to see how the state leaders, who had been in denial despite successive electoral debacles, chart their future course and criticism of Mamata.

One of the central points of Yechury’s criticism of the state unit at Thursday’s meeting was its approach on the question of land, an issue believed to be at the core of the slide in the party’s support base since 2008.

“The slogan of land as our basis and industrialisation as our future, coined at the time of the Nandigram developments, continued to be used even in this election campaign. In the current situation, this slogan was seen by the people as a continuation of the land acquisition policy, reviving memories of that period which had alienated rural people from the Left Front,” the source quoted Yechury as having told the meeting in reference to the note.

Amid the current agrarian crisis and the farmers’ agitation, any talk of acquiring land would deepen the peasantry’s alienation from the party, the note said. Yechury reiterated the point.

The Bengal unit’s repeated assertion during the poll campaign that the BJP and Trinamul were two sides of the same coin too came under attack at the meeting. The general secretary explained how this approach had damaged the party’s credentials as an uncompromising defender of secular democracy that opposes the BJP.

The Bengal unit of the party, led by Surjya Kanta Mishra, has publicly acknowledged its mistake in coining the term “Beejemul”.

The question, however, is how the state leaders will react to the other lacunae the central leaders have highlighted in their assessment of what went wrong in the Assembly polls.

“During the central committee meeting earlier this week, some Bengal comrades seemed defiant in the face of criticism from comrades from Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Tripura,” a source said.

“One of them went to the extent of asking a Tripura comrade about the party’s performance in the tribal council polls in his state without acknowledging that the CPM remained a force in the northeastern state. We will have to see how the Bengal unit reacts and redraws its strategy.”