Gulf Times
CPM lost touch with ground reality, says senior leader
IANS/New Delhi
Senior Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Sitaram Yechury has admitted that the party had “lost touch” with the ground reality in its bastions of West Bengal and Kerala.
“Of course, the results show that we lost touch (with the ground reality). It is a big debacle,” Yechury told CNN-IBN channel in an interview.
Asked if party general secretary Prakash Karat would resign owning up the defeat, Yechury said: “Resignation is an escape from responsibility. We will collectively assess (the reasons for the debacle).”
He said “the top leadership will have to take up a leadership role.”
“A serious, honest, self-critical review of all the issues will be done,” he said, adding that the issue of alleged leadership failure “would also be discussed”.
“The process has already begun and by middle of June we will come to a conclusion,” he said.
“You cannot escape the reality that this is a big debacle for the party. This is the first time in the last two decades that a secular government is being formed without the role of the CPM,” he said.
The CPM’s Lok Sabha tally slipped to just 16 from 43 in 2004.
In Kolkata, CPM patriarch Jyoti Basu asked senior party leaders to reach out to the people of West Bengal to find out the reason for the party’s poor showing.
“Basu has asked his party leaders, Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and CPM state secretary Biman Bose to reach out to common people and find out why the people had not voted for the communists in the Lok Sabha elections,” Basu’s personal assistant Joykrishna Ghosh said.
“Basu has asked both of them to look into the issue seriously. He also instructed them to make people understand the policies of the Left Front and what they are willing to do for the common people in Bengal,” he said.
Meanwhile, the CPM leaders also held a state committee meeting in Kolkata yesterday to discuss the dismal result of the LF in the general elections.
In Kerala’s capital Thiruvananthapuram too the CPM began a state secretariat meeting amid indications that it could be a stormy one as the party takes stock of its humiliating defeat.
The two-day 15-member secretariat meeting will be followed by the 84-member state committee meeting that will last three days.
Karat and senior politburo member S Ramachandran Pillai will oversee the five-day meeting.
The meetings are the first since the poll debacle in which the state’s ruling Left Democratic Front saw its Lok Sabha tally slipping to a mere four from the earlier 19.
A CPM legislator, on condition of anonymity, said some damage control exercise would be undertaken.
“The central leadership instead of finding a solution to the ongoing rift in the party between state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan and Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan is trying to placate the rival factions,” said the angry legislator, adding that the party should “wield the rod where it has to be done.”
The rivalry between Vijayan and Achuthanandan reached a flash point when the central leadership suspended them from the politburo in May 2007 and then reinstated them in October the same year.
The biggest casualty of the factional feud has been the functioning of the Achuthanandan government, which has completed three years.
-- My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. - Jorge Louis Borges