Congress thorn in CPI (M) flesh

The absurd skit recurs as a curtain-raiser to party meet

Thiruvananthapuram: It has become a cliché for the CPI(M), ahead of its triennial all-India meet, to make some enfeebled noises over the party’s electoral equations towards the Congress at the national level.

This absurd question is back in for debate, though in limited political and media spaces given the party’s emaciated status as a national force, as the CPI(M) is getting ready for its 23rd congress, to be held in Kannur in Kerala in April 2022.

The party’s Central Committee (CC) met in Delhi earlier this month to discuss the draft political resolution to be placed before the party congress. The party polit bureau will draw up the resolution and revert to the CC to consider it. The document will be placed before the party congress.

Reports suggest that the Congress question came up for discussion at the CC meeting. The CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury rubbished the interpretative elements of the reportage as imaginative, though he did not entirely deny that the issue was figured at the CC meeting.

The CPI(M) is one of the few communist parties in today’s world where the entire members down to the grassroots join the process of discussing the political lines, strategies and tactics to be adopted in a given situation. The practice zealously followed, starts from the local committee level and culminates in the party congress, an assembly of delegates from all organisational tiers.

The party now matters only in Kerala, where it is in power and faces no immediate threat after its second consecutive electoral victory. Its relegation to the lone down south state does not seem to have dampened the procedural rectitude of the top brass in practising the Marxist-Leninist organisational and structural processes laid down in the heydays of socialism. So, the elected delegates at the party congress will analyse and debate right earnest the country’s political situation and the role of the party in deciding the nation’s future.

The Congress question is expected to figure as part of this process this time too. Albeit, It is quite improbable that the party would make a clear-cut position on this issue, leaving it as ambivalent and ambiguous as in previous occasions.

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As far as its national policy is concerned, the prime target of the CPI(M) is to see the defeat of the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. The party bosses are pretty well aware of the reality that its contribution in achieving that target is slender. All that it could look forward to is to notch up a handful of parliament seats from Kerala, where its tally was one out of 20 in 2019 polls.

Barring Kerala, the choice for the party cadres and supporters in most other states, however small a constituency that may be, is limited to voting for the party or candidate the best positioned to raise a challenge to the BJP. This would mean that in states where the Congress and the BJP are locked in the straight contest, the left supporters would vote for the Congress. This has been a long-settled issue.

Ever since the BJP’s ascendance, a section in the CPI (M)’s national leadership has been advocating an electoral alliance with the Congress outside Kerala. The late party veteran Harkishen Singh Surjeet was the most vocal proponent of this line. He was the architect of the Left-Congress synergy during the UPA-I rule, which broke after the Manmohan Singh government went ahead with the Indo-US nuclear energy pact, disregarding the Left’s objections.

The Kerala leadership had always been uncomfortable about an open alliance with Congress even outside the state. They feared that such a tie-up would dent the party’s prospects in Kerala. Now that the national scenario is entirely different from what it used to be a couple of decades back, even a section of the CPI(M) in Kerala is not averse to the party forging ties with the Congress in states where that would help defeat the BJP. They think, instead of spoiling the party’s chances in Kerala that could improve its standing, by winning greater support from the minorities, whose bigger concern is to stall the third coming of the BJP.

In the post-poll scenario, it is obvious that the CPI(M) would lend its support to a formation of parties that would replace the BJP in the event of a hung parliament. It would not matter much for the party if such a front would be led by Congress or a strong regional party. Regardless of what happens outside the state, the party in Kerala would be concentrating its energy and resources to grab maximum LS seats from Kerala. That would position the party’s Kerala unit, firmly in the grip of Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, as a key player in the post-2024 situation.