CPM on the verge of losing national party status, wrestling likely in party over alliance with Congress

There were indications of an in-house wrestling in the party over the failed experiment in Bengal of aligning with the Congress.

The sidelined Prakash Karat camp is set to use this as an excuse to target party general secretary Sitaram Yechury .

For ‘national’ status a party should secure a minimum 6 per cent votes in the Lok Sabha elections and have at least 11 MPs. The CPM failed to achieve this in 2014.

The second option to earn national party status is to win 1 out of every 30 assembly seats in four states.

With the CPM tally down to zero from 10 in Tamil Nadu, the party has 1/30 MLAs only in Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura. This would be the second time the CPM faces the risk of losing its national party status. It lost it once, in early 2000, before regaining it following EC’s relaxation of the rules. The CPI had lost its national party status in 2009.

National status apart, CPM circles indicated that the tussle brewing in the central leadership since Yechury replaced Karat as party chief last year could reach a boiling point following the failure of the Bengal experiment.

The Karat camp has been whispering that the ‘Bengal line’ was a ‘dilution of the political/tactical line’ adopted during the last Party Congress.

The election-eve ‘smuggling in’ of an article in the Karat-edited CPM mouthpiece, People’s Democracy, criticising the party’s collaboration with “the bourgeoisie party” by re-producing a convenient Karl Marx quote is seen as the warning shot fired by Yechury’s detractors.

After Thursday’s results, Yechury told journalists that the party was set to review and discuss the verdict soon.

Notwithstanding the attempts to provide an ‘ideological and political cover’ to the tussle, party circles see it as a flare-up of the pent-up personality clashes, especially as the Karat camp continues to have a slight edge in the Polit Bureau and will be keen to weaken Yechury’s position, more so after the pro-Yechury Bengal unit has lost the polls while Kerala’s Pinarayi Vijayan faction, whose supporters are in the Karat camp, has reinforced itself.

The defeat of a political/tactical line supported by a party chief had led to resignations of general secretaries Ranadive (post-Calcutta thesis) and P Saundaryya (after his opposition to CPM aligning with Jan Sangh was rejected) HKS Surjeet offered to resign after the ‘historical blunder.’

Sections in the party feel Karat camp’s target is Yechury. But they point out that Karat did not resign when breaking up with UPA-1 boomeranged on the party in the 2009. The Yechury camp also takes credit in bringing together Pinarayi and VS Achuthanandan , averting election-time feud witnessed during the Karat regime.

Many also point out that CPM, the projected opponent of the SA Dange line, also has the history of conveniently aligning with Congress: It aligned with Congress-DMK in Tamil Nadu, with Congress-TRS in AP and fought the Hoshiarpur seat in 2004 LS polls with Congress support.

It aligned with the Congress-NCP for 2005 Maharashtra polls, apart from accepting Lok Sabha Speaker post in 2004. By Agencies.