Driving Naari Programme launched in Chandigarh
New Delhi: Downplaying reports claiming internal dissent in the party after being battered in the last several elections, the Communist Party of India’s (Marxist) general secretary Prakash Karat on Wednesday said that the stories which appeared in the media are misleading. He added that the party will soon adopt a new political line.
Karat, while addressing a press conference, said that the CPM will draft a political resolution after due consideration and discussing the review report.
A four-day brainstorming session of the party’s central committee began on Sunday with top leaders from different parts of the country debating on the correctness of the political-tactical line adopted at the CPI(M)’s Jalandhar Congress in 1978.
As per this line, the CPI(M) was to take the lead in forming a broad anti-Congress forum of secular, democratic parties, as also isolate the BJP.
In a significant move, CPM leader Sitaram Yechury has placed before the 90-member panel a five-page alternative report which is understood to be supportive of the Jalandhar line but blames its faulty implementation in the last decade for the drastic decline in CPI(M)’s strength nationally, apparently criticising the leadership of general secretary Prakash Karat.
Now with the “communal” BJP ruling at the Centre and gaining strength in states, a section of the central committee feels it would have to adopt new political-tactical line to face the challenge and regain strength as the ruling dispensation was “a combination of corporate power and RSS-led Hindutva forces”.
A large section of the party feels communalism was also raising its head in West Bengal which had seen no such tension over the past four decades.
Apart from the political-tactical line, the CPI(M) Politburo has also placed a draft report on the emerging political situation which would also be debated.
In 2004, CPI(M) had 44 MPs in Lok Sabha when it had supported the Congress-led UPA to form government at the Centre. Four years later, the Left withdrew support to UPA-I and subsequently, its strength continued to decline and has fallen to nine now.
In West Bengal too, Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress uprooted the Left in West Bengal after 34 years and CPI(M) fortunes fell in its other stronghold of Kerala.
PTI
