Outlook English - Print Subscribers Copy Outlook English, 07 May 2018 | Page 30

NEW RED LINE
Revisionism
Saves The Day
Bengal’s beleaguered comrades push a changed ‘Yechury
line’ down hardliners’ throats in the party congress
by Dola Mitra in Calcutta
W
HEN the challenge posed by
the adversary is tough, even
seemingly inflexible ideolo­
gical ‘lines’ can be bent. On
the very first day of its party
congress held in Hyd­erabad
from April 18 to 22, the CPI(M)
amended the political resolution it
had adopted in its central committee
meeting in January in Calcutta. In the
party’s 54-year history, this was a first
and it marked an urgency, according
to some Bengal Communists. Speak­
ing to Outlook after the party con­
gress concluded, former CPI(M) cen­
tral committee member Gautam Deb
30 OUTLOOK 7 May 2018
says it’s “the need to set things right
without further delay”.
Deb was among those to have supported
general secretary Sitaram Yechury’s pro­
posed draft during the Calcutta meeting,
which advocated working with other sec­
ular democratic parties, namely the Con­
gress, in order to fight the BJP. In fact,
most of Bengal’s CPI(M) leaders were
A former CPI(M) MP
says even “a split in the
party was discussed” in
case January’s hard line
wasn’t changed. It was a
‘do or die’ affair.
PTI
CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram
Yechury with leaders Prakash Karat,
Pinarayi Vijayan (extreme right) and
Biman Bose (extreme left)
fav­ourably disposed towards this argu­
ment, known as the ‘Yechury line’. In the
January meeting, it was rejected outright.
Three months down the line now, a middle
path has been adopted. In short, though a
political alliance with the Congress has
been ruled out, an understanding and
coo­peration with secular parties, includ­
ing the Congress, with a goal to combat
and oust the BJP, is not.
A section of the Bengal CPI(M) blames
its calamitous defeat in the 2011 assembly
elections, when it lost power to Mamata
Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress after a
continuous reign of 34 years, to its sever­
ing ties with the Congress—CPI(M)’s
withdrawal of support in 2008 to UPA-1
at the Centre still rankles with some. That
break drove the Congress into the
Trinamool’s waiting arms, thus unifying
the votes against the Left Front. However,
subsequently, political experts have dis­
missed the idea that the CPI(M) lost
bec­ause of the alliance. “The party lost
owing to three decades of anti-incum­
bency and because the Trinamool finally