The Kerala CPM leadership has purged one of the party’s best-known embedded poets and chief cultural agitators in the state, for penning sarcastic verse that apparatchiks found was obliquely aimed at themselves.Party member and poet K C Umesh Babu is one of the founder leaders of the Purogamana Kalasahitya Sangham or PUKASA (Progressive Artists and Writers Forum), a highly influential body of Marxist writers and thinkers, closely controlled by the party. He has also been the district secretary of the outfit in Kannur district, CPM’s strongest citadel.Babu’s undoing was that he wrote a poem in Janashakti, a magazine run mostly by ex-CPM journalists expelled by the official leadership, which is under the firm control of CPM state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan. The leadership had proclaimed the magazine reactionary after it began attacking Vijayan and his men while holding up his arch party foe and Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan. Babu’s poem, called The Fears, read:“Someone made a speech, and the leaders said it’s to clobber the party/Someone wrote a poem, and the leaders said it’s to clobber the party/Someone made a critique, and the leaders said it’s to clobber the party/Someone launched a newspaper, and the leaders said it’s to clobber the party/Someone died, they heard of it, and the leaders said it’s to clobber the party.“Thunderbolt fell and the leaders said, let the committee meet/Bridge collapsed and the leaders said, let the committee meet/Need to know the truth and the leaders said, let the committee meet/Can’t get justice and the leaders said, let the committee meet/Ten per cent commission, and the leaders said hand it to us, discreetly.”“Babu hadn’t named anyone but those lines obviously concern our state party leadership, its rightist-revisionist agenda,” according to Berlin Kunhanandan Nair, the CPM’s only official foreign correspondent who had covered Eastern Europe, USSR and other Communist havens for over 30 years. Nair, too, was expelled from the party after his return last year, for raising some questions the state leadership did not take kindly to.The decision to expel Babu from the party was taken at a meeting of the party fraction controlling PUKASA, in the presence of CPM state secretariat member MV Govindan, district secretary P Sasi and state committee member MV Jayarajan. Sources said party leaders overcame opposition from the outfit’s members to push through the decision to throw him out of PUKASA as well.“As a poet, I need to react to things around me,” Babu told The Indian Express. “I will continue to write, continue to be a Marxist. I have no other identity.” But then, in Kerala, comrades have been expelled for a lot less. Appukkutan Vallikkunnu, Associate Editor of party organ Desabhimani was purged after being constantly spied “perusing clippings from bourgeois newspapers.”And a veteran photographer of the same publication was booted out after he made an irreverent remark about the practice of using Prakash Karat’s face as a screensaver on all PCs in the party newspaper’s office. It is a long list.
