Putative party

The manner in which CPM General Secretary Prakash Karat chose to get his senior party colleagues in Kerala to toe the party line may bear the stamp of established communist practice but it does, nevertheless, appear anachronistic. Their expulsion from the Polit Bureau certainly had the desired effect of bringing both V.S. Achuthanandan and Pinarayi Vijayan abjectly to heel and freely “admitting” to their mistakes, but there is an authoritarian flavour to the whole affair, which would appear out of sync with today’s politics.

Indeed, it bears a whiff of a period in fairly recent Chinese history when political leaders who were perceived to have “deviated” were paraded with dunce caps and deprecated as “bourgeois revisionists” “capitalist roaders” and the like. Neither Achuthanandan nor Vijayan was served with as much as a show-cause notice or a chance to explain themselves. Disciplinary action, when it came, was swift, decisive and unprecedented. It is not the first time that general secretaries in the CPM have cracked the whip. In January 2000, for instance, Harkisen Singh Surjeet , then party general secretary, did have occasion to reprimand party MP, Saifuddin Chowdhury, and the West Bengal Transport Minister Subhas Chakraborty because they argued for greater inner party democracy. But the two men were given a chance to “rectify themselves” at that juncture. In the present instance, there was not even a notional deference to the principle of right of reply.

Karat’s unequivocal action may well be provoked by what many perceive as the waning authority of the Central Committee at a time when the party’s main strength comes from the two states of West Bengal and Kerala. The forthcoming months, leading up to next year’s 19th Party Congress, will see a great deal of political activity. Against this background, the central leadership of the party must have found it necessary to assert itself. But it has as a consequence undermined the authority of senior leaders and well as its image as a modern political party.