Sitaram Yechury camp sees political win in Round 2

New Delhi: Round two went to CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury on Monday with the party’s Central Committee asking the politburo to incorporate his ideas on working with the “non-Left secular forces”, including the Congress, to oust BJP from power, while finalising the party’s political-tactical line ahead of the party meet to be held in April next year.

While the Bengal faction, led by Mr Yechury, is in favour of such an alliance, the Kerala faction, led by former general secretary Prakash Karat, is against it.

The “coup d’état” for the Yechury faction came after 31 members out of the 63, including former Kerala chief minister V.S. Achutanandnan and state finance minister Issac Thomas, spoke in favour of Mr Yechury’s line at the three-day meeting. Two members remained ambivalent on their stand.  This helped avoid a voting in the Central Committee over the matter.

Sources said those who supported the Yechury line included the entire Bengal unit except two members, and members from Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Uttar-akhand and Jammu and Kashmir. Significantly, there was a division in the South Indian states also with members from Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana as well as Kerala supporting his stand.

In might be recalled that in the last meeting of the CPI(M) politburo, the faction led by Mr Karat had dominated, following which two drafts were circulated in the meeting.

The CPI(M) has to finalise a draft outline of a tactical-political resolution before the party meet in April next year. This document, which would be adopted at the party meet, will form the basis of its strategy for the 2019 general elections.

The genesis of the discussion on whether an electoral alliance with the Congress was necessary began with an internal debate within the party on whether the current BJP dispensation at the Centre was a fascist authority in the classical sense of the term.

While the faction supporting an electoral pact with other secular parties like the Congress argue that this was fascism in the true sense and every force needs to come together to defeat it, the other side feels that this cannot be fascism as parliamentary system of democracy still existed.

In an editoral in the party mouthpiece, Mr Karat had written that the BJP-led government at the Centre was not ‘fascist in the classical sense but authoritarian’. Mr Yechury had challenged him point blank saying that the government of Narendra Modi was fascist.

Along with the argument that the Modi was government was not fascist in the classical sense, the Karat faction also feels that it was the “neo-liberal” policies of the Congress which had helped the BJP come to power and thus any electoral understanding with the Congress was detrimental to the CPI(M) retaining its own mass base.

However, the Yechury faction argues that this was the time for consolidation of forces against the Modi government and there was no need to “tie your hands” by explicitly mentioning no alliance with Congress.