Ahead of Kottayam, factional slugfest mars local meets

Several area conferences of the party have so far been halted and shelved midway to prevent things going entirely out of hand, with the two sides in full battle cry. The two latest were on Saturday, when the Aluva and Kodungalloor area meets were suspended for “undesirable and sectarian” developments—comradespeak for the two factions too openly gunning for each other and making a big mess.

This was a day after Kodiyeri Balakrishnan, state Home Minister and chief Vijayan acolyte, bravely declared there is going to be no more factionism after Kottayam, and two days after S Ramachandran Pillai, the Poliburo’s observer, said the party had the strength to deal with such things. But the real difference the Politburo diktats have apparently made so far is that neither Vijayan nor VS now goes about publicly slamming each other — the fight recedes below. A typical instance was the recent area conference at Kazhakoottam. Some 61 comrades on the other side of the divide wanted to contest against the 19-member official panel, even if not all of the first lot were allegedly even area conference delegates. This brought 10 more from the Vijayan faction into the fight. While the district committee observers were trying to make some sense of it and scrutinise the nominations, the VS faction decided to end the show. With some comrade delegates even beginning to get physical, the observers hastily suspended the conference. This was a fortnight after the party’s Chala area conference too had to be called off in similar embarrassment.

Nothing has been able to put down the factional fires raging since the 90s, though both VS and Vijayan had worked side by side to dislodge the once-powerful CITU faction from the controls, at its 1998 state conference in Palakkad—and VS himself was the prime mover behind Vijayan’s elevation as state secretary. They had drifted apart and things had peaked after the party’s 2005 conference at Malappuram. To the point where the PB had to make both cool off outside for a while, under suspension. It doesn’t help that their feud is not just something between two leaders or their close supporters, or even the Red voters at large. It goes way deeper down into almost every other section, from traditional Left support groups to the state’s once highly credible Left realms in literature and many front outfits — not to mention the Government itself, where the CM runs a Cabinet largely populated by Vijayan men.