Autumn of solitude for Kerala’s Marxist patriarch

V B Cheriyan, who had led the party’s CITU as its national secretary for 11 years before getting booted out for dissidence, says Achuthanandan has no hope unless he ‘‘evolves’’. Cheriyan says the man still belongs to an idelogical Jurassic Age, when the party believed in its since-revised 1964 programme—rigid anti-imperialism, anti-feudalism and anti-monopoly.

‘‘Achuthanandan can’t survive any more unless he publicly accepts that these slogans are now meant only to rally grassroot herds still game for revolutionary rhetoric, and not for policy decisions. He can’t be unaware that the state party is a corporate headquarters vetting multi-crore business and industrial proposals. It can’t have redundant rigidities coming in the way,’’ says Cheriyan.

Others disagree. ‘Berlin’ Kunhanandan Nair, expelled party dissident and Achuthanandan camp follower who was the CPM’s best known media representative in Europe for 30 years, says only a referendum on the party’s ‘‘rightist deviations’’ can save the veteran. Nair claims Achuthanandan will ‘‘act decisively’’ once the Politburo clears him of the state committee’s charges of sectarianism—and worse, ‘‘leaking party secrets to the media’’.

Nair maintains that Achuthanandan still packs a lot of clout among the ranks. ‘‘But he is essentially being targeted to keep him out of the race for Chief Ministership. The state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan wants that chair, and he has the brute majority to put to use in the state committee and secretariat,’’ says Nair.

Pushing 82 years now, Kerala’s only surviving founder-leader of the CPM is also perhaps its unluckiest. The only man that the party ever projected as a CM-in-waiting, Achuthanandan had been waiting for the last 15 years. Only to realise now that he needn’t, anymore. The Kerala CPM, looking to follow West Bengal and raring to make up for time lost in ‘‘course correction’’, is clearly looking elsewhere.

But terminating Achuthanandan’s ambitions was probably merciful.

Achuthanandan has had the chief ministership snatched away from him thrice in the past. The first was in 1991 when, flush with their success in the local bodies poll, the Left decided to have its E K Nayanar-led Government seek re-poll a year before term. Achuthanandan was projected to the next CM, and he won, too. But the Left was vanquished.

In the next poll, in 1996, he was again the automatic CM choice as the other top honcho, Nayanar, chose not to contest. Predictably, the Left won the poll. But Achuthanandan lost, clearly done in by his party rivals.

His third go was in 2001. The party fielded him—the only Politburo member in the fray—from Palakkad, a red bastion. This time, he won, the Left lost.

Achuthanandan is best known for his passionate interventions in almost every public issue of some consequence in Kerala. But his intra-party USP has been his postures against ‘‘rightist deviations’’ for which he launched a ‘‘rectification campaign’’ against the official line before the Malappuram conference. He did manage to use that to control most of the district committees, before Vijayan and his men turned the trend, getting it labelled as ‘‘sectarianism’’.

At Malappuram, Achuthanandan pushed his protege-turned-foe, state secretary Vijayan, into balloting for the state panel. But the results reduced Achuthanandan to a rebel of little consequence: Kerala’s senior-most CPM leader ranked 64 in preference to the 76-member state committee; all his nominees lost.

His isolation in the party is now near-complete. Vijayan is in complete control of the state committee and secretariat. And his men are preparing to deliver the coup de grace, once they have the central committee’s nod after it goes through a state commission report on ‘‘sectarianism’’. More ruthlessly, perhaps, than the British troops who took on the rag-tag bunch of comrades lugging wooden spears in the Punnapra-Valalar peasant uprising, Achuthanandan’s own Red baptism.

But having vanquished the veteran, Vijayan apparently does not want to let it rankle. ‘‘What are you talking about? Achuthanandan is our senior leader. He is the No. 1 in the party in Kerala,’’ he says, and there’s no smirk.