Even by Stalinist standards, this is an unusual purge. The CPI(M) in Kerala has sacked a photographer with its newspaper, Desabhimani, for allegedly making a comment on party General Secretary Prakash Karat. When Padmakumar, staff photographer of Desabhimani for over 15 years, noticed Karat’s face on the new screen-savers installed in the newspaper’s computers, his colleagues say, he quipped that the party could do without such idolising. But word got around and within a week, the CPI(M) state secretariat itself had mulled over this act of ‘‘grave indiscipline,’’ formed a committee and conducted an official probe. Padmakumar was summoned and told to quit or be sacked — giving him nothing on record, not even a show-cause notice. His colleagues say that the charge read out to him was that he made a derogatory remark on the party chief. ‘‘It’s an internal disciplinary issue, we can’t discuss it,’’ says P Rajeev, Desabhimani’s resident editor, and a Pinarayi Vijayan acolyte pitchforked to the new state committee. The incident comes on the heels of the state party conference in Malappuram, where state secretary Vijayan cut to size his hardline bete noire, V S Achuthanandan. Vijayan and his camp can use all the backing they can have from the party chief to help stamp out hardline dissent. When contacted, Karat refused to comment, saying he does not want to talk about Kerala issues.Appukkuttan Vallikkunnu, associate editor of Desabhimani till he was hounded out seven years ago, says such arbitrariness is nothing new to the party. Appukkuttan was accused of writing pamphlets on the sly for the ‘Save CPM Forum,’ a shadowy, short-lived dissident effort that revelled in pulling skeletons out of the party closets and splashing them across newspaper pages. Party sleuths did not take much time to decide that the embarrassing stuff were Appukkuttan’s handiwork — on two grounds. The style of writing and expressions used were similar to his and Appukkuttan had also been seen ‘‘perusing clippings from bourgeoise newspapers’’ in the Desabhimani’s own library. ‘‘I am told that a colleague had deposed that he had seen me reading objectionable news clippings. Imagine, this was despite the fact that I was supposed to know issues and write the paper’s editorials,’’ shrugs Appukkuttan. He, too, was never given a show-cause notice. He was asked to go on leave for a week and then told to quit. But he has since moved the High Court and the case is up for hearing within the next fortnight. V Krishnakumar, the high-profile Chief Operating Officer of the party’s TV channel, Kairali, was recently hounded out of office in an almost similar way—with no charge memos, no hearings. He was accused of harassing a woman colleague—who had not made such a complaint anyway—and his life was made miserable. It didn’t need a lot of prodding to make him quit.
