Post-poll campaign

B B Tandon may no longer be chief election commissioner but the CPM believes there should be no let up in the campaign against him.

B B Tandon may no longer be chief election commissioner but the CPM believes there should be no let up in the campaign against him. His last press conference was no more than 8216;8216;an exercise of defending the indefensible8217;8217;, writes Nilotpal Basu, former CPM MP and party central committee member. The Left Front roundly won the West Bengal polls but for the CPM some issues remain8212;among them Tandon8217;s 8216;8216;bizarre assertion8217;8217; that 8216;8216;differential approaches and standards8217;8217; need to be adopted in different states. Basu says the former CEC never explained the need for adopting this approach for West Bengal which raised the question whether incumbents of constitutional offices 8216;8216;interpret subjectively the reality of a state8217;8217; or whether there was no accountability to explain the 8216;8216;factual basis which justify their actions8217;8217;. Basu points out that despite Tandon8217;s exit, it was necessary to examine the implications of all that the former CEC 8216;8216;doggedly defended8217;8217;.

Too little, too late

Despite the Prime Minister8217;s announcement putting on hold all disinvestment, the CPM will stay on course for the weeklong campaign on price rise starting July 13. But on the farmers8217; issues, the All India Kisan Sabha, a CPM frontal organisation, is building up an all India action plan in October and November that will end in a rally in New Delhi on November 15. The decision on the agitation by the AIKS, with politburo member S. Ramachandran Pillai as president, comes against the backdrop of the PM8217;s Vidarbha package that the kisan sabha describes as too little too late. People8217;s Democracy reports a Central Kisan Committee resolution to explain why. The waiver should have been of the principal loan amount of the families affected by peasant suicides and the 8216;8216;really needy sections8217;8217;; there was no announcement on the minimum support price for cotton and the restoration of advance bonus to farmers; no mention was made of raising the import duty on cotton and other crops while the CKS feels the crisis was the result of lifting quantitative restrictions on imports and a refusal to raise import duty. The organisation believes that the Left8217;s intervention is crucial to taking correct policy initiatives in the farm sector as it says, with reference to the Rural Employment Guarantee Act, that the scheme8217;s implementation was unsatisfactory where the Left movement had not intervened and 8216;8216;experience has proved8217;8217; the scheme could be 8216;8216;implemented properly only through the intervention of the kisan sabha and other organisations8217;8217;.

Uncovering the RSS role

Against the backdrop of the attack on the RSS headquarters in Nagpur, the CPM8217;s weekly organ tries to draw a link between the attack and the blast reportedly at an RSS activist8217;s home in Nanded in April. The report titled 8216;Police, media cover up RSS role8217;, suggests the Nanded incident was aimed at engineering communal tension in the area as that was also the time that L.K. Advani8217;s Bharat Suraksha Yatra was to have entered the state.

8216;8216;Looking at the minute details, one could infer that serious plans were afoot to foment communal tension in the area,8217;8217; says writer Subhash Gatade in the report. The writer goes back to the issues that led to the ban on the RSS and suggests that the 8216;8216;larger gameplan8217;8217; needed to be unearthed.

8212;Compiled by Ananda Majumdar