Karat is silent as clamour begins within dazed party

While party general secretary Prakash Karat ducked all questions pending the Politburo meeting on Monday,party state secretary Biman Bose today offered to resign at the state secretariat meeting at Alimuddin Street.

“The rank and file of the party have expressed their anger against the leadership. One way to defuse it is my resignation as party state secretary. That will help ease the situation,” Bose is said to have told the secretariat members. Sources said his colleagues persuaded him to stay on arguing that “it is not your responsibility alone.”

For now,the criticism is coming from the usual suspects — the disgruntled and the “mavericks.” Expelled leader and former Speaker Somnath Chatterjee said: “The party fared badly as it was divorced from the people of West Bengal. The party leaders could not understand the pulse of the people.”

When contacted,Benoy Konar,one of the secretariat members told The Indian Express. “It is collective responsibility and all of us are responsible for the defeat. Why should Biman Bose take responsibility alone?”

The secretariat will meet again on May 15 and on May 17,there will be a day-long meeting of the state committee. The central leadership has been requested to convene a central committee meeting in the last week of June.

Biman Bose asked a member,Madan Ghosh,to prepare a questionnaire and send it to local party offices to get feedback on why the party fared so badly.

There were also demands among members to expel Abdur Rezzaq Mollah,minister for land and land reforms who today branded Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee as a weak chief minister and called Industries Minister Nirupam Sen “the villain of the piece.”

Said Mollah: “He (Buddhadeb) does not even have the ability to tackle a ‘poisonless’ serpent. But he was trying to catch and play with a cobra?” Clearly,Mollah’s reference was to Buddhadeb’s ambitious land acquisition plans not only in Singur and Nandigram but in North and South 24-Parganas.

One senior CPM leader,who spoke on the condition that he not be named,said that the turning point was Nandigram. “In Singur,80 per cent of the landowners had agreed to give up their land,only 20 per cent were holding out. We should have built a campaign,tried to isolate the Trinamool. We should have made Singur happen. After all,it was the first such project in the state. We should not have ventured into Nandigram before resolving Singur.”

Once in Nandigram,moreover,“a political approach” should have been taken,as against the administration-led initiative,to defuse apprehensions and tensions. “We should have held a Left rally to restore normalcy in Nandigram. There should have been political intervention before police intervention. If senior leaders had gone to Nandigram…”

Apart from the opportunity lost to communicate with the people,and also to partners within the Left Front,on the Buddhadeb government’s industrialisation strategy,there is an acknowledgement of a problem that had been growing steadily,waiting to overtake the party — of cadres gone arrogant and worse.

This internal stocktaking may not spill out into the open for a while. Those hoping for some dramatic atonement at the Politburo meeting on May 16 will be disappointed,as will those who expect a gesture to Mamata Banerjee in her hour of victory — so far the Left has only congratulated Mamata through the media.

“An open,polemical debate at this time will only weaken us,and spread confusion,” said the CPM leader. “The next six months will be a period of great difficulty for us.” The Politburo issued a statement that the results “will,by no means,make the Left policies and programmes irrelevant for the country.”