Opinion Unkeeping the House
CPM’s decision on another Rajya Sabha term for its general secretary reflects the party’s larger irresolutions.
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The relationship between parliamentary politics and party organisation has been something the democratic left has grappled with since Independence.
The CPM Central Committee’s (CC) decision to disallow its general secretary, Sitaram Yechury, a third term in the Rajya Sabha reveals deep lacunae on two fronts the party prides itself on — ideological clarity and organisational maturity. The West Bengal unit of the CPM proposed that Yechury, who will complete two terms in the Upper House next month, be given a third term. The state’s Congress too was keen to support his candidacy. The CPM, however, has an internal norm that stipulates a two-term limit. Eventually, the CC, prominently, through members of the Kerala unit, overruled the proposal, asking instead for an “acceptable and independent” Opposition candidate. Another reason, Kerala CM and Politburo member Pinarayi Vijayan told this newspaper, is that the general secretary’s role involves “travelling across the country” to help build the party.
The relationship between parliamentary politics and party organisation has been something the democratic left has grappled with since Independence. That there need be no exclusive disjunction between the two, and in fact, that the politics of the street and the debates in the House — especially in the age of television — affect and complete each other should be obvious. If in taking its decision on Yechury’s third term, the CC shows inadequate acknowledgement of the new balance it must strike, it should worry the party at large. The discussion leading up to the decision also reflects another ideological cleavage — the CPM’s relationship to the Congress. The CPM in West Bengal has had a loose “electoral arrangement” with the Congress in the assembly elections in 2016. Despite overtures from the state units of both parties, the CPM at large resisted a formal alliance. Now, the decision to reject the Congress’s offer of support to Yechury seems an extension of the differences between the Bengal unit and the rest of the party.
These ideological confusions appear to have political consequences beyond keeping Yechury out of Parliament. In West Bengal, where the CPM has been reduced from being the longest-serving democratically elected communist government in the world to third position in the state legislature — with the BJP threatening to usurp even that position — lack of clarity over the Congress has meant that the latter’s support is meant exclusively for Yechury, rather than the party as a whole. In the near term, it seems that the CPM will lose an articulate voice in the most public political platform — the Parliament. But for a party that can trace its roots to at least 1925, what should be more worrying is its apparent poverty of choices to replace Yechury in the Rajya Sabha. That is not a problem that can be solved by travelling across the country.
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