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Never before in its history has such a comprehensive leadership crisis overwhelmed the CPM. Complete lack of ideological direction and State-specific problems in West Bengal and Kerala have left the Marxists clueless about how to resuscitate the party's electoral fortunes
The top leadership of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) will be engaged over the next several days in a series of meetings to come to terms with the party's shattering debacle in the recent Lok Sabha election. A two-day State committee meeting followed by a Polit Bureau meeting and then a Central Committee meeting will attempt to come to terms with the electoral aftermath that has placed the party in its worst ever predicament since its inception. Even its most optimistic supporters realise that this will be a daunting task.
What has compounded the CPI(M) leadership's current woes is that there is a simultaneous collapse of authority at both the national as well as State level in the party's regional bastions of West Bengal and Kerala, where the party also heads State Governments. This means that an increasingly insecure party general secretary Prakash Karat can expect no help whatsoever from a jittery West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee or the marginalised Kerala Chief Minister, VS Achuthanandan. Perhaps never before in its history has such a comprehensive leadership crisis overwhelmed the CPI(M).
The challenges facing the party are at two levels - a complete lack of ideological direction in the Polit Bureau and Central Committee, and specific local problems in West Bengal and Kerala. At the moment neither the central nor the regional leaderships appear to have any clue as how to cope with either of the challenges. As a matter of fact, the disarray in the two is feeding off each other and further aggravating the crisis in the party.
At the national level, the party may lose the support of both the moderate and extreme wings of the Left. The moderates feel that the CPI(M) has lost its national relevance through meaningless Left-wing posturing that has snapped the party's links with the Congress. On the other hand, the far-Left faction is now convinced that the compromises made by the CPI(M) with ‘bourgeois democracy' have blown up in its face.
The CPI(M) central leadership has been taken aback at the manner in which the Congress after its surprise poll success has adopted several quasi-Left ideas, particularly that of inclusive growth. This has palpably shrunk the national space previously occupied by the CPI(M). It is also ironical that with the nuclear deal off the headlines and US President Barack Obama wooing international Islam, Marxist leaders have been left without even their ideological shibboleths anymore.
Last update : 26-07-2009 19:44
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