A Moderate Marxist

MA BABY, the newly elected general secretary of the Commu­nist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM, was among the few Central Committee members who had strongly advocated for naming the late West Ben­gal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu as prime minister in 1996. However, a majority within the party, particularly from his home-state Kerala, vigorously opposed the idea. They re­jected the opportunity to head the 13-party United Front (UF) coalition government, insist­ing instead that CPM offer only outside support.

Baby, who became a CPM Central Committee member in 1989 at the age of 35, was then a Rajya Sabha MP with extensive experience work­ing in North India. He had earlier served as the all-India president of both the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) and the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI), the student and youth wings of CPM, respectively.

Flexible, open-minded and receptive to fresh ideas, Baby has long stood apart from the rigid mould of orthodox Marxists. While based in Delhi before relocating to Kerala in the late 1990s, he had developed friendships across political lines and among artists, cultural figures, and sportsper­sons, among others. He soon emerged as a dynamic and youthful face of the party, known for his deep interest in arts and culture, a notable departure from the party’s usual suspicion towards what it re­garded as bourgeois interests.

Born in 1954 in Kollam, southern Kerala, into a lower middle-class family, Baby was an early boomer by CPM standards. He became SFI president in 1979 aged 24, succeeding Prakash Karat and preceding Sitaram Yechury, his immediate predecessor as general secretary. At 32, he was nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 1986, and a year later, Baby became DYFI president.

A sport aficionado, Baby was a regular at the badmin­ton courts near the United News of India (UNI) office in Lutyens’ Delhi during the 1980s and 1990s. He played with flair and could converse at length about top global ath­letes, especially in football and tennis. Incidentally, he was also instrumental later in the creation of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India’s first event of its kind. His circle of friends also includes public intellectu­als, celebrities, Carnatic music maestros, and sportspersons.

Within global commu­nist circles, Baby is regarded as an internationalist. Hav­ing entered CPM’s national student leadership at just 20, he had the opportunity to work closely with founding party stalwarts such as P Sundarayya, Jyoti Basu, EMS Namboodiripad, M Basavapunnaiah and oth­ers. He forged relationships with global communist lead­ers, including Fidel Castro, and figures from the former Soviet Union, Vietnam, China, and other nations.

Mentored by the legend­ary CPM leader N Sreedharan, Baby is an alumnus of SN College, Kollam. His studies were interrupted during the Emergency when he was arrested and imprisoned.

Despite a promising start, Baby, seen as a moderate, faced challenges navigating both Kerala’s turbulent political landscape and the ideological orthodoxy of the state CPM unit after his return to the state. Although he was elected to the party’s highest body, the Politburo, in 2012, and chosen as Kerala’s education minister from 2006 to 2011, his stand­ing within the party had somewhat diminished until he was elected CPM general secretary this month.

Baby has suddenly acquired a halo thanks to his return to his party’s national scheme of things. After all, he is the first from the Kerala unit to become party boss in a long time: specifically, after Namboodiripad stepped down in 1992. He takes charge at a time when CPM faces daunting electoral odds. Yet, Baby is seen by some po­litical observers as uniquely positioned to connect with both middle-class voters and secular political forces, an as­set in an era when the party is in dire need of renewal.

CPMGeneral SecretaryKerala politicsMA BabyMaduraiUnited Front