Karat to Face His Party’s Music

An extended meeting of the CPM’s Central Committee in August is expected to call him to account for overstepping the party’s political line.

With his puritanical bearings, measured gestures and hardline Marxist utterances, Prakash Karat, general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) for the past five years, has turned himself into one of the country’s most no-nonsense political faces. His fans treat him as a hero, a voice of the voiceless, a brave man leading the charge against pro-US, liberal policies of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his sepoys. But to many in the CPM, including some Politburo members and several Central Committee (CC) members, he has overstepped the political line set by the CPM’s top decision-making body—the Party Congress—and thereby pushed the party into an unprecedented crisis.

Overstepping the political line is an allegation that no general secretary of the CPM has faced ever since the party came into existence in 1964. The ‘extended CC’ that the party will convene in August this year, therefore, is expected not just to formulate its political line ahead of the crucial Assembly elections in West Bengal and Kerala, but also hold Karat to account for going beyond the limits of the line laid down by the Coimbatore Party Congress in April 2008. “Never in the past has the party so blatantly overstepped the political line,” says a senior CPM leader, “and therefore there has never been any need for an extended CC between two Party Congresses. It’s for the first time that the party finds itself in such an awkward situation.”

In a communist party, there cannot be a graver charge against a leader than violation of the Party Congress’ political line. None of Karat’s predecessors—P Sundarayya (general secretary from 1964 to 1978), EMS Namboodiripad (1978 to 1988) or Harkishan Singh Surjeet (1992 to 2005)—ever faced such a serious charge. And there is no precedence either of the party invoking the ‘extended CC’ clause of its constitution to assess such a failing and make corrective suggestions on the all-important matter of the party’s political stance.

Anyhow, an extended CC is currently scheduled as a four-day affair starting on 7 August at Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh. “The decision to convene it was taken once it became clear that the political line laid down by the Coimbatore Party Congress has been overstepped,” says the senior CPM leader, “As the next Party Congress, which is the sole body that can decide on the political line, would be delayed because of Assembly elections in West Bengal and Kerala, and there has been an urgent need for political course correction, it was decided to convene an extended CC that would take stock of the problem.”

To counter the charges, Karat loyalists plead party-wide complicity, arguing that every decision since the Coimbatore Party Congress was taken after due discussion within the Central Committee. They assert that those levelling charges against Karat constitute a “microscopic minority” of the party, people who want to redefine the approach towards the Indian National Congress.

Even if the entire Central Committee elected by the Coimbatore Party Congress comes under attack during the extended CC debate over the leadership’s alleged transgressions, Karat faces the likelihood of individual humiliation for the simple reason that it was he who steered the party away from the political line laid down by the Party Congress. “Any statement against the Central Committee would be construed as a statement against the party general secretary because of his pivotal position in the CC’s decision making process,” says the senior CPM leader.

When the CPM held its 19th Party Congress in 2008 at Coimbatore, the Left was a prop of the Congress-led UPA Government at the Centre. “During the last Party Congress,” says the senior CPM leader, “the party differentiated between the BJP and Congress, considering the latter to be a secular bourgeois party. It, therefore, resolved to work for the defeat of the BJP while pressuring the Congress-led Government to take pro-people measures. As a long-term goal, the Party Congress stressed on striving for a third alternative.”

“The line was clear,” he adds, “But what we actually did was fought the Lok Sabha polls not merely to defeat the BJP but also the Congress. This was a clear transgression of the political line set by the Party Congress. Also, while the CPM resolved at Coimbatore that the third alternative should be based on a platform of policies for which the Left, democratic and secular forces can work together, the Third Front, which staggered into shape after the Left withdrew support to the UPA, was a motley combination of unlike-minded parties.”

The results have been disastrous for the CPM in particular and the Left in general. “This crisis is no longer merely academic in nature,” says the senior leader, “It has become an issue of life and death for the party’s cadres and sympathisers. We have only created enemies for the party. Already, we have lost over 200 comrades (mostly killed by Maoists in West Bengal).” 

Disastrously, the Third Front experiment proved to be short-lived, he adds, fizzle away as it did soon after the Lok Sabha polls. All this, in his view, must be pinned on the CPM leadership’s failure to appreciate the Party Congress’ directive on creating a policy platform for the Left in alliance with other democratic and secular forces. “Not only did the actual political line pursued result in disunity among Third Front constituents,” he elaborates, “it has for the first time put even Left Front unity under a real threat. If we lose West Bengal and Kerala, the Left Front may not remain together.”

The political line that is laid down by the Party Congress can be changed only once this apex body meets again after three years. In between, the Central Committee that the Party Congress elects is empowered to make electoral adjustments within the broad contours of the political line. According to the CPM constitution, the Central Committee is responsible for ‘carrying out the political line and decisions adopted by the Party Congress’.

The political line, in fact, is functionally so sacrosanct in a communist party framework that even a plenum is not considered competent enough to debate or amend it. In fact, none of the two plenums that the CPM convened in the past dealt with the party’s political line. The first plenum that was held in 1968 at Burdwan debated ideological issues, while the second plenum held at Salkia in West Bengal restricted itself to organisational matters, announcing for the first time the CPM’s intention of  strengthening the party’s roots in the Hindi belt. “As the present crisis relates primarily to the political line, the Central Committee has decided to convene an extended CC instead of a plenum,” says the senior CPM leader.

With the CPM rank and file desperate to rid themselves of the confusion over the political line, the four-day August meeting is expected to draw keen attention. It will be attended by nearly 400 delegates, including 85 Central Committee and 275 state committee members. This is about half the typical attendance at a Party Congress, which is why insiders have dubbed it a mini Party Congress—except that this one is likely to crackle with fireworks.

Karat won’t be amused. That the party’s general secretary, accustomed to having his own way, has to face such scrutiny at all is a blow in itself to him. Still, he is unlikely to give in without a fight. Sources expect months of ‘inner party struggle’ between Karat and his loyalists backed by a major section of Kerala lobby on one hand, and the majority of the party’s West Bengal unit on the other. Even before last year’s Lok Sabha results, there were signs of tension between the two factions. But with blame to be assigned for the party’s poor showing, the infighting intensified.

West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and many other state party leaders held Karat singularly responsible for the mess, pointing fingers at central leadership decisions like withdrawing support to the UPA-1 on the Indo-US Nuclear Deal, sacking Somnath Chatterjee from the party, and hobnobbing with Bahujan Samaj Party leader Mayawati. Most Bengal leaders, it is widely known, held Karat’s decision to snap ties with the Congress as a blunder that might ultimately cost the party its most secure state and perhaps only reliable source of electoral strength. They have been in favour of maintaining some sort of ties with the Congress, instead of pushing it towards Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress and thus putting at stake the very existence of the Left Front government in the state.

Karat, on his part, held the state government’s overdrive on industrialisation and the clumsy acquisition attempts of fertile land in West Bengal—in a word, Nandigram—responsible for the party’s poll reverses. ‘It was clear from the results of the panchayat elections held in 2008 that the fear of land being taken away for industrial projects had alienated sections of the peasantry. The Lok Sabha election results have further confirmed this trend. Errors were committed in dealing with land acquisition. The police firing in Nandigram was a serious mistake, which led to the very unfortunate loss of lives of poor villagers,’ wrote Karat’s close aide and CPM’s Research Unit convenor Prasenjit Bose in an article that appeared in a ‘bourgeois weekly’ in the first week of October—at the height of strife between the factions.

All this while the two had a hearty tug-o-war over fixing a convenient time slot for the next Party Congress, originally scheduled for April 2011. While Karat and his followers insisted that the gathering be held ahead of schedule so that it does not coincide with Assembly elections in West Bengal and Kerala (due in May 2011), his detractors wanted it deferred until the end of the polls so that the results could be analysed.

Of course, both factions had their own calculations in mind. The Karat camp wanted to avoid a post-poll Party Congress in order to duck a probable backlash in the event of a loss in West Bengal, while his detractors wanted exactly such an eventuality to be placed high on the discussion agenda. The deadlock that lasted for over eight months after the Lok Sabha polls was finally broken in a Central Committee meeting held at Kolkata in the first week of February. As the two factions squared off, Karat found himself bereft of the Kerala lobby’s support, and it was eventually he who had to retreat. Once the Karat faction showed signs of weakness, the Bengal lobby struck hard, forcing not only a post-poll time slot for the Party Congress but also an extended CC meeting ‘to decided on the political line to meet the current situation’.

So, where does Karat go from here? Many party leaders feel that even if the Kerala party unit gets re-activated and wins the day for the besieged general secretary at Vijayawada, his days in the limelight as a leader may finally be nearing an end. Making a diagnosis of what is going wrong, after all, is easier than fixing it—which is what the leadership’s role is. The CPM’s electoral future has rarely looked so bleak, and Karat is fast running out of options to turn trends around.

All this makes for heightened discontent within the party. The Central Committee meeting held in the first week of May, for example, saw a heated exchange when the issue of WR Varadarajan’s expulsion came up. The leader had committed suicide after the February CC meeting in which he was humiliated without as much as a chance to counter the charges against him. So acrimonious was the air at the meeting, say sources, that some members had to be asked gruffly to sit down and shut up. 

At the same meeting, some members raised the issue of the party’s decline in the Hindi belt. The politically crucial states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar were among the five (the others being Jharkhand, Assam and Maharashtra) that had been identified as ‘priority states’ by Karat when he took over as general secretary at the Delhi Party Congress in 2005. It’s a forlorn dream now, say Karat’s critics, and it is he more than anyone else who must explain why that’s the case today. Meanwhile, the Politburo meets on 5-6 June to prepare the first draft of the extended CC agenda.

CPMPrakash Karat