Letter Bomb from Kerala

The state’s former CM has spoken up and put the CPM’s central leadership in a fix

Prakash Karat was not wrong. Indeed, he intended no deception when he said that “reports appearing in the media regarding the letter [of VS Achuthanandan] are misleading”. Yet, the war that VS, as Achuthanandan is popularly known, has declared on the CPM leadership is real enough. It is just that the contents of the letter—the bomb that the octogenarian Marxist has lobbed into the lap of the party general secretary—are not the same as reported in the media.

According to sources close to Karat, VS has not stated, at least not in so many words, in his letter that he does not want to continue as Leader of the Opposition in the state Assembly if the CPM central leadership refuses to intervene in the affairs of the Kerala party unit, as reported in the media. But what he has written in his letter is no less damning for Pinarayi Vijayan, the powerful state secretary of the CPM, who, with Karat’s backing, had almost succeeded in marginalising the Marxist veteran in the recently held 20th party congress held at Kozhikode.

In his letter to Karat, a copy of which was also sent to CPM Politburo member Sitaram Yechury, VS has narrated the entire story of how Vijayan’s sectarianism resulted in party rebels of the Onchiyam area committee in Kozhikode district breaking away and forming a new party—the Revolutionary Marxist Party—under the leadership of TP Chandrasekharan in 2008. In particular, the letter says that in 2008, when CPM leaders and cadres of this area committee were up in arms against the state leadership, VS went there as the Politburo’s representative and almost succeeded in persuading the rebels not to leave the party. But no sooner had VS left Onchiyam than Vijayan called the rebels ‘betrayers’ and expelled some of them from the party, thus provoking the entire area committee to part ways with the CPM. The letter then goes on to explain how the ‘highhandedness’ of Vijayan pushed the party deep into crisis in Kerala after the gruesome murder of Chandrasekharan recently and how the stand that VS took against that of the state party secretary was not in contravention of the party line. According to a senior CPM leader, “The letter finally concludes that this kind of highhandedness by Vijayan is not good for the party.”

According to sources, VS might not have shot off this letter to the central leadership had he not been provoked by Vijayan and his loyalists who got Deshabhimani, the party daily in Kerala, to publish an article by its editor V Dakshinamoorthy, justifying the state secretary’s statement calling Chandrasekharan and his cohorts ‘betrayers and renegades’. “It was this editorial that seems to have forced VS to write the letter to the central leadership,” says a senior party leader.

Whatever the reason, the developments following the murder of Chandrasekharan have taken the long-running feud between VS and Vijayan to an altogether new level, perhaps beyond the point of no return. Immediately after Vijayan made his remarks on Chandrasekharan, VS broke his silence that he had held ever since he was left humiliated at the Kozhikode party congress. Taking strong exception to Vijayan’s portrayal of Marxist rebels like Chandrasekharan as ‘betrayers and renegades’, VS compared the party’s state secretary to SA Dange, the late chairman of the undivided CPI before the party split in 1964, thereby suggesting that the Kerala CPM strongman might also suffer the fate of Dange, who was later ousted from the CPI.

The latest flare-up in the VS-Vijayan feud has placed the CPM’s central leadership in a bind. Though VS’s letter is aimed squarely at Vijayan, Karat too finds himself in the dock. For, a section in the party believe that Karat won the crown of general secretary of the CPM for the third time by openly aligning himself with the party’s official Kerala faction—that is, the faction led by Vijayan—at the Kozhikode party congress this April. The unofficial deal that Karat forged with the party’s Kerala unit was simple and straight: the state unit would protect Karat if the estranged West Bengal lobby showed signs of aggression against his leadership, in return for VS’s exclusion from the Politburo. Ignoring Vijayan’s terms would have harmed Karat’s own leadership of the party. It was, therefore, a foregone conclusion right from the start that Vijayan’s bête noire had no chance of getting inducted into the Politburo. As a result, VS, the party’s popular face in Kerala, was left in the lurch despite all his goodwill among the state’s masses and despite the fact that he had failed to retain power only by a whisker in Kerala’s Assembly polls last year.

Now that VS has grabbed his opportunity and spoken up, it is difficult for either Vijayan or Karat to escape the heat.

CPMKeralaVS Achuthanandan