Whispers of a Witch-hunt

With searchlights out for ‘bourgeois tendencies’, the CPM drives one of its leaders to his death.

In a few hours you will pass your sentence. And here I stand before you in filth, crushed by my own crimes, bereft of everything through my own fault, a man who has lost his Party, who has no friends, who has lost his family, who has lost his very self

—From Pyatakov Trial documents

The last plea of Bolshevik leader Georgy L Pyatakov, falsely convicted for plotting against the Soviet government and executed by Stalin in 1937, bears a striking resemblance to the words with which the CPM stalwart WR Varadarajan defended himself during the party’s central committee before his punishment was announced and he opted to end his life: “I have done nothing unbecoming of a communist. I will abide by any decision the party takes. I have lived a communist and die a communist.”

It was only afterwards that the Central Committee, which met at Kolkata in the first week of February, upheld the findings of the Tamil Nadu party unit that had recommended punishment for Comrade Varadarajan for ‘misbehaving with a woman’. Whatever the truth of the charges, the fact remains that at no point was Varadarajan, one of the senior leaders of the party, allowed to defend himself before a proper enquiry committee. The findings were simply read out in front of the 70-odd members of the central committee by CPM General Secretary Prakash Karat, and Varadarajan was summarily expelled from all elected positions in the party.

It was humiliation indeed for a man who had worked almost all his life for the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM). An RBI employee, he left his job and joined the party in 1963, and started working with the CPM’s trade union front, Centre of Indian Trade Unions (Citu). In 1989, he was elected to the Tamil Nadu Assembly. He rose to become a central committee member of the party, and one of Citu’s national secretaries.

Days later, Varadarajan’s body was recovered from Porur Lake on the outskirts of Chennai. In killing himself, he became in some sense the first victim of the party’s ongoing ‘rectification’ campaign which aims to root out ‘bourgeois’ influences from the party.

Varadarajan’s death has now led to questions being asked of this new campaign. “Why should perceived immorality be given precedence over corruption charges against leaders like (Kerala party secretary) Pinarayi Vijayan in the rectification campaign?” asks a Central Committee member, talking to Open, “Why should charges of corruption in the SNC-Lavlin case be brushed aside?”

The question has an eerie echo because Varadarajan had written to Karat in a letter on 19 December, just four days after receiving a copy of an enquiry report, that ‘the findings of the enquiry cannot meet standards of justice and fair play and need to be rejected’. Pointing out that the original complainant (the purported victim) had declined to appear before the party’s enquiry committee, which was probing charges against him on the basis of complaints by his estranged wife Saraswathi, Varadarajan wrote in his letter to Karat, ‘…The allegations against me are frivolous, without any basis and not substantiated. The enquiry committee, which went into the complaints against me, had not followed a fair and transparent process. The disciplinary action proposed against me is uncalled for and unmerited.’ In the letter, Varadarajan wrote that in two similar cases earlier, the women concerned were either summoned or an enquiry was done at their place of residence in the presence of the local party leadership. ‘This being the extant procedure, how the Enquiry Committee chose to close the enquiry in my case with mere ‘telephone evidence’ is beyond comprehension,’ he wrote.

Sources say that the CPM’s women’s wing, Aidwa (virtually headed by Brinda Karat) had taken up Saraswathi’s allegations. By the end of the central committee meeting, it seems that Varadarajan had already made up his mind to commit suicide. A note written on 6 February, the day the central committee meeting concluded, quotes a Tamil couplet by Thirukkural that says ‘death is better than dishonour’. A second note, dated 11 February, a day before he went missing, donates his money in two bank accounts, his books and laptop to the party, and his cadaver for medical research, saying, ‘… Nowhere should there be any function to unveil my picture, including in my house, or any other function.’

The party’s official reaction came only after the Chennai police leaked the news of Varadarajan being missing since 12 February, and it sought to defend what had transpired. Action had been taken against him for ‘conduct unbecoming of a communist’, said the CPM tersely. Even after the leader’s body was found, the party leadership has remained tight-lipped. “He was a valued comrade who gave a contribution to the development of the party and the trade union movement. The manner of his death is both tragic and painful,” said Karat in his first response to the tragedy.

But far removed from such bland statements, the death has left the party in turmoil. While no one dares speak out openly, the very fact that several central committee members were willing to talk to Open in critical terms about the leadership speaks for itself in a party known for its internal discipline. “If the punishment was part of an attempt to correct him morally,” says a central committee member, “then the entire rectification exercise is doomed to fail. Comrade Varadarajan took great pride in being a communist and the party decision absolutely shattered him.”

CPMdeathdisciplinemoralitywitch-huntWR Varadarajan