DC Edit | Baby, CPM Face Twin Challenges
As M.A. Baby becomes the new general secretary of the CPI(M), the party navigates internal restructuring and its complex alliance with Congress in the fight against the BJP.;
The election of veteran Kerala leader M.A. Baby as the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), by far the largest communist party in India, comes at a time when the party faces the twin tasks of reorganising itself and taking the INDIA bloc forward.
The mainstream communist movement in India has had a chequered history, with it scripting its own stream during the freedom movement, following the destructive Calcutta thesis after Independence to the split in 1964 and its tryst with parliamentary politics over the decades. The Congress that it fought tooth and nail after Independence has become its major national ally while the Sangh Parivar affiliates it had fought the Emergency with have ascended the throne of power even as the Left party became a famished force
electorally. The party has been vanquished in West Bengal and Tripura, where it ruled in the not-so-distant past. However, it manages to retain its base and power in Kerala.
The challenges the party faces at present are unique in that it has to fight the Congress and other secular democratic forces if it were to regain its lost strength in its erstwhile strongholds and spread to newer areas. At the same time, it has to fight alongside those very same forces to challenge the RSS and the BJP.
A realistic Left politician would recognise the need to work with the Congress and other secular forces if his party were to mount a challenge to the RSS-BJP combine. Mr Baby, who has had his political upbringing in Kerala, the cradle of alliance politics, appears to have recognised this, going by his early statements about the love-hate relationship the CPI(M) has had with the INDIA bloc and the Congress.
The late Sitaram Yechury, one of the chief architects of the INDIA bloc and the main glue that kept it together, rose to the occasion in trying times. Mr Baby and his party thus have a model to follow if they want to, or can return to its old dogmatic position. It’s a call the party and its new tsar to take.
