K Raveendran
The scene at the Central Committee meeting of the CPI-M the other day in Delhi ran like this: the committee members are huddled together, pens poised, brows furrowed and looking askance at how and why the sand under the feet of their party got washed away in the Lok Sabha elections in the only remaining backyard of the Marxist party. Mash the Great, the intellectual capitalist of the Kerala party, made his weighty exposition of what exactly happened: ‘We lost because they won’. Fair enough. Only resident psephologist film maker Sreeni could have bettered it.
The committee wasn’t entirely convinced. In a stunning display of bureaucratic acrobatics and obliviousness, the members decided to embark on a soul-searching expedition to unearth the mysteries behind their colossal failure in Kerala. The CPI-M’s post-election analysis is like a tragicomedy – tragic for them, hilarious for the rest of us.
Except for the CC and other manifest forms of party leadership, everyone knew what was coming. Those who couldn’t read the writing on the wall had worn a veil over their eyes that conveniently blocked the reality because it soothed their eyes, and served their materialistic demands. Chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s famous intemperance, indulgence, abrasiveness, and scant respect for the rule of law couldn’t have produced any other result. There was no rocket science involved.
For the CC, it’s not so much a search for answers as it is an important exercise in political theatrics; the disconnect between leadership posturing and grassroots realities was so glaring only the ardent devotees could have missed it. But despite Vijayan’s stellar track record in rattling cages and making headlines for all the wrong reasons, some within the party seemed shockingly surprised by the election outcome.
The reality is only beginning to sink in now.
The CC move for a deeper study is like dissecting a fish to understand why it’s not climbing trees. If anything needed a study, it is perhaps the extent to which prime minister Narendra Modi’s face on the BJP election posters resembled that of Sreenarayana Guru so as to trick the Sreenarayaneeya vote bank that sustained the Marxist party for so long into voting for BJP. To boot, we have it on the authority of Cherthala’s wholesale dealer of Ezhava votes that there has been such a shift, although he attributes it to the Pinarayi leadership’s -mis-adventurous courtship of the minority communities.
Sitaram Yechury and his committee colleagues had no choice but to nod in sombre agreement with whatever Pinarayi Vijayan said and did before, during and after the election, given that he had such stranglehold over party finances, rendering them little more than glorified interns in his grand political opera, the central theme of which turns out to be filial love. With the central leaders beholden to Pinarayi for their salaries and perks, their relationship was more akin to that between employee and employer rather than leader and follower.
Yechury and company can’t even go on strike against their paymaster, for that is the sole proprietorship of the party’s militant trade union CITU, of which they can’t be expected to be members. That would mean they ditch their glorified titles and apply for ordinary membership of CITU and start from scratch, un unreasonably high sacrifice to make.
I feel particularly distressed at their plight as we have had a somewhat shared past. Yechury, Prakash Karat, Brinda Karat and Maneka Gandhi were my contemporaries in JNU and I had written any number of posters for Karat and Yechury when they contested the JNU election. It is a different matter that it was my passion for poster writing, which continues to be so even today, than an affiliation with their political ideology that landed me in their camp.
