KANNUR
Sitting at the seaside Government Guest House in Kannur on a sultry Friday afternoon, Mohammed Salim, CPI(M) State secretary in West Bengal, sounds confident that his party is on the path of revival in the State.
“Everyone thought 10 years was enough to erase the memory of the Left from the minds of the people. But look at the campuses in West Bengal and all youth leaders are from the CPI(M). What does that show?” he asks.
With the ascent of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) as a supposed alternative to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), everyone including the media, was keen to see that the CPI(M) was written off, he says. But the TMC played second fiddle to the BJP, which swelled at the expense of the former.
“Can you certify TMC’s commitment to secularism and democracy? All these years, the party refused to utter a word against the RSS,” alleges Mr. Salim, a Polit Bureau member of the CPI(M) attending its 23 rd Party Congress.
Lawlessness, attacks on the Left and election malpractices marked the governance, he says.
Mr. Salim has a four-point yardstick – whether a party is a BJP ally, was ever a BJP ally, an estranged ally or a potential ally – to disqualify a political formation from being part of the broad Left, democratic alliance envisaged by the CPI(M). Most regional formations fail in one or two of points of this test, but the Congress, having never been a BJP ally, fits in the scheme of this broader alliance, he maintains.
Only, the party has to introspect on its ideological rigour.
Mr. Salim says that the number of parties in the Left combine grew from 9 to 16 now in West Bengal and it was a good sign as it’s the time to mobilise and organise mass struggles.
It doesn’t matter that the party drew a blank in the last Assembly elections. That’s the lowest point of a downslide that started some years ago. But there’s resurgence on the horizon, he said.
