Oldest Communist Party elects a New General Secretary

COMMENTARY

The Communist Party of India, the oldest Communist Party in the country whose birth took place in Kanpur in December 1925, has held its Twentyfirst Congress in Patna. The CPI-M, which surfaced much later in October 1964 and whose founders decided to advertise their Marxist credentials in the name of the party in order to differentiate it from the parent organisation, is currently holding its Twentieth Congress in Kerala’s Kozhikode.

Just before the Twentyfirst Congress, the CPI suffered a big jolt when its unquestioned leader C.K. Chandrappan, the party General Secretary in Kerala (groomed by such stalwarts as M.N. Govindan Nair, C. Achutha Menon and P.K. Vasudevan Nair), breathed his last after a serious illness. And soon after the Congress one of its tallest figures in the North-East, the founder of the party in Assam, Promode Gogoi, passed away. Both these were severe blows to the party.

The official Communist Parties in the parliamentary arena are going through a serious crisis of late as a consequence of their electoral debacle in West Bengal in particular (the defeat in Kerala is of a temporary nature from available indications; yet frampant factionalism in the CPI-M unit in that State has caused a major headache for the central leadership of the ‘Marxist’ party even if the young upstarts in the party hierarchy deny it with characteristic nonchalance). However, the CPI-M leaders remain unfazed—for any genuine introspection leading to change of guards is anathema for them. Why? Because that would force them to ‘reform’, a word they avoid like plague; for in it lies, in their view, the seeds of discord with the parent party, the CPI.

The most reassuring development in the present scenario in the Communist Parties is the handing over of the mantle of leadership in the CPI from the veteran A.B. Bardhan to the Andhra CPI leader Suravaram Sudhakar Reddy. As The Indian Express has aptly pointed out,

...A two-time Lok Sabha MP, Reddy may not have the charisma of Bardhan, or be as outspoken or media-savvy, but he can’t be called reticent or unimaginative either. The 70-year-old law graduate from Kurnool is a quintes-sential organisation man, a practical politician fully attuned to the ground realities. He believes making his party strong and independent is as important as, if not more than, Left unity and is against letting Ajoy Bhavan play second fiddle to AKG Bhavan...

A product of student politics in the 1960s when one was fortunate to come in close contact with him, Sudhakar was the General Secretary of the All India Students Federation and came under the influence of CPI General Secretary C. Rajeswara Rao and party Chairman S.A. Dange. Since he learnt his craft from pioneers of the communist movement in Andhra Pradesh like Rajeswara Rao and Dr Raj Bahadur Gaur, he has the capacity to give the CPI, and thereby the Left as a whole, a distinct identity. He is imbued with a broad national vision and does not suffer from sectarian hangovers his counterparts in the CPI-M justify in the name of ‘ideology’ (by which they actually seek to convey the term ‘dogmatism’).

Sudhakar has his job cut out: building and expanding the party in the Hindi heartland, especially UP and Bihar, which was neglected all these years.

His distinctiveness is evident in his approach to specific issues. As The Indian Express disclosed,

...It was under his leadership that the CPI in Andhra Pradesh launched a massive agitation in the Telangana region which ended in the Warangal Declaration in 2000 demanding a separate State. As State Secretary, he mana-ged to convince the central leadership and his comrades in Andhra Pradesh that supporting the demand was in the party’s interest. The CPM is opposed to the demand.

It is quite possible therefore that Sudhakar would succeed in reaching out to the broader Left (including those in the ML groups and non-party activists) even while keeping good relations with the CPI-M. He is also expected to forge strong bonds with people’s movements like the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) led by Medha Patkar. For essentially he stands for the broadest possible unity of all progressive forces against regressive elements of all hues fostered by vested interests.

And in this task he has one major asset which his counterparts in other political parties, especi-ally the CPI-M, lack: modesty. Thus he is devoid of any trace of the holier-than-thou attitude, one of the prime attributes of the average Left leader. He also shuns the limelight. Incidentally these were precisely the special traits of the late C.K. Chand-rappan too (which is why he was able to befriend so many people in Kerala and beyond).

One hopes Sudhakar would be able to significantly contribute in the service of the nation and its toiling people in the days ahead.

Observer