Party veteran V.S. Achuthanandan has been dropped from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI-M] central committee.
The 21st Party Congress of the CPI(M), which concluded at Visakhapatnam on Sunday, took the decision reportedly after a heated exchange over the issue in the party Polit Bureau between former CPI(M) State secretary Pinarayi Vijayan and Sitaram Yechury, who subsequently got elected as the party general secretary. The final decision was to make him one of the special invitees to the central committee.
Mr. Achuthanandan, who would turn 92 on October 20, is the only living founding-leaders of the party.
Mr. Achuthanandan himself did not appear to be too perturbed by the Party Congress decision and told waiting reporters before leaving Visakhapatnam that it was age and not the health of a leader that mattered for the party. Now that he has been made a special invitee, Mr. Achuthanandan would not have voting rights and would only be able to participate in the proceedings of the committee.
The Leader of the Opposition does not figure on the party State committee as things stand now. When the State committee was reconstituted at the State conference in Alappuzha, one position was left vacant, after Mr. Achuthanandan walked out of the conference taking exception to the adverse references about him in the organisational report presented by Mr. Vijayan and the personal attack against him on the eve of the conference. Mr. Achuthanandan’s re-entry into the State committee was still under a cloud and a decision on that would be known only in the coming days, probably well after the Polit Bureau Commission goes into the many charges that he had raised against the State leadership of the party in the central committee.
