Ahead of critical State elections in West Bengal and Kerala next year, the four-day CPI(M) plenum that starts on December 27 in Kolkata will principally focus on how to strengthen the party organisation. This comes, as party general secretary Sitaram Yechury says in his article in the forthcoming issue of the party organ, People’s Democracy (December 27), in the wake of the “weaknesses in terms of stagnation if not decline in the strength of our party and mass organisation membership, its uneven composition and a sharp decline in our party’s electoral strength” that was noted at the 21st Party Congress held earlier this year in Visakhapatnam.
Mr. Yechury also notes that strengthening the organisation becomes “all the more important given the concerted attack by … rightwing reactionary elements against the CPI(M), particularly in our stronghold of West Bengal, through the politics of terror and intimidation. The CPI(M) as a whole, our party units all across the country, must focus on the defence of our strong Left bastions and outposts of the Indian revolutionary forces.”
“At the 21st Party Congress, we realised,” a Central Committee (CC) member told The Hindu , “that the organisational question needed in-depth study that would require more time.” The coming to power of the BJP in mid-2014 and the subsequent growth in communalism, and economic and social policies that were anti-poor, he said, should have created ideal conditions for the growth of the Left parties: “But we found the Left is still not able to project itself properly and mobilise the affected persons.” A key element therefore, is to strengthen the party organisation, the CC member said, and to “make its party structures more inclusive”: in a party that does not like to talk about caste, there is a growing realisation that its key decision-making bodies are simply not representative enough.
At the party’s 21st Congress, the CPI(M) had discussed the reports submitted by three groups constituted by the CC to study the impact of neo-liberal policies and the changes that were brought about in the working class, in Indian agriculture and the middle classes. As a consequence, the party’s slogans, its style of work and the required organisational steps were discussed and some decisions were taken. The required new organisational steps that need to be undertaken on this basis will be taken up at the Plenum.
The CPI(M)’s last plenum on organisation was the Salkia plenum that was held soon after the 10th Party Congress in December 1978, when the Left parties were resurgent in the country. This week’s plenum, Mr. Yechury writes, is taking place at a time when “the socialist countervailing challenge to imperialism has disintegrated at the global level … when the Indian ruling classes are mounting a combined onslaught of the communal and the neo-liberalism offensive. This converges with the stagnation or decline in our party’s strength and influence both inside and outside Parliament.”
Flexible tacticsThe political-tactical line adopted at the 21st Congress also emphasised that as Mr. Yechury notes, that the “CPI(M) must adopt flexible tactics to meet swift changes in the political situation … electoral tactics should be dovetailed to the primacy of building the Left and Democratic Front. The party organisation must be capable of discharging these tasks.”
In a sense, a CC member told The Hindu , the plenum takes forward some of the arguments that Mr. Yechury had put forward in October 2014 at a four-day brainstorming session of the CC.
The party’s efforts to change its tactics adopted at the party’s Jalandhar Congress in 1978 to meet present-day political challenges had seen senior leader Mr. Yechury — not yet general secretary then — opposing the stand taken by the Polit Bureau and, by extension, general secretary Prakash Karat. Mr. Yechury had then moved an “alternative document” to the draft review report finalised by the Polit Bureau. Though he was overruled, his line had been that there was nothing wrong with the 1978 line and argued that it failed because of shortcomings and “subjectivism” in implementation in the last decade.
He further argued that this, along with organisational weaknesses, was to blame for the electoral setbacks.
