After talking of unity for sometime earlier this year, the CPI(M) and the CPI are back at what they have always done: spar over who has better pedigree as a Communist Party.
Leaders of the two parties have now locked horns over a letter written to his party members by CPI State secretary Pannian Ravindran and published in the party organ Navayugom terming the split in the Communist Party in 1964 a ‘tragedy’.
Hitting back at the CPI State secretary through an editorial page article in the party organ Deshabhimani on Thursday, its chief editor and CPI(M) State secretariat member V.V. Dakshinamoorthy said if the CPI(M) had not been formed, there would have been no working class revolutionary party in India.
‘Split a tragedy’In his letter, quoted extensively in Mr. Dakshinamoorthy’s article, Mr. Ravindran had said that if it were not for the 1964 split, which was the result of 32 persons walking out of 101-member national council of the undivided CPI, the Communist Party would have grown into a massive force in the country. “The tragedy called split is turning 50 this year. That split that set the stage for all the subsequent splits,” he had said.
Responding to Mr. Ravindran’s observations, Mr. Dakshinamoorthy said the 1964 split was not an overnight development, but the outcome of inner-party discussions lasting a decade on class issues and the ‘authoritian’ attitude of the then party leadership. Although the two parties had subsequently come together in 1967 to form the eight party alliance government, their unity had come a cropper when CPI used corruption charges as a ‘political weapon’ against CPI(M) Ministers, Mr. Dakshinamoorthy said.
“Let us celebrate the 75 anniversary and centenary of the formation of the Communist Party together and separately but, when doing so, but there is no reason to foul-mouth, directly or indirectly, the celebration of the 50 anniversary of the formation of CPI(M),” Mr. Dakshinamoorthy said.
