Although the CPI(M) Central committee has let off party veteran and Leader of the Opposition V.S. Achuthanandan with a mere public censure for ‘some of his recent remarks and actions,’ it has rejected almost every single one of his contentions on the SNC-Lavalin deal and political and tactical positions taken by the State CPI(M) in recent times.
The Central committee’s assertions, contained in a resolution adopted by it at its meeting in New Delhi on July 21-22 and published in party organ Deshabhimani on Wednesday, say that Mr. Achuthanandan’s continued attack on the State party leadership over the SNC-Lavalin deal and its attempts to have electoral tie-up with the Democratic Indira Congress (DIC), led by the late K. Karunakaran, and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), led by Abdul Nasir Maudany, a few years ago and to secure loans from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) was motivated by factional intentions.
The resolution says that while the DIC-PDP-ADB issues were discussed and settled by the Polit Bureau and the Central committee (as and when they arose), Mr. Achuthanandan’s charges against party State secretary Pinarayi Vijayan over the SNC-Lavalin deal was ‘examined in depth’ by the Polit Bureau and Central Committee in July 2009, and found to be without any merit. “Com. VS’ claim that his differences are political and ideological is unfounded. The Central committee cannot accept Com. VS’ logic that suppression of contrary views and annihilation of divergent views showed an organisational tendency of political deviation. These allegations are being raised with factional motive,” the 20-paragraph resolution adds.
The resolution says that the Central committee decided to publicly censure Mr. Achuthanandan because of his ‘baseless accusatory statements’ against the State party leadership and for indulging in activities that weakened the party. He has been directed to self-critically admit this in public and the Central committee hopes that henceforth he would behave in a manner conducive to jointly countering the attacks against the party, the resolution says.
Neyyattinkara bypoll
The resolution, in effect, accuses Mr. Achuthanandan of having caused the party candidate’s defeat in the Neyyattinkara Assembly byelection by visiting slain Revolutionary Marxist Party (RMP) leader T.P. Chandrasekharan’s home on the day of the polling ‘without consulting the (Kozhikode) district leadership or informing them.’ “This visit of Com. VS was telecast live by the visual media and repeated throughout the day. This had a negative effect in Neyyattinkara where polling was in progress,” the resolution notes. It also criticises him for having stated that the investigation into Chandrasekharan’s killing was moving in the right direction at a time when the party was organising protests against party workers being ‘wrongly’ implicated in the case and third degree was being used by the police against them.
Coming down equally heavily on Mr. Achuthanandan’s likening of Pinarayi Vijayan to S.A. Dange by drawing parallels between Dange’s description of those who had left the CPI in 1964 to form the CPI(M) as ‘betrayers of the working class’ and Mr. Vijayan’s description of Chandrasekharan and other RMP cadres as ‘kulamkuthikal’ (roughly ‘betrayers of the clan’), the resolution says that Mr. Achuthanandan’s public challenge of the State leadership created considerable confusion in the minds of party sympathisers and left them disappointed. The contents of a letter Mr. Achuthanandan sent to the party general secretary on May 20 found its way to the media in Kerala. Being the time of the Neyyattinkara byelection, this also created huge confusion.
Action against Mani
The resolution also frowns on former Idukki district secretary M.M. Mani’s speech at a time when the party was trying to defend itself against the attack on the party over Chandrasekharan murder and says that his speech dealt a ‘big blow’ to the credibility of the party’s campaign. For this, the Central committee has asked the State committee to take ‘appropriate action’ against Mr. Mani, the resolution says.
