“Are you shooting the messenger,” I asked the Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader who told me a few days ago that the party would not allow the media to set the agenda for it.
His reference was to reports about the public outcry over the exclusion of popular Health Minister K.K. Shailaja from the new Kerala Cabinet headed by Pinarayi Vijayan . “The public sentiment is perfectly understandable. But see how the media tried to leverage it to create a narrative of the party being anti-women and undemocratic,” he said.
The leader said that a few years ago, at a State plenum, the party decided that the perceived permanence attached to parliamentary positions should end. “We have the examples of Tripura and West Bengal in front of us. That’s why we chose not to field anyone who’s had two consecutive terms in the Assembly, in the polls. The State Committee also decided that all CPI(M) members in the Cabinet would be talented freshers, to bring about a generational change,” he said.
He added that there were excellent Ministers in the last Cabinet who did not contest the election. Of the ministers who got re-elected, none was given an exemption. The party would not fall for “media propaganda,” he said firmly.
“An exemption to Shailaja Teacher alone would have had you [the media] crying foul that ‘the Kannur lobby’ was at work,” said another leader.
The mutual distrust between a large section of the media and the CPI(M) goes back a long way. As the party’s State secretary between 1998 and 2015, Mr. Vijayan had frequent run-ins with some media organisations which he accused of working in concert, like a ‘syndicate’, to destabilise the party. Locked in a factional fight with veteran leader V.S. Achuthanandan then, Mr. Vijayan spared no occasion to go hammer and tongs at a section of the media for its “concerted leakage of inner party happenings”. With the ascent of the Bharatiya Janata Party nationally, the media was also accused of furthering a “right wing agenda”.
Reporting on the CPI(M) in Kerala willy-nilly puts reporters in a spot when the leaders start wondering why a particular issue, a controversy or development was treated by the media in a certain way. To be sure, the media is not a monolith; those with the values of journalism intact are unremitting in questioning the establishment.
And the cloak of secrecy covering the CPI(M)’s proceedings hasn’t helped matters either. I told the leader that it is only natural for the media to wonder if the exclusion of Ms. Shailaja had anything to do with cutting her down to size, similar to what happened to the legendary leader K.R. Gouri.
He responded that the party has several talented youth, many of them women, at all levels, including in the Cabinet. “And there’s a mechanism to oversee the functioning of the government, to prevent concentration of power,” he said.
Gouri Amma wasn’t officially projected by the party as its chief ministerial candidate in 1987; going by party seniority, E.K. Nayanar was the natural choice. The media got it all wrong, another leader said.
Given the shared scepticism between the media and the party, it’s hard to know what actually happened in the party then or what has driven the policy shift now.
