After the humiliating loss which almost wiped off the Communists in the national political scene, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) has come up with their analysis for their debacle.
According to Indian Express report, the central committee has gone back to their 2014 conclusions of shifting the blame to others by claiming that the left parties lost more ground to last five years due to NDA’s money power, which according to them swung the elections in the favour of the latter.
Reportedly, Prakash Karat, the then party general secretary had spoken of the alleged role of the NDA’s “money power’’ in swinging the elections in 2014 as well. Sitaram Yechury, the current general secretary of the CPI-M has also spoken of the systemic erosion of Left supporters and blamed the “violence unleashed by the Trinamool Congress’’ for its losses in West Bengal. Even in 2014, Karat had pushed the blame claiming “communal polarisation” of the electorate led to the NDA’s victory. Interestingly, five years later after the severe losses in 2019, Yechury has fallen back to the same alibi.
Yechury on Monday said the CPM’s first order of the day is to “get in touch with all our cadres’’ and bring them back into the fold. In 2014, Karat had said the party had decided to “examine why there has been an alienation of sections of the people from the Party’’.
Speaking to the media, Yechury confirmed that it was true that despite huge numbers turning up to their movements and marches, they were not translated electorally. He further added that they will be analysing the issue over the next two months.
Yechury also indicated that the opposition alliance or mahagathbandan narrative of “saving India” from communal forces and protecting the country’s Constitution and institutions had gained little traction on the ground.
Yechury also took a dig at the Congress, stating that, “The opposition parties, the Congress, in particular, failed to put in place the unity of secular opposition parties that were being projected in the run-up to the elections. A campaign to safeguard secularism as against the communal offensive was not conducted. Soft Hindutva is not the answer for hardcore Hindutva. The ideological battle between Hindutva and secularism was not forcefully conducted. The voters in Kerala felt that Congress will be in a better position for the formation of an alternative secular government.”
The Communist Party of India-Marxist further added that the Congress did not co-operate with the left front on seat sharing in West Bengal, which led to the rise of the BJP in the state.
“In West Bengal, elections were held in a highly polarized atmosphere. There was a high anti-incumbency against the TMC. The CPI(M) and the Left Front were not seen as the alternative and this led to a shift in a section of our traditional votes. The Congress’s refusal to accept the Left’s proposal for maximizing the pooling of anti-BJP, anti-TMC votes bolstered this binary narrative,’’ said Yechury.
