The unprecedented challenge being faced by the State leadership of the CPI(M) following protests by party cadres and supporters against selection of candidates in different Assembly constituencies appears to have taken the shine off the party’s victory in the three-tier local body polls.
With protests continuing unabated from far north in Manjeswaram to Kuttiyadi, from Ponnani to Tarur, from Kalamassery to Ambalappuzha, the party leadership apparently stands jolted out of its ideological comfort zone. The localised rebellion has compelled the area and district secretaries to come up with unconvincing explanation on parachuting candidates or outsiders in Assembly segments.
Protests for VS
Unlike the protest when veteran leader and former Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan was denied the party ticket ahead of 2006 and 2011 elections, the agitations now indicate that the State leadership was out of sync with the ground reality, a senior party functionary said.
The party’s two-term norm on candidature too is contributing for the unrest, the functionary said.
The street protests and the posters favouring and disapproving contestants also revealed that the centralised democracy practised by the party in principle all these years has given way to “parliamentary ambition”, a phraseology often used in party circles to refer to a tendency to be discouraged.
Besides, the rigid organisational structure, which the leadership had fiercely barricaded all these years, is rapidly resembling the Congress in the run-up to elections.
Party sources said that the sporadic incidents against the decision of the State secretariat on the nominees also exposed the disconnect between the top leadership and the grass-root levels.
No discussions
No democratic discussions had been carried out among the different rungs of the party so as to gauge the mood and mind of the cadre. The call for a rectification campaign against wrong trends adopted at the Party Congress remained unfulfilled within the party framework.
Also, a party functionary said that the rebellion, which possibly stemmed from leadership-cadre disconnect, would further aggravate the party fault-line if a course correction was not done immediately.
Temporarily the party can, however, heave a sigh of relief that no State-level factionalism is involved in the ongoing protests. Certainly, beyond electoral calculations, a bigger challenge to the party leadership is to strengthen cohesion in all levels of the party organisational structure.
Published - March 09, 2021 07:48 pm IST
