From CPI(M) general secretary to his Kerala satrap Pinarayi Vijayan, comrades have been busy annotating veteran leader Jyoti Basu’s there-is-no-alternative-to-capitalism line.
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: From CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat to his Kerala satrap Pinarayi Vijayan, comrades have been busy annotating veteran leader Jyoti Basu’s there-is-no-alternative-to-capitalism line.
Vijayan, amid a crusade to wrest control of the party unit, has said that those who hailed Basu’s advocacy of capitalism are yet to understand the party and its programmes.
In a two-part series in party mouthpiece Deshabhimani, he accused “Malayalam bourgeois media” of propagating that the party has accepted capitalism and globalisation.
“Contemporary stage of revolution is of people’s democracy. This is not meant for eliminating capitalism. The party views the work for socialist revolution as the next stage.
Then the world will move to the transformation to communism… The party has never hoped to eliminate capitalism and implement socialism by its participation in the state government before the people’s democratic revolution,” the party secretary writes quoting several party policy documents starting from 1964.
He also made a jibe at his bete noire VS Achuthanandan: “Some people are hoping that this (the propaganda that CPI(M) has abandoned the socialist path) will lead to an ideological battle in the party conventions to come. They will become more active in the coming days.”
The Kerala chief minister was the first leader in the state to react to Basu in a party convention on Monday. The embattled octogenarian was clever enough to put himself as an anti-thesis to the “deviationist lobby”.
“When people harp on factionalism, no one has banned - and no one can - ideological debates within the party. It is a lively party. We have to respond to the doubts and confusion of the members of the party,” he had in Aluva, where the crucial Ernakulam district convention was underway.
Though he has been losing ground elsewhere, Achuthanandan succeeded in keeping the Vijayan juggernaut at bay in Ernakulam. Many Vijayan loyalists were rapped for their ties with the nouveau rich.
Achuthanandan, who represent the classical camp in the party along with Karat, is only too happy to polarise the party in the run-up to the 19th CPI(M) Party Congress to be held in Coimbatore.
He views Basu’s statement as a tool to mobilise support within the party when Vijayan and his men systematically sweep almost all district conventions.
He said that the “workers and the toiling classes have pronounced the death warrant of capitalism” and “the party would use non-capitalist measures on the road to socialism”.
Vijayan, who minces no words hailing the West Bengal model of new-age communism, is in an unenviable position catering to his home constituency.
“People’s democracy comprises all anti-feudal, anti-monopoly, anti-imperialist forces. Thus, it is not a revolution to eliminate capitalism. Capitalism will have a place in it,” he writes.
Ironically, the pragmatic party boss is brushing up his dialectical skills when even Achuthanandan is opening up his government to state withdrawal and private participation.
s_don@dnaindia.net
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