‘Greatest blunder’: Foes, allies slam Sitaram Yechury for alliance with Congress

In the CPI(M) it’s always been Karat’s line versus the Yechury line. While the hawkish former general secretary, Mr Prakash Karat, favoured maintaining “equidistance” from the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, party general secretary Sitaram Yechury, a moderate face, favoured a tactical alliance for the party’s growth.

The Bengal result has, however, dented Mr Yechury’s much flaunted move to ally with the Congress. While in Marxist corridors the cadres were whispering about the “tactical error”, Trinamul supremo Mamata Banerjee, flush with victory, described the alliance as the “greatest blunder”.

The CPI(M), which had joined hands with the Congress in Bengal, was in a direct fight against the Congress-led UDF in Kerala. It is being argued that the defeat in Bengal and victory in Kerala vindicated the Visakhapatnam line of the party. At the 21st CPI(M) Party Congress at Visakhapatnam, talking about the “political-tactical line”, former party boss Prakash Karat had said, “While the main direction of the struggle is against the BJP, the party will continue to oppose the Congress as it pursues neo-liberal policies”. He maintained that “it’s the Congress-led UPA government’s anti-people policies and corruption which helped the BJP to come to power. Therefore, the political line precludes having any understanding or electoral alliance with the Congress.”

Pulling in the other direction, Mr Yechury, backed by the former Bengal chief minister, Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, forged an alliance with the Congress. Mr Bhattacharya even shared the dais with Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi at an election rally in Bengal.

If the Karat camp was pointing fingers at “Yechury’s electoral misadventure”, the CPI(M) general secretary maintained that the party “respected the verdict of the people with all humility in Bengal” and that it would “examine and review the results in order to draw proper lessons from it”. Mr Yechury “saluted the comrades who worked unitedly despite the attacks by the Trinamul Congress”.

Mr Yechury claimed that the vote share of the CPI(M) has remained more or less the same in the state for the party as compared to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The CPI(M) Central Committee and state committee will meet shortly to review the Bengal debacle.

The Left parties, both CPI and CPI(M), talked about “serious introspection” in West Bengal and said that their impressive performance in Kerala was “historic”, yet “expected”.