Disenchantment and ‘enduring alienation’ of many a staunch member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) ended with the launch of a new communist party in Salem on Sunday.
Christened the Marxist Party, the new outfit came into existence with representatives from 28 districts in Tamil Nadu passing an unanimous resolution during a meeting here. This was followed by the formation of a state organising committee, comprising 11 members, for the new party.
The Tamilnadu Government Employees Association’s former president K Gangadharan was named the committee’s organiser.
A major component of the resolution was a determination to register the Marxist Party with the Election Commission and to kick-start political work on the basis of a party programme, essentially on the lines of the CPM’s original flagship People’s Democratic Revolution programme, by functioning as a mass revolutionary party and not as a cadre-based outfit. The immediate goal was not election, so there was no thinking as yet on political alliance in the next election, Gangadharan told Express.
The Marxist Party would first set its sights on party building and filling leadership vacuum for the working class and deprived sections.
“However, when the time comes for electoral politics, the Marxist Party will identify parties whose policies and programmes are not antagonistic to its own. We will not become a minor partner in any alliance. We will wait till we gain sufficient strength and are in no hurry,” Gangadaran said. Queried about the party’s stance on the CPI, Gangadaran said it was no different to CPM and that, in fact, many from the CPI too turned up for Sunday’s meeting and endorsed the formation of the new party.
On other communist outfits like the CPI(ML) and the Maoists, he said his party would respect the “faith of the Indian people in parliamentary democracy and will accept any stream of communism, provided they represent the mass of the exploited people and are led by them”. When probed on the new outfit’s commitment to a broader Left coordination, Gangadharan said it would join a front that was in line with its own policies and programmes. Many staunch communists who toiled for the party for many years had been sidelined, expelled or ignored by clever manipulations, he alleged.
The contradiction, he said, was rooted in the party’s ideological confusion and jettisoning of its core programmes like abandoning the People’s Democratic Revolution, taking over of land from landlords and distributing it to the poor (this has been replaced with a policy of land acquisition with compensation), class compromise and its political manifestations of supporting the UPA’s corrupt regime, winking at crass neo-liberalisation policies like FDI and blind support to Pranab Mukerjee when he was a presidential candidate.
The policy of supporting the Congress for the sake of alienating a communal BJP and withdrawing support to UPA over the nuclear issue while not questioning its anti-people policies did not reflect the people’s views, he said. “The party’s (CPM’s) organisational structure has become communalised, lacking inner-party democracy.”
The newly-appointed office bearer said the CPM’s senior member W R Vardaharajan’s suicide was a result of factional fight, but through a “planned manipulation”. However, a discussion on the matter was put off.
Meanwhile, efforts by Express to reach CPM state secretary G Ramakrishnan for his comments on the development turned out to be futile. However, in the party’s daily publication Theekathir, Ramakrishnan said that the development would not affect the CPM and that most of the new party’s members were expelled members.