NEW DELHI: After swallowing their worst ever defeat, first signs of fissures within the Left conglomerate came to the fore on Wednesday with CPI, after its two-day national executive meet, asking Left leaders to exercise humility and get rid of their arrogance.
“The National Executive emphasises the need for humility and total absence of arrogance in the behaviour and attitude of all Left leaders and activists in relation to people,” said CPI general secretary A B Bardhan reading out from the Party statement.
Although, Bardhan didn’t mention any names, the statement, apparently, is being seen as a veiled attack against CPM general secretary Prakash Karat, who had devised the whole election game plan almost single handedly, including bringing parties like BSP, AIADMK, JD-S and TDP under the banner of the Third Front.
Smarting under the shocking defeat, a sullen looking Bardhan made a candid admission that the multi-crore-rupee SNC-Lavalin scam, involving Kerala CPM State secretary Pinarayi Vijayan, affected the image of the Left Democratic Front (LDF) in the State for which they had to pay in the elections.
Conceding that both national and State specific factors caused the Left parties’ dismal performance in the polls, the CPI felt a “frank and self-critical review should be carried out into the manner in which the Left Front worked. “
The election plan proved to be a disaster with all the four Left parties losing heavily and their tally getting reduced from a healthy 61 to just 24 MPs. Working under the guidance of their “big brother” CPM, the CPI suffered the maximum damage by getting reduced to just four MPs in the 15th Lok Sabha against 10 in the 2004.