VISAKHAPATNAM: The CPM would rather reach out to the rights groups, activists, NGOs--it once abhorred and found detrimental to politics--rather than to the regional parties or the Congress. Subhashini Ali, member of the outgoing CPM Central Committee(CC), more candid than others admits that it’s “wake-up call” for the party, “We’ve had a thoroughly critical look at what went wrong and why we went wrong, on decisions and implementation.”
Though a charming and prominent woman leader of the party, Ali had failed to swing the West Bengal voters in her favour in the last Lok Sabha polls. Still, she is firm in her belief that the party did not take a wrong call by pulling out of the UPA I in 2009.
“Neither the timing was wrong, nor the decision,” she insists. Emerging from the party’s discussion on the political resolution, where she was performing the crucial role of providing the Hindi transliteration to the English-speak, this could the line the party is taking.
Post-pullout from the UPA, the CPM/Left lost power in West Bengal and came down to single digits in Lok Sabha.
Having made the ground for an alliance between the Trinamool Congress(TMC) and the Congress by its exit. But Ali says that it was not the coming out of the UPA but the wrong land acquisition policies that the Left Front(LF) adopted--in Singur and Nadigram leading to violence--that led to its washout in Bengal. “We lost because, we went away from out basic principles on the land issue. In fact, we should have opposed the UPA more, for instance its Special Economic Zone(SEZ) policy. We’re paying the price of not taking strong enough stand--for not fighting it out for our declared positions,” she adds, in a way blaming the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee Government for abandoning the Left line and falling for soft Manmohanomics.
The regional parties--the Left’s old friends with whom it floated a front even during the last Parliamentary elections--are not spared either. “The regional parties have increasingly become clones of the Congress and the BJP. They’ve adopted the same economic policies,” she said.