THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: In May 2006, when the CPM in Kerala was in turmoil, Jyoti Basu came up with a solution.
“Give comrade V S Achuthanandan a chance to contest. Correct our earlier decision and save the party,” he is learnt to have told the politburo then.
Basu, who had a love-hate relationship with the Kerala CPM, was making his greatest contribution to it. The denial of an Assembly seat had upset Achuthanandan, and his followers organised demonstrations across the state, stunning the CPM central leadership.
Though Keralite PB members S Ramachandran Pillai and Pinarayi Vijayan insisted that the party should not revoke its decision, Basu sounded practical. He was always a buffer between the warring Pinarayi and VS factions in the Kerala party.
VS followers believe that it was a last minute intervention by Harkishan Surjeet and Basu that scuttled VS’s plan to contest against the official panel in the Malappuram state conference in 2005. After preparing the ground to contest against the official panel, VS dramatically backtracked and requested the delegates to support the official panel.
The CPM has a history of convening the special politburo at Kolkata to discuss the group war in Kerala. Basu couldn’t have attended had the meeting been convened in Delhi, and his presence was very important for a crucial issue like groupism in Kerala.
“Basu’s patronage helped to dilute disciplinary action against VS on several occasions.
That doesn’t mean that Basu belonged to the VS group. To him the party was supreme. But he could rightly sense the mass support for VS,” said a CPM leader.
Basu’s long relation with the Kerala party, that began with his election campaign tour in 1964, was a little strained after 1996.
When Basu was considered for prime minister, the Kerala unit opposed it tooth and nail. In fact, many CC members from Kerala spoke out against Basu’s accepting the offer.
Basu nurtured the feeling for many years that it was the CITU lobby from Kerala that spoiled his chance. Two years later, several stalwarts including K N Raveendranath and M M Lawrence, who spoke against Basu’s prime ministerial ambitions, were expelled from the state committee in an election and many still believe that the elimination was part of a grand design.
