In its first admission of guilt, the West Bengal unit of the CPI(M) confessed it had not been able to properly implement the rectification campaign — the prescription of the Prakash Karat lobby to bring the house in order after the Lok Sabha debacle — in the state.
CPI(M) state unit general secretary and politburo member, Biman Bose, today said: “We have not been able to implement the total programme as of now. We are not able to implement it properly. We need to move towards proper implementation.”
According to sources, CPI(M)’s politburo meeting, which started today at the party headquarters, discussed preliminary findings of the results of the civic body polls. In the election to 80 municipalities, the Left suffered yet another major setback, as Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress swept Kolkata and Salt Lake and was likely to bag more than 40 municipalities.
But the party categorically denied any change of guard in West Bengal, even as some media reports suggested that Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had offered to resign after the drubbing in the latest round of elections.
An unhappy Bhattacharjee decided to skip the politburo meeting, but Bose came to his rescue, saying: “The question does not arise. The matter has not been referred to the Central Committee. It has not been discussed in the state committee.”
But later, when asked if there would be any change in leadership in the state, politburo member Sitaram Yechury evaded a direct answer and said the matter would come to the Central Committee and politburo only after the state committee reviewed the election debacle. The party, led by Prakash Karat, had launched a rectification campaign aimed at arresting non-communist trends in the party and set the house in order after setback in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. Admitting that the process was yet to complete in the state, Biman Bose said the party would continue its work in the direction.
The top CPI(M) leadership also categorically ruled out early polls in West Bengal, as demanded by the Trinamool Congress. Pointing out that only 8.5 million of the 50 million voters of the state had participated in the recent civic polls, Bose said: “Some people want to see a whole picture in this.”
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When asked if these polls were semifinals to the next year’s assembly polls, Bose quipped: “Those who participate in elections are not sportspersons. This is not a match.”
Bose today presented a preliminary report on the civic polls to the politburo, which would go into the issue after the state committee formalises its report this month. This is the second time Bhattacharjee skipped a politburo meeting after a poll debacle. After 2009 elections, he has not attended the politburo meet. In close quarters, an exasperated Bhattacharjee has even remarked that many central leaders who take part in these meetings have little understanding of the ground reality in West Bengal. According to him, they talk about theories that have no relevance in today’s complex socio-political context.
The two-day politburo meeting is attended by leaders like Karat, Yechury, S Ramachandran Pillai, M K Pandhe, Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarkar, Kerala state unit chief Pinarayi Vijayan and Kodiyeri Balakrishnan.