Sitaram Yechury gets second term as CPM general secretary

Suresh Dharur

Tribune News Service

Hyderabad, April 22

Sitaram Yechury, a pragmatic Marxist who defied the majority view in his party and successfully pitched for tactical understanding with the Congress, was on Sunday re-elected as the CPI (M) general secretary for a second term.

The re-election, capping weeks of speculation over his future amid internal rift over political-tactical line, came on the concluding day of the party's 22nd congress in Hyderabad.

The new 95-member Central Committee unanimously elected Yechuri (65) for a second three-year term. He was first elevated to the post at the party's 21st congress at Visakhapatnam in 2015.

The Central Committee also elected a 17-member politburo. West Bengal leader Tapan Sen and Nilotpal Basu find a place in the new Politburo while former CITU leader AK Padmanabhan has been relieved.

Kerala leader S Ramchandran Pillai would continue in the politburo. MV Govindan Master, Chief Editor of the party publication Deshabhimani in Kerala, and former Kerala Assembly speaker K Radhakrishnan, are the new entrants in the Central Committee.

Prakash Karat, Brinda Karat, Manik Sarkar, Pinarayi Vijayan, Ramachandran Pillai and Biman Basu are among the members of the Central Committee. 

"The main task today is to defeat this BJP government and for that all necessary measures will be undertaken," Yechuri said in his acceptance speech.

Terming the 22nd party congress as "momentous", he said, "If any message that should go to rank and file and to our class enemy, it is that CPI(M) has emerged as a united party."

"Let us re-dedicate ourselves to the task of protecting the country's unity and integrity and the constitution," he said.

It was a sort of double win for Yechury as his political formulation, favouring electoral understanding with the Congress to achieve a larger goal of defeating the BJP, was accepted by the party on Friday when an amended political resolution was adopted without voting.

The indications of the decks being cleared for Yechury's re-election were available when the politburo, amid intense debate over the political line, agreed to modify the draft political resolution, accommodating the minority view held by Yechuri camp.

The amended version of the political-tactical line removed the phrase "without any understanding or electoral alliance with the Congress" and added "without political alliance with the Congress". This was seen as a boost to the Yechuri camp.

The climbdown came after intense pressure from the supporters of Yechury who pressed for secret ballot vote on the amendments to the draft political resolution moved on Thursday by the politburo member Prakash Karat.

The modification of the Marxist party's political-tactical line assumes significance in the wake of growing convergence among the opposition parties on the need to build an alternative rainbow coalition to take on the BJP-led NDA in the 2019 general elections.

Though the CPI (M) will not have "political alliance" with the Congress, there will now be a greater flexibility to have tactical understanding with secular parties, including the Congress.

As the war of wits between the two camps threatened to reach a flashpoint at the party conclave with Yechury's supporters insisting on a secret ballot vote, the politburo stepped in to strike a compromise.

As a middle path, it was decided to tone down the anti-Congress position. As a result, the key operative portion of the political resolution now reads: "The main task is to defeat the BJP and its allies by rallying all the secular and democratic forces. This has to be done without political alliance with Congress party."