Yechury denied RS seat

The comrades have been unable to shake off hubris ever since they were thrust into the national spotlight in the mid-1990s. First they denied Jyoti Basu an opportunity to become Prime Minister on flimsy ideological grounds. Nearly a decade later, his own colleagues blocked Somnath Chatterjee from being nominated for the President’s post. Now, when the chips are truly down and the leftists are short of seasoned parliamentarians, the CPM has decided that its general secretary Sitaram Yechury, among the most effective parliamentarians, would not get a third term. The arguments are cogent: a rule denies any comrade more than two terms in the legislature and Yechury cannot be an exception.

If there was any doubt that a powerful lobby within the party wanted to block Yechury from winning seat with Congress support, the Kerala CM was drafted to point out that no previous general secretary has dissipated his energy in Parliament. At a time when the Opposition should be fielding its sharpest and brightest in Parliament, the Rajya Sabha will be poorer without Yechury’s sarcastic and witty interventions delivered without cliches and archaic formulations. If the comrades were really interested in setting their house in order rather than settling personal vendetta, they should have let go of Yechury as party general secretary and utilised him for marshalling opposition to the ruling arrangement. After all, Yechury is known more for his networking and negotiating skills and less for the rough and tumble of street politics. 

The Karat and Yechury eras in the CPM have shown that JNU’s two ex-leaders are not really cut out for painstaking plodding through the countryside and moffusil towns to rebuild the movement. Karat’s vacuous theorising led to a setback from which the Left never recovered. Yechury sought to save the crumbling edifice by aligning with the Congress in West Bengal but lost support in the party when the experiment blew up. The denial of a RS berth to Yechury is the fallout of that bitterness in the CPM over the right approach to a coalition that has been camouflaged in the logic of party regulations.