The CPI(M) used to describe indiscipline, intra-party feud and open demonstration of disagreement with party leadership as vices of the bourgeois parties. It seems that these vices are now creeping into a regimented party like the CPI(M).
The party leadership is facing the wrath of axed sitting MLAs in some districts like Malda, Birbhum, North and South 24 Parganas, and even in Kolkata. The party bosses’ decision to drop nearly 150 sitting MLAs including nine ministers has antagonised many of them.
Some disgruntled MLAs are questioning the decision of the leadership in a distinctly un-Communistic manner. Others have sent their loyalists to sit on a dharna in front of the district party headquarters, something unheard of in the CPI(M).
Left red-faced, the party satraps have decided to placate the angry MLAs by engaging them in either poll campaigns as star speakers or by giving them other organisational party posts.
Significantly, this time the Left Front has introduced at least 149 greenhorns emulating the poll matrix of former party secretary late Anil Biswas who had dropped 110 sitting MLAs at one go in the 2006 Assembly polls.
Insiders revealed that the party started facing a coup of sorts soon after the announcement of the list of candidates on Sunday. “The move to drop so many sitting MLAs to pre-empt anti-incumbency factor has not gone down well with our party ranks. In fact, it has opened up a Pandora’s Box,” said a CPI(M) central committee member.
In fact, the repercussion of dropping MLA Chandana Ghosh Dastidar in Falta in South 24 Parganas is being felt in West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s Jadavpur constituency where her husband Khokon Ghosh Dastidar is a zonal committee secretary and a party strongman. Fearing that he may sabotage Mr Bhattacharjee’s poll prospects, the party is planning to make him the chief election agent of the Chief Minister.
The Left Front partners are also facing the music. Even veteran Forward Bloc chief Ashok Ghosh had to face the ire of nine axed MLAs who had been dropped. Mr Ghosh said: “Lenin was right when he called parliament a pig sty.”