Kolkata, Feb 26 As the CPI(M) on Tuesday announced the new 80-member committee in West Bengal headed by the party politburo member Md Salim as the state secretary for a second term, questions have started surfacing over the constituents of the panel.
The first question is why among the 11 new entrants in the state committee, not a single one was from the CPI(M)’s student and youth wings, although the leadership had for quite time stressed on bringing new faces into leadership positions in the state.
The second question is why an erstwhile district secretary of the party in North 24 Parganas, Mrinal Chakraborty has been retained in the new state committee although he was defeated in internal polls for the chair of district secretary that was conducted just before the 27th state conference at the end of which the new state committee was announced on Tuesday.
The third question is why veteran party leader and former West Bengal municipal affairs and urban development minister in the previous Left Front Government, Ashok Bhattacharya, who had been dropped from the new committee because of his age, was not even included as a special invitee to the panel.
Similar questions have been raised on why the party’s only Rajya Sabha member from West Bengal and senior advocate of Calcutta High Court, Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, too, was not included as a special invitee after being dropped from the state committee on Tuesday.
Party insiders said on Wednesday that in all probability the CPI(M)’s state leadership was not agreeable to many revolutionary experiments with the formation of the new state committee considering that the latter will lead the party into the crucial Assembly elections in West Bengal scheduled next year.
This time the committee will have to be ready for both the eventualities of contesting alone and continuing with the seat sharing arrangement with the Congress that started with the 2016 state Assembly elections.
The draft political resolution of CPI(M) for its 24th party Congress at Madurai in Tamil Nadu scheduled in April this year, which was released earlier this month in New Delhi, had focussed more on independent political lines in the coming days rather than on electoral understanding.
“The party should pay more attention to the independent political campaign and mass mobilisation around the political platform of the party.
“There should be no blurring of our independent identity or diminishing of our independent activities in the name of electoral understanding or alliances,” the excerpts of the draft political resolution, a copy of which is available with IANS read.
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