State of play
On the face of it, the recently-concluded party congress of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] in Kannur was the party’s last chance to revitalise itself at the national level and formulate plans for effective interventions against the Bharatiya Janata Party’s — and by extension, the Sangh Parivar’s — burgeoning stranglehold on the diverse Indian society, which the combine is desperate to homogenise.
Expectedly, the party congress demonstrated an unprecedented ‘united resolve’, in the words of the re-elected general secretary Sitaram Yechury, to reverse its receding influence among the people and to close ranks with like-minded regional secular and democratic forces to stall the BJP’s advance. But that’s easier said than done and the CPI(M), at its nadir electorally, knows it rather well. However, what lends the party the moral confidence is the victory of the farmers’ agitation in which it was a key player and its role in ‘secularising’ and ‘expanding’ the struggle against the Citizenship Amendment Act-National Register of Citizens (CAA-NRC) regime. Ironically, this period also saw the party membership and representation in Parliament drop catastrophically. But its fall wasn’t an instantaneous and unforeseen occurrence.
