CPI’s Kerala secretary Pannyan Raveendran on Sunday asked ‘Big Brother’ Pinarayi Vijayan, his counterpart in the CPI(M), to show self-restraint while attacking his party publicly at a time when tension between the official neo-liberalist leadership of the Marxist party and the CPI seemed to be escalating.
“The references by Pinarayi against CPI were extremely unfortunate. It would be better for all if provocative statements are avoided while speaking in public,” Pannyan said in Kannur on Sunday referring to Pinarayi’s statement on Saturday at Vadakara, Kozhikode that the CPI should not succumb to false pride.
Despite being the two lead parties of Kerala’s Opposition lDF, the relations between the CPI(M) and CPI have not been all that warm for a long time for a plethora of reasons including the Marxists’ alleged pro-capitalist perspective in many matters and the CPI(M) official leadership’s unrestrained campaign against its central committee member VS Achuthanandan.
“It’s a time when the two parties should be working together. It would not be in the interest of anybody to waste time in disputes. It would be better if local issues are not referred to at public functions,” Pannyan said referring to Pinarayi’s open attack against the CPI for holding a separate memorial programme on the anniversary of the Onchiyam uprising on April 30.
Pinarayi, leader of the neo-liberalist faction of the CPI(M) which is in total control of the party organisation in Kerala, had while speaking at a programme in Vadakara, Kozhikode on Saturday warned the CPI against taking a position of severing ties with the Marxist party and that it should give up its “false pride”.
The CPI(M) secretary was referring to the CPI’s act of observing the anniversary of the Onchiyam peasant uprising separately last April 30 while the two parties had been observing it together till now. “Does the CPI mean that no relationship is needed (between the two
parties) in such programmesIJ Such a stand won’t help the left,” Pinarayi had said.
However, CPI(M)-watchers said that Pinarayi’s ire towards the CPI was not limited to the Onchiyam Martyr memorial programme but it is also applicable to the position it had adopted with regard to the neo-liberal Marxists’ intra-party campaign against Achuthanandan, whom Vijayan and his loyalists want to remove as Opposition leader in the State Assembly.
When the issue had come up in the last meeting of the central committee of the CPI(M), senior CPI leader AB Bardhan had said that the Marxists should take any decision keeping the larger national situation in mind, indicating that any action against Achuthanandan could have serious ramifications for the left movement in India.