The three-day plenum of the Kerala CPI(M) ended in Palakkad on Friday with a huge rally and State party secretary Pinarayi Vijayan’s call to comrades to solve all organisational weaknesses before the lok Sabha election but an ad placed by a controversial industrialist in the party organ, Deshabhimani daily, spoiled the spirit of the meet on the last day.
The quarter-page colour ad — felicitating the CPI(M) on the occasion of its plenum — on the front page of Friday’s Deshabhimani daily was placed by the Palakkad-based Surya Group of Companies run by controversial businessman VM Radhakrishnan aka Chakku Radhakrishnan, a person accused in a case pertaining to three mysterious deaths and facing Vigilance probes.
Criticisms arose instantaneously within the party and outside that the CPI(M) itself had defeated the very purpose for which the fourth plenum of the party was organised. The main objective of the plenum was to put an end to the alleged connections of leaders and other partymen with mafias operating in the various fields of Kerala economy.
According to critics, the appearance of the ad in the party organ was indicative of the “shameless determination” of the CPI(M) leadership to continue its “unholy relationship” with dubious elements. Radhakrishnan has been frequently accused of being a benami looking after the shady business interests of several political leaders belonging to the left and the Congress-led UDF.
VS Achuthanandan, nonagenarian Opposition leader and Central committee member of the CPI(M), left the plenum venue on Friday morning itself without waiting to participate in the rally in the evening, reportedly out of protest against the appearance of the ad in the party paper and also because of the pointed attacks against him during the two-day discussions at the meet.
However, Deshabhimani general manager and Central committee member EP Jayarajan, a strong advocate of the official neo-liberalist leadership headed by Pinarayi, tried hard to justify the insertion of the advertisement in the paper. “What do you know about DeshabhimaniIJ It’s the paper’s right to decide what ads it should carry,” he told reporters rather arrogantly.
“What Jayarajan says may be true. But the problem is even the CPI(M) cadres do not agree with the decision to carry the ad on the very front page of the paper on the day the plenum was to end,” said a former State committee member of the CPI(M). “Obviously, the incident reveals some dubious connections (between the leadership and the businessman),” he said.
However, the CPI(M) assessed that the plenum was a huge success as it had been able to create a feeling among the partymen that a new awakening was needed as far as political morality, discipline and more effective organizational were concerned. Pinarayi’s speech on Friday while replying to the discussions at the plenum reflected this.
The CPI(M) decided at the plenum – which unanimously adopted the organizational report Pinarayi presented – to study the problems being faced by the minorities in the State for which the lower committees of the party would be given questionnaires with the goal of finding out the backward people among the minorities.
Pinarayi told partymen that the proposals in the guidelines approved by the plenum should be implemented within a year. He asked them to immediately start the work for solving the problems the party was facing organizationally before the lok Sabha election. The follow-up examination of organizational preparedness would start in December, he said.
As per the organizational report presented at the plenum, committees would be set up to examine whether partymen were amassing assets disproportionate to their known sources of income. Also, partymen would not be allowed to become office-bearers in religious or religious community organizations.