The CPI(M) in Kerala is facing an unprecedented crisis. While leaders like Karukappilly Siddique and Zakir Hussain, accused of criminality, have become inevitable for the Marxists. On the other, local leader PN Jayanthan is a symbol of the decadence into which they have fallen
The Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] in Kerala is facing an unprecedented and strange crisis. First, a local leader in Kochi of its youth outfit Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI), Karukappilly Siddique, was booked for intimidation and extortion, enabling the “bourgeois” adversaries to charge the party with keeping goondas and mafia buttonmen as members and protecting them. Then, Zakir Hussain, a senior leader who till recently was holding the position of area secretary — which in the party’s power structure is a position on par with or more important than that of an MlA — in Kalamassery near Kochi, was named as prime accused in a case pertaining to kidnapping and threatening a businessman, pushing the party, particularly its groupism-riddled Ernakulam district unit, into an indefensible situation.
But a bigger blow came just days after this, when a 34-year-old woman held a Press conference in Thiruvananthapuram, the State capital, to make a disclosure that would devastate the party politically and morally: She accused PN Jayanthan, a local big gun in Thrissur district and young councilor of the party in the newly constituted Wadakanchery municipality, of gang-raping her alongwith three of his associates, one of whom was an active party member, in 2014 and forcing her and her family through threats to flee the district itself. The incident also revealed how corrupt and conniving is the law-enforcement system in the State that has been ruled alternately by the left and the Congress-led alliance since its formation 60 years ago, when the victim alleged that a senior police official, who was entrusted with the task of ensuring justice to her, when she lodged a complaint on the gang-rape just three months back, had persecuted her in the name of statement recording at the police station and evidence collection in the middle of huge crowds of onlookers.
Indeed, a whole political party cannot be held responsible for the hooliganism, mafia links or sexual perversities of some of its individual members or leaders. It should also be granted that despite the gravity of the crime he had allegedly committed, Jayanthan is indeed not the first politician in Kerala to be accused of moral turpitude. But how important the elements like Jayanthan, allegedly a local loan shark with multiple shady business interests, had become for the Kerala CPI(M) was made clear in the party’s official response to the young woman’s disclosure. When all efforts of the top CPI(M) leadership to protect Jayanthan met with abject failure in the meetings of the Wadakanchery area committee and Thrissur district secretariat of the party, it decided to suspend him from the organisation while retaining him as its municipal councilor.
While announcing the decision on Jayanthan’s suspension, district secretary K Radhakrishnan did something which not even the rudest-of-the-rude Indian politician would even think of doing. Radhakrishnan, former Assembly Speaker and former Minister and considered even by CPI(M)’s adversaries as a man of great moral strength and political cleanliness, disclosed the name of the victim. Shocked by the audacity, newsmen asked him if he had done this by mistake.
The defiant reply from Radhakrishnan, a highly reputed leader of the CPI(M), was, “Why can’t I mention her nameIJ It is not proper to argue that the other person’s name should not be revealed while Jayanthan’s name is being mentioned repeatedly.”
More shocking was the defence a woman Marxist member of the State Cabinet, who had thus far been known as a furious fighter for women’s rights, offered for Radhakrishnan’s act of adding insult to the gang-rape
victim’s injury.
What is more appalling with regard to the gang-rape scandal is the alleged refusal by Marxist Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, who is desperately trying to project himself as an anti-corruption crusader and a moral warrior, to take action, when the matter was brought to his notice in the form of a complaint sent to him by the victim herself by registered post last August.
Again, according to young Congress legislator Anil Akkara, under whose constituency the Wadakanchery municipality falls, a fellow councilor of Jayanthan from his own party, had held discussions with a CPI(M) Minister at the State Assembly complex after the scandal erupted.
That the Siddique affair, the Hussain case and the gang-rape scandal had erupted just days after party’s central committee member EP Jayarajan was forced to resign as Industries Minister, after it was proved that he had made several nepotistic appointments in State PSUs, including that of the son of another central committee member PK Sreemathy, his sister-in-law should have prompted the Marxist Chief Minister to be more uncompromising in his approach to these issues. But that is not what he or the party leadership sitting at AKG Centre, the State headquarters in Thiruvananthapuram, chose to think.
“It all proves that the rot is not local. The party’s bosses are well aware of the slush and slime filling within the CPI(M). The fact is that the CPI(M) just can’t weed these elements out because the party itself had nurtured them in its race to capture power and to establish its hegemony — both physically and politically — over adversaries and as part of its internal war,” says senior journalist PVS Warrier.
Obviously, Siddique, Hussain or Jayanthan and two of his fellow Marxist councilors in Wadakanchery, accused of running stone quarries and realty and illegal loan businesses, are in no way communist comrades by the leninist yardstick. Also, they are not the only such elements in Kerala’s Marxist party. Political analysts vouch that the influence such elements command in the party proves the moral and political degeneration into which the State CPI(M) has fallen since the pro-capitalist neo-liberalist faction, headed by Chief Minister Pinarayi, took the reins of the party into its hands with the State conference in Malappuram in 2005 by cutting to size the group of traditionalists led by veteran vs VS Achuthanandan. According to sociologists like BS Panicker from Kochi, it is not easy for the Kerala CPI(M) to come out of this pit anytime in near future. “There is no corrective force in the CPI(M) anymore. Its destiny seems to be to continue with this decadence and die an eventual death or to evolve into another Congress party, a process akin to which seems to be already on,” says Panicker.
The other side of the Marxist folly in the State is the brutality of its physical battle for survival as being witnessed in Kannur, described often as Kerala’s Marxist heartland, where it is in perpetual war against almost all other political parties, particularly the BJP and RSS. Siddique and Hussain are pointers to how criminality has become inevitable for the Marxists while Jayanthan is a symbol of the decadence into which they have fallen due to the financial compulsions for political survival. The dangerous corollary of this criminalisation and decadence is that the party alone is not the victim as far as it is ruling over 33 million people of Kerala.
(The writer is Senior Editor,The Pioneer)