Will a “disappointed” West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee attend the CPI(M) central committee meeting slated to be held from July 21 to 23 in New Delhi?
This question is doing the round in party circles after Mr Bhattacharjee was chided by the Prakash Karat lobby “for some specific reasons” in the last politburo meet. Mr Bhattacharjee who had left the meet in a huff, has expressed his reluctance to state party secretary Biman Bose to attend the central committee meeting which will deliberate over the line of contour to be adopted in the extended central committee meeting to be held in August. The chief minister’s office (CMO) sources also confirmed that Mr Bhattacharjee has no programme to visit New Delhi this July.
Sources at CPI(M) revealed, Mr Bhattacharjee has become a bit disappointed with the party central committee in general and party secretary Mr Karat in particular mainly for two reasons. First, Mr Bhattacharjee is upset due to Mr Karat’s cryptic message to the state party that it does not need any great insight into dialectical materialism to conclude that the defeat was caused due to the “mistakes” the state government made in its land acquisition policy. Mr Karat had reiterated his “state-related reasons” theory in presence of the state party mandarins in his recent Promode Dasgupta Memorial lecture in the city.
Secondly, the party’s central leadership has adopted an aggressive anti-Congress line while Mr Bhattacharjee still believes that the Congress is a lesser enemy compared to the BJP.
This “tactical line of anti-pathy” towards the Congress by the party central committee is what Mr Bhattacharjee felt “was a deviation from the political line adopted by the 1998 Coimbatore party congress.” Significantly, the 1998 congress had advocated defeating the “communal forces” while standing by the Congress.