After successfully setting an electoral lifeline by breaking the 40-year-old tradition of switching parties every five years, the CPI(M) is consciously giving a facelift to the party apparatus in Kerala.
The ongoing party meetings at the grass roots level reveal that more youth, especially women are joining the ranks of leadership. Currently, the branch and local committee meetings have concluded in majority of the districts, while area committee conferences have commenced in others.
The election of 19-year-old S. Subhalakshmi and 21-year-old Jaseema Dasthakeer as branch secretaries of Vilakkuvettam in Punalur and Vayalikkada in Chathannur respectively has already brought the focus on the paradigm shift in the party. Hundreds of women occupy positions of branch secretaries and an increasing number of women have been elected local committee secretaries across the State.
Incidentally, a 94-year-old Narayana Pillai has been selected secretary of Ennakkad branch in Mannar when the party is experimenting to bring down the age limit.
Age limit
A proposal of the CPI(M) to put an age ceiling for its Central Committee members to 75 from 80 years has to be ratified by the party’s 23rd Congress, scheduled to be held in Kannur in April next year.
Party sources said that the process of replacing old faces had slowly started when the CPI(M) leadership decided to choose Pinarayi Vijayan as the Chief Minister over veteran leader V.S. Achuthanandan after the Left Democratic Front emerged victorious in 2016.
Now the withering away of factionalism that had earlier existed in the party at the State level has fortunately given the leadership the liberty to try out with the pragmatic approach.
The generational shift became more definitive and visible after the Assembly polls in 2021 although Mr. Vijayan drew flak for taking an arbitrary decision on the constitution of the Cabinet.
Today, the party has softened its stubborn hard-line position to accommodate the aspirations of the growing middle-class in the State. The business class, though temporarily feel perturbed about the gloomy economy, is not that unhappy. However the bureaucracy remains untamed, the sources said.
Bengal experience
The resolve for change, party functionaries said, began by drawing lessons from the collapse of the CPI(M) unit in West Bengal.
That senior leaders controlled all echelons of the party with a mishmash of outdated ideas was the living evidence that the Left Front, that uninterruptedly ruled the State for 34 years from 1977 to 2011, failed to win even a single seat in the West Bengal Assembly polls of 2021.
While the CPI(M) is going through an interim period without factionalism, the leadership cannot ignore the emerging caste equations within the organisational structure in future.
Nevertheless it will also have to take on the Congress which has become hostile and aggressive after K. Sudhakaran took charge as the KPCC president, sources said.
