A regimented party like CPI(M) has its own ways of working. The party’s central committee is likely to turn down the politburo’s majority opinion on general secretary Sitaram Yechuri’s Rajya Sabha nomination. The issue will come up at the coming central committee meeting beginning on July 17. The controversy over the line came to the surface when secular parties wanted Jyoti Basu to be Prime Minister in 1996. It later manifested itself during breaking up the alliance with the Congress government on the Indo-US nuclear deal in 2004. The party’s political tactical line of equidistance with the Congress and the BJP has been called in question. The situation has changed with the BJP sweep all over India. The case against Yechuri’s nomination is clear. First, no CPI(M) general secretary had held a post in the Rajya Sabha before Yechuri who has already completed two terms in the Upper House. The party has to make an exception for him to give him the ticket for the third time. He has to bank on the support of forty four Congress MP’s to get the minimum forty two first preference votes to make it to the upper house.
Bengal’s CPI(M) brigade – Surya Kanta Mishra, Biman Bose and Md. Salim are for Sitaram Yechuri’s nomination. The Bengal party is aware that it cannot survive in the state fighting a solo battle. It had an alliance with the Congress in the 2016 assembly elections. But the central leadership had declared that it was not in consonance with the party line. A historian like Irfan Habib supports the alliance to fight the BJP and so does former general secretary Prakash Karat. It has also been suggested that there can be tacit support to the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal to resist the BJP inroads into the state.
