Curiously, a “praise” for CPI-M general secretary Sitaram Yechury, that he’s a “two-in-one” general secretary of both the CPI-M and the Congress Party, has come from senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh. He’s not wide off the mark. Yechury has often presented himself as the mouthpiece for the Congress as equally as he presented his own party’s arguments. This was so in his public pronouncements as well as in his parliamentary engagements in the Rajya Sabha. He had no luck to be an elected member of the people in Parliament, meaning a presence in the Lok Sabha. A Telugu, his field of political activity all along was Delhi. The party could never establish itself as a force in the national capital also as its leaders’ obsessions had always been to be part of the Delhi elite rather than going down to the grassroots. Arvind Kejriwal, raising the voice of the poor, smiled his way to be the chief minister of Delhi state right under the nose of the Communist leaders. For the likes of Yechury, the Congress suited them best because it was ideologically impossible for the Left to ally with the BJP. The Congress is neither left nor right, but both.
It must be noted that the Communists had a love-hate relationship with the Congress. In 1959, the first elected government of EMS Namboodiripad in Kerala was overthrown by the Nehru government at the Centre at the behest of then Congress president Indira Gandhi. Namboodiripad and the CPIM nursed a grudge against the Congress all through his life till the 1990s. At the same time, the CPI of SA Dange had sided with the Congress and shared power in Kerala for a few terms there and the two cooperated in Parliament for several years. In recent decades, the CPI and the CPIM are together under the Left banner, as they realized they could not make any mark at the national level by standing apart. Yet, they were not willing to re-unite into one Communist party. The Left fought the Congress in West Bengal and Kerala almost always and in a recent election the two joined hands to tackle the TMC in West Bengal. All through the terms of Sitaram Yechury as general secretary of the CPIM, he made it a point to adopt the Congress Party ideology as his own party’s. Many suspected that he was the informal adviser to Sonia Gandhi in taking decisions for the Congress. The result is the CPI-M has lost its identity except in Kerala, thanks mainly to Yechury.
