CPI(M) blames Lok Sabha polls loss on external factors

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) has blamed all but itself for its disastrous Lok Sabha election performance in the party’s first comprehensive review of the 2019 Lok Sabha election. The party has now asked for another review—to be conducted over three months—on how the tasks cut out in its 2015 plenum have been implemented.

In the three day-long meeting of the Central Committee that ended on Sunday, the party leaders talked about Congress chief Rahul Gandhi’s candidature from Wayanad, Sabarimala temple controversy, media’s role, Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee’s style of politics, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s outreach and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s money power among the factors that swung the Left’s voters away.

“In Kerala and Tripura, our slogan was to defeat the BJP. But our voters felt that only the Congress can do so. As Rahul Gandhi went to Wayanad, thousands of demoralised Congress workers in Kerala got charged up,” said a senior leader of the CPI(M).

For West Bengal, the comrades discussed how, in the last nine years, the party became dysfunctional. “As many as 84,000 false cases have been slapped against workers by the TMC government. Our people got killed, we didn’t get places to meet but Banerjee allowed the RSS to work,” said another member of the Central Committee.

Bengal leaders also blamed the media for playing up the “Trinamool-BJP binary”. According to party insiders, many leaders said media reports hardly mentioned the CPI(M). It affected a large number of party supporters who shifted to the BJP to teach the Trinamool a lesson.

In the recent Lok Sabha polls, the Left parties reached its lowest ever tally of six MPs—a pale shadow of their best performance of 61 in 2004. In its former citadel of Bengal, the CPI(M) drew a blank and won just one seat in Kerala, a state it is in power.

The meeting also saw fireworks as some leaders of Kerala and Tripura tried to blame party general secretary Sitaram Yechury for giving an impression in the run-up to the polls that the party will support a Congress-led government. This positioning shifted votes to the Congress. Yechury, however, turned the tables and said the Kerala government’s handling of the Sabarimala issue led to erosion of the Left votes.

First Published: Jun 10, 2019 10:35 IST