Probable candidates for the general secretary's post are Mohammed Salim, MA Baby, Ashok Dhawale, and BV Raghavulu.
Published Apr 03, 2025 | 9:00 AM ⚊ Updated Apr 03, 2025 | 9:00 AM
Inaugural session of the CPI(M)'s 24th party congress in Madurai on Wednesday, 2 April. (X)
Synopsis: The 24th party congress of the CPI(M) began in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, on Wednesday, 2 April. With the party having an age ceiling for its leaders, the question of who would succeed the late Sitaram Yechury as the national general secretary will be answered soon.
With the leading Left parties in India going to their national conferences, much is at stake for both CPI(M) and CPI.
The CPI(M) constitution says the leadership should opt for voluntary retirement on attaining the age of 75.
Let’s look at the Navaratnas, as CPI(M) reveres its foundational team of nine-member Polit Bureau who started the CPI(M).
Harkishan Singh Surjeet served the party till the age of 92 though he retired as general secretary on turning 89. Though he was 89, he could steer the opposition boat back to power in the 2004 elections with the highest strength ever of his party and the Left. He thus stood as a leader to reckon with in Indian politics.
Another nonagenarian who served the CPI(M) for long was Jyoti Basu, who served till the age of 96. He was a polit bureau member till the age of 94.
But from the overall experience, it was felt necessary to pass on the mantle to younger people. Hence the CPI(M) amended its constitution and fixed 75 years as the age limit to be in the party central committee, the highest decision-making body.
Going by this constitutional amendment, the seven polit bureau members who will vacate their positions at the 24th party congress that began in Madurai on Wednesday, 2 April, are Pinarayi Vijayan (81 years), Brinda Karat (77 years 5 months), Subhashini Ali (77 years 3 months), Prakash Karat (77 years 2 months), Manik Sarkar (76 years 2 months), Suryakant Mishra (76 years), and G Ramakrishnan (75 years, 10 months).
Going by the developments in the party, BV Raghavulu, representing both Telugu states in the polit bureau is also supposed to take voluntary retirement as he had already filed his resignation to the party central committee in 2022 itself.
Raghavulu’s It is a curious case. There were allegations about his highhandedness and resorting to factionalism in the Andhra Pradesh conference held in 2021. As it appeared from media reports, the polit bureau was arm twisted not to accept his resignation and this gave him a breather.
If Raghavulu is standing by his own words, he might also be relieved from the polit bureau.
With such a large number of polit bureau members getting relieved, the challenge before the party now is two-fold: They can re-amend the party constitution which was initially piloted by Prakash Karat in 2015 and remove the age limit, allowing the seniors, either Prakash or Brinda, to take up the mantle.
Mathrubhumi reported that in the recently concluded central committee meeting, it was reported that leaders like Arun Kumar and some others batted for the removal of the age limit. But this was rejected by the central committee, including Prakash Karat.
As this option is ruled out for now, the next available option is to choose the next general secretary from among the lot called resident polit bureau members. The question of seniority knocks the door again in a different context.
The probable candidates for the general secretaryship in the upcoming CPI(M) conference at Madurai are Mohammed Salim, MA Baby, Ashok Dhawale, and Raghavulu, provided he won’t stick to his resignation.
Let us look at their respective abilities to hold that position. Of the four, Baby is the only one who does not have any experience of leading the party at the state level. Raghavulu headed the party in undivided Andhra Pradesh from 1997 to 2014. He might be the single-longest-serving
secretary in the state.
He is followed by Dhawale who steered Maharashtra from 2005 to 2015 till he was asked to shift to Delhi. Salim is in charge and has been fighting for the revival of the party in West Bengal since 2022.
The Kerala media is abuzz about why Baby and A Vijayaragavan have been moved to the center.
Though Baby served as a national level student and youth leader, the party’s Kerala unit did not appoint him as the head of any district or the state unit. Even when the then-state secretary — Kodiyeri Balakrishnan — went on medical leave, Vijayaraghavan, much junior to Baby, was asked to lead the Kerala unit as interim secretary. This indicates that Baby is incapable of holding the organisational strings together; nor is he a fiery field worker.
Though he has been part of the All India leadership for long, an able English speaker, and calls himself a cultural theoretician, his ideological contributions to the party and interventions are next to none. The same is the case with Raghavulu.
Moreover, both were constantly at odds with the late Sitaram Yechury. The antagonist sectarian approach of Raghavulu was such that even after Yechury became general secretary, he was never asked to attend the important Andhra state committee meetings.
At the same time, the party in the state could not progress by even an inch since 2008. The
local body representation and assembly representation in both the Telugu states has become zero since long.
On top of it, despite Pavan Kalyan publicly admitting his training and indebtedness to the RSS, Raghavulu forced the Andhra Pradesh state committee to have a tie-up with him in the
2019 assembly elections, against the majority assessment.
Such tactical blunders are more in number than with any other aspirant for the post of party general secretary.
The last option is Dhawale. Though his stint as a polit bureau member is very short or for that matter, his image as a pan-India leader is only around 10 years old, he has been in the central committee for over 25 years. He has also made significant contributions to the party.
When the party’s graph was on a downslide, he and other Kisan leaders in Maharashtra chalked out a programme for the historic farmers’ long march from Nasik to Mumbai.
Maharashtra also has the historical legacy of the Warli tribal peasants’ struggle, like Andhra Pradesh’s Telangana armed struggle. But the difference is that the party in Maharashtra has glued its bases together even today, unlike in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
Even contesting on its own, the party’s Lok Sabha candidates in Maharashtra can garner over one lakh votes and win one or two assembly seats as is evident from Election Commission data.
Dhawale along with the team at the All India Kisan Sabha headed by veteran parliamentarian Hannan Mollah successfully became a leading part of the one-year-long united political farmers struggle which forced Modi to repeal the Farm Laws and apologise to the nation.
In all probability Dhawale should stand a better chance provided the party’s top brass does
not succumb to the traditional Bengal vs Kerala binary. Now the question before the party congress is whether to crown the performers or the followers.
(The writer is a lawyer, and cultural critic. He was previously associated with the CPI(M). Views expressed here are personal. Edited by Majnu Babu).
