A full-house party meeting to discuss the CPM’s drubbing at
the hands of Mamata Banerjee in Bengal and party boss Prakash Karat’s
flirtation with the Third Front saw comrades openly express a lack of
confidence in the leadership on Thursday.
Members at the state committee meeting, attended by Karat, also asked whether
CM Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had a plan to halt the Trinamool upsurge that in
recent weeks seen CPM supporters defect and clashes erupt as Mamata’s men begin
to push for greater turf control.
Bhattacharjee bore it all sitting beside Karat who came in for criticism for
his Third Front misadventure. The majority state committee members held him
responsible for the gamble, while some from North 24-Parganas felt that the
leadership went wrong in timing the withdrawal of support from the UPA
government over the Indo-US nuclear deal.
But what reverberated through the first day of the two-day meet was the lack of
confidence in the leadership with state committee members groping for a route
to make up for the electoral reverses before the 2011 Assembly elections. The
focal point of this disgust was the state government’s failure to protect the
CPM men under attack in districts.