Average age of India’s population should reflect in CPI(M): Yechury in Bengal

The median age of the nation’s population, which is around 28 years, should reflect in the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or else it will not be able to counter its political opponents, the party’s general secretary, Sitaram Yechury, told members of the West Bengal state committee at a closed-door meeting on Thursday.

The two-day meeting, which started on Thursday and continued till late evening, has been convened to review the organizational weaknesses of the CPI (M) in Bengal where, for the first time since 1946, it failed to win a single assembly seat in the March-April polls. Several members of the CPI(M) central committee are more than 75 years old. Prominent among them are Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan, 76, Bengal Left Front chairman Biman Bose, 81, and prominent Kerala leader S Ramachandran Pillai, 83.

Yechury made the statement days after CPI(M) central committee members from across the nation raised a proposal during a three-day virtual meet that no member aged above 75 should stay in the body. The central committee is the party’s highest decision making platform. The proposal will be placed for adoption at the CPI(M)’s 23rd party Congress to be held in Kerala in April 2023.

Bengal state committee members who attended Thursday’s session told HT on condition of anonymity that Yechury, who spoke for almost one hour, was bitterly critical of the state unit’s failure.

“While focusing on several organizational issues, he said the party cannot counter its opponents, especially the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), if the median age of the nation’s population does not reflect in the rank and file. He said fixing a quota for youth in party units will yield no result unless they are given responsibility and leadership roles,” said a state committee member.

“The party earlier decided that 20% positions in all units should be reserved for leaders aged up to 30 years. Yechury emphatically said that these leaders should be made part of the CPI(M)’s policy making process,” said a second state committee member.

In the recent assembly polls, the BJP bagged 77 seats against 213 won by the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC). State and district leaders of both these parties are comparatively younger than their counterparts in the CPI(M).

Before the 2018 panchayat polls, the CPI(M) tried to overhaul its organisation across all 23 districts of Bengal. It replaced more than 60% leaders aged between 60 and 80. Some prominent former ministers and local heavyweights were replaced with people who were in their 40s and 50s. As many as seven district committees, including the one in Kolkata, got new secretaries.

In a bid to streamline the party structure, the CPI(M) also completely did away with the zonal committees in 2018.

The CPI(M) earlier divided every district into several zones and each zone had a committee that was answerable to the district committee, the top body in a district that reports directly to the state committee headed by the state secretary. The zonal committees used to supervise the performance of area committees. The area committees monitored branch committees which are the party’s organizational set up at the lowest level.

CPI(M) leaders said on Thursday that the shakeup did not yield any result in the panchayat, Lok Sabha and assembly polls although more than 300 younger people were inducted in branch and area committees in 2018. Organisational elections will be held again the coming months.

In 1953, when Jyoti Basu became the Bengal state secretary of the undivided Communist Party of India, he was only 39. Majority of the frontline leaders were his contemporaries while many of the foot soldiers were youngsters from college, party leaders said.

In 2015, four years after the CPI-M and its Left Front partners were voted out of power, the Marxists had little presence among the youth and most of their leaders in the cities and districts were aged between 60 and 80, the CPI(M) said in its internal report presented at the crucial organizational plenum. It was held in Kolkata in December 2015.

A portion of the plenum report said the Telangana unit of the CPI(M) had the highest number of young members, while in Bengal only 13.5 % members were less than 31 years old. Even in Tripura, where the party was defeated by the BJP in 2018, this age group accounted for only 18.3 % members in 2015.