M.A. Baby Points to 'False Perception' as CPI(M) Reviews Keralam Setback

Communist Party of India (Marxist) national general secretary M.A. Baby has said that a deliberate campaign to build a false perception against Left democratic forces played a significant part in the party's recent reverses in Keralam. He was speaking at the opening of a three-day extended State committee meeting on Sunday morning.

Mr. Baby acknowledged that the Left ought to have been quicker to respond to the way this narrative was constructed. The party, he said, should have exposed and defeated it but failed to do so, and there were other lapses as well. He called for correcting these mistakes, winning back public trust and moving forward.

According to Mr. Baby, regressive forces have long sought to defame Communist forces. He recalled the Liberation Struggle of 1958-59, an agitation backed by the Congress and other parties against the first democratically elected Communist government led by E.M.S. Namboodiripad, describing it as a movement directed against the progressive measures of the State.

He said such false perceptions had been built continuously since then. Although the Communist government was undemocratically dismissed by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1959, the vote share of the undivided Communist Party of India fell by four percentage points in the 1960 election, which he said showed how the party's policies had influenced people. The consolidation of anti-Left and right-wing forces, however, kept it out of power at the time.

Mr. Baby argued that a comparable situation unfolded in Keralam in 2026. Campaigns to create false perceptions against the CPI(M) and its leaders, he said, began after the party-led front returned to power in the 2021 Assembly polls. One such claim was that the party had reached an understanding with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party, an allegation that he said had influenced a large number of people. The party needed to examine where it had erred in countering such campaigns, he added.

He urged party cadre to engage in criticism of others as well as self-criticism, noting that most prominent leaders, including some currently at the helm, had undergone the party's rectification process, which he described as a time-tested method for corrective steps.

The conference is being held in the wake of electoral setbacks for the CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front in Keralam. The party's Central Committee had earlier brought out a review report on the election performance, and the State committee has prepared guidelines for cadre based on it. Participants, who include district secretariat members from across the State and leaders of class and mass organisations, discussed the document presented by M.V. Govindan on Sunday, with deliberations set to continue on Monday. Party sources said the State committee will prepare a further report based on the outcome of the discussions on September 15.

Senior leader Paloli Mohammed Kutty raised the party flag at the start of the meeting. At least nine Polit Bureau members, among them Mr. Baby, Mr. Govindan and Opposition leader Pinarayi Vijayan, are attending.