A 'Young Turk' quits, disquiet within CPI(M) in West Bengal over alliance comes to fore

The resignation of one of the ‘Young Turks’ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in West Bengal on Monday brought to the fore the crises within the party, which ruled the state for 34 years, voted out of power in 2011, but was left with no seat in the state assembly in the last election since 2021.

Pratik ur Rahaman, a member of the state committee of the CPI(M), resigned from all posts as well as the primary membership of the party. “I am of late finding it difficult to align myself with the thoughts and works of the district and the state leadership of the party on quite a few issues,” Rahaman wrote to the CPI(M) state secretary, Mohammed Selim, in a letter. The letter got leaked on social media.

Rahaman, one of the young faces the CPI(M) relied on for its revival in West Bengal, declined to speak to media persons, terming his resignation as “an internal matter” of the party. Selim, too, told journalists that it would be discussed within the party.

A disquiet within the CPI(M) in West Bengal started after Selim had a meeting with Humayun Kabir, a member of the legislative assembly, whom Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s party recently suspended for making controversial comments with communal overtones and for planning to rebuild the ‘Babri Mosque’ in Murshidabad in West Bengal. The meeting fueled speculation about an alliance between the CPI(M) and the Janata Unnayan Party (JUP), a new political outfit floated by the former Trinamool Congress leader, for the forthcoming assembly elections.

The CPI(M)’s move to ally with Humayun Kabir’s party not only drew flak from the TMC but also raised questions within the communist party itself. Shatarup Ghosh, another ‘Young Turk’ of the party, however, publicly said that it was not the responsibility of the CPI(M) only to stick to morality, principles and ideology in politics. Ghosh also said that the CPI(M) would do whatever it should do to oust the TMC from power. Sources within the CPI(M) said that Rahaman was among the party’s leaders who were opposed to the party’s move to ally with Kabir. He recently posted on social media that one could not remain a member of the communist party without principles and ideology. His post was perceived by many as a riposte to Ghosh.

The TMC, led by Mamata Banerjee, had defeated the CPI(M)-led Left Front in the 2011 West Bengal assembly elections, ending the 34-year-long rule of the leftist parties in the state. An agitation against the Left Front government’s move to acquire agricultural land to set up industrial units in Nandigram and Singur had catapulted the TMC to power in 2011.

The TMC then retained power in the 2016 and 2021 elections, too.

The CPI(M) and its allies over the past 14 years failed to regain the political space it lost to the TMC. The party at present has neither any MLA in West Bengal, nor any MP in the Lok Sabha from West Bengal.

The CPI (M)’s vote percentage too nosedived from 33.1 per cent in 2009 to 6.3 per cent in 2019 and to 5.7 per cent in 2024, when the party failed to win any Lok Sabha seat from the state.