Deputy Speaker of the Lok Sabha and AIADMK leader Dr.M.Thambidurai has made a very sharp comment on national parties as if they do not mean anything at all in Tamil Nadu. ”The national parties can compete only with NOTA (None of the Above mentioned in the ballot paper),” he has acerbically observed. He has also said that it was in Tamil Nadu that the Grand Old Party of India - the Congress- was dethroned first.
Deputy Speaker of the Lok Sabha and AIADMK leader Dr.M.Thambidurai has made a very sharp comment on national parties as if they do not mean anything at all in Tamil Nadu. ”The national parties can compete only with NOTA (None of the Above mentioned in the ballot paper),” he has acerbically observed. He has also said that it was in Tamil Nadu that the Grand Old Party of India - the Congress- was dethroned first.
While he may be right in his first observation regarding the relevance of national parties in Tamil Nadu, with an emaciated Congress and a fledgling BJP, he is factually incorrect to say that it was only in Tamil Nadu an opposition party first formed a Government. The first party to claim that distinction was Communist Party of India and it was E.M.S.Namboodiripad, one of the tallest leaders of the communist movement who formed the Government in Kerala in April 1957. And Communist Party of India is the oldest party in the country, next only to the Congress.
The first Communist Ministry under E.M.S in Kerala was dismissed by the Nehru Government on 31st July 1959. As every body, including Congress leaders, will admit now, it was a clear case of murder of democracy.
It’s been 97 years since the formation of the Communist Party of India (CPI). Today, there are many communist parties in India and most of these parties don’t have any footprints in electoral politics. Most of these parties were formed out of splits from another party. A question arises here - have the splits in the communist parties weakened the communist movement in India?
At the time of the formation of the CPI , two prominent leaders in the party were MN Roy and Abani Mukherji. They started out as friends but soon became bitter enemies. So, the incident of splitting in the communist parties had already started back in that era.
The first major split came in 1964 when the CPI split into two factions - the Communist Party of India and Communist Party of India (Marxist). The differences between the leadership intensified at the time of the Sino-Indian war. There were mainly two groups in the party - leftist and rightist. Some of the leftist leaders were AK Gopalan, P Sundarayya, M Basavapunnaiah, Jyoti Basu, BT Ranadive, while SA Dange, C Achuta Menon, MN Govindan Nair, and Raj Sekhar Reddy were on the right side.
The tussle between these two groups took place at every point, from Rajya Sabha elections to party membership. In 1964, the CPI split into two parties when 32 members walked out from its national council meeting.
The CPI(M) was formed at the seventh congress of the Communist Party of India held in Kolkata in 1964. The main reason for the split was the question regarding which political line the party should follow. The leftists took a pro-Chinese stand while the rightists were in favour of the Soviet Union line.
As a result of this split, the communist movement was damaged badly. Many supporters of the party took retirement. The two parties suffered the most in a number of States.
Tamil Nadu has given birth to a number of communist stalwarts like P.Ramamurti, P.Jeevandham, N.Sankariah, etc., Being a highly literate state with a large number of industries this should have been a fertile ground for the growth of communist movement. But it has only pockets of influence.
Communists have been hounded by the Congress Government in Tamil Nadu and a number of them have faced several trials and tribulations.
After the split in 1964, the Communist party contested the 1967 Assembly elections in the State as Communist Party of India (CPI) and Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI-M).
In the dozen assembly elections since then, both of them could not make much of a headway. The following tabular column shows how poorly these two parties have fared during the past 50 years.
Assembly Elections: Percentage of votes secured and number of seats
| Year | CPI | CPI-M |
| 1967 | 1.8 (2) | 4.07 (11) |
| 1971 | 2.32 (8) | 1.65 (Zero) |
| 1977 | 2.9 (5) | 2.8 (12) |
| 1980 | 2.7 (9) | 3.2 (11) |
| 1984 | 2.6 (2) | 2.8 (5) |
| 1989 | 1.2 (3) | 3.5 (15) |
| 1991 | 1.2 (1) | 3.2 (1) |
| 1996 | 2.12 (8) | 1.68 (1) |
| 2001 | 1.6 (5) | 1.7 (6) |
| 2006 | 1.6 (6) | 2.7 (9) |
| 2011 | 2 (9) | 2.4 (10) |
| 2016 | 0.79 (Zero) | 0.72 (Zero) |
(Source: Election Commission of India)
Though they are two groups born out of the CPI and they keep on talking about Left unity, there had hardly been any unity in their approach in Tamil Nadu initially.They used to be in opposite alliances on a number of occasions.While CPI is perceived to be close to Congress, CPI-M was with the DMK or the AIADMK.
Neither of these groups has touched even 4 % of votes and the number of seats secured depended upon the alliance in which they were accommodated. They have been riding piggyback on the regional parties in the past several elections.
Even new parties like the DMDK and the PMK, considered a castesist party, have overtaken the communist parties.For instance in 2011, DMDK secured 7.9% and the PMK 5.2%.In 2016, once again PMK secured 5.36%. Both the Communist parties have fared extraordinarily poorly in the latest elections , being partners in the 4-party People’s Welfare Front. Both the groups could not secure even one per cent of the votes and not even a single seat.
The first casualty due to the split and the internecine quarrels was ideology. Both the groups used to brand both the DMK and the AIADMK as bourgeois and corrupt but still join hands with either of them.Thus they lost their credibility, especially among the youth.
Once upon a time, it used to be said “once a Communist, always a Communist”. Probably that might be true of those in the 20th century.I very much doubt whether it holds good even now.
Many left leaders said that the communist movement was hugely affected by the 1964 split. There were some rumors about merger of the CPI and the CPI(M). The CPI’s general secretary Sudhakar Reddy firmly believes that it will be possible for the two communist parties to unite in the future. The merger of these two parties is the need of the hour because the causes for the split (in 1964) are irrelevant today. For reviving the communist movement in India, there should be a merger.
But the recent happenings in the Central Committee meeting of the CPI-M (wherein there are two camps at work-one led by Sitaram Yechury, current general secretary, and the other by Prakash Karat, former general secretary-in connection with the ‘political line” that should be taken with regard to the Congress) do not augur well .While the Bengal-line proposed by Yechury wants to have some “understanding” with the Congress (in spite of that being a neo-liberal party), the Kerala-line of Prakash Karat is totally opposed to it.Ironically both groups treat BJP as the main adversary.
The party congress might see a “Kurukshetra”, admits Yechury. How it is going to pan out, we don’t know.
There is a line in “The Communist Manifesto” that, “The communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties” but what has been happening is just the opposite.
Once Marx said, “Workers of the world, unite!” but here in India, what needs to happen can be summed up by, “Communist leaders (parties) in India, unite!”