By IANS
Thiruvananthapuram : The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) Saturday began branch committee meetings across Kerala. The month-long exercise is expected to show which of the two factions in the state has the upper hand.
The Kerala unit of CPI-M, which leads the state’s ruling Left Democratic Front (LDF), is deeply divided between the camps led by Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan and state party secretary Pinarayi Vijayan, with the latter enjoying a huge majority in the party’s 81-member state committee.
With the rival factions already at war with each other, it remains to be seen how far they would heed general secretary Prakash Karat’s warning that factionalism will not be tolerated in the party’s Kerala unit and the central leadership will intervene in case of any infighting.
The branch level committee is the lowest level in the party organisation. There are 26,000 branches of the party in the state and they will complete their meetings by the end of this month.
October will see the local committee meetings followed by the area committee meet, which concludes in November.
The district committee meetings will be taken up in December and January, leading to the state party Congress at Kottayam in the second week of February.
At all levels, the Achuthanandan faction is certain to rake up two corruption scandals that rocked party mouthpiece Deshabhimani, as both involve close aides of Vijayan.
One of the cases relates to state central committee member E.P. Jayarajan, whom Karat has sacked for accepting a Rs.20 million deposit on behalf of the newspaper from a lottery vendor.
In another case of alleged bribery, the party has expelled a deputy general manager of Deshabhimani from the party, who is also a close aide of Vijayan.