Sitaram Yechury rules out any pre-poll national opposition alliance

New Delhi: The so-called opposition unity of all and sundry in the name of anti-BJP forces has come a cropper before it started.

CPIM general secretary Sitaram Yechury said on Friday (April 8) that there would not be any all-India front or alliance before the general elections in 2024. “Alliances would emerge only after elections,” he said.

“In every state the broadest effort would be to maximise the pooling of anti-BJP votes. Depending on the complex situation in each state, effort would be made for the broadest possible mobilisation of secular votes,” he said, virtually admitting the helplessness of the opposition camp.

The CPI-M’s politics, too, has suffered the lack of credibility factor owing to its varying equations with parties like Trinamool Congress in West Bengal and with the Congress in Kerala and other states. Going soft towards Mamata Banerjee’s outfit in the 2021 assembly polls in West Bengal had resulted in a bitter culmination that today the Left parties as a whole do not have any state legislators.

The Bengal assembly has become ‘Communist-mukt’.

Similarly, in Kerala, Congress and CPI-M led Left Front have been bitter rivals for decades, but in an utter display of political hypocrisy, the Congress and Left parties strike a deal at the national level and also in other states. Hence, Yechury’s remarks have a special significance of their own.

After two days of discussions on the political resolution at Kannur in Kerala, the CPI-M top leaders also decided to take the CPM-led Kerala government’s policies to the rest of the country as an alternative “model”.

This also makes it clear that the Kerala unit of CPI-M has gained the upper hand in the Marxists’ party.

The CPI-M earlier ruled supreme in Bengal and Tripura, but it lost power in Bengal in 2011 and Tripura in 2018.

The CPM’s Party Congress approved a political resolution that called for fighting the BJP but without a national-level alliance with Congress.

The resolution, however, gives its nod to state-level alliances with different parties.