Pinarayi gets VS acolyte demoted

NEW DELHI: Former deputy leader of CPM in the Lok Sabha, and a member of the Kerala state committee of the party, N N Krishna Das, MP, was on Sunday demoted to the Palakkad area committee for carrying out a sting operation on fellow comrade and state power minister A K Balan.

The state committee which met in Thiruvananthapuram to discuss the report of the CPM probe panel’s report on the raging factional feud in the party, agreed with the state secretariat’s recommendation for demoting MP. Mr Das, a former national president of CPM’s youth wing, DYFI, is the chairman of Parliament’s Standing Committee on Subordinate Legislations.

Mr Das, who belongs to the faction loyal to CM VS Achuthanandan is accused of tapping the phone of the minister, a confidante of CPM state general secretary Pinarayi Vijayan. Mr Das, the probe panel had said, did the sting operation with the help of a BSNL employee. Mr Das later passed on the tapes to the party leadership.

The dominant Pinarayi faction has been insisting on serious disciplinary action against the party MP. But the chief minister’s loyalists have been maintaining that the party MP had merely attempted to bring to focus involvement of senior party leaders in factional politics.

The feud in the state unit has been a cause of worry for the central leadership. Senior leaders like Prakash Karat have been making frequent trips to Kerala to quell trouble in the state unit. A recent organisation report prepared by the central leadership even blamed the factionalism responsible for the rising drop out rate of party membership.

Factionalism is not new to the state unit. Even when EMS was in control, leaders close to him routinely used their proximity with him to target their rivals. The lobby close to EMS was successful in denying the chief minister’s post to veteran party leader K R Gowri.

In the run up to the last assembly election, too, the Pinarayi group tried to deny V S Achuthandan’s claim to lead the legislature group. It was after the central unit’s intervention that the Pinarayi group backed out.