The Hindu : National : Jolt for Achuthanandan camp at meet

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Wednesday, Feb 23, 2005

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National

Jolt for Achuthanandan camp at meet

By Our Special Correspondent

V.S. Achuthanandan

MALAPPURAM, FEB. 22. The CPI(M) Polit Bureau member and Leader of the Opposition in the Kerala Assembly, V.S. Achuthanandan, suffered a major set back in his party when all the 12 persons fielded by him for election to the State committee were defeated at the 18th State CPI(M) conference here today.

The 545 delegates to the conference endorsed the official panel placed before them by the outgoing State committee and rejected the 12 names put forward by the Achuthanandan camp in defiance of the party national leadership's appeal for unity.

They also unanimously re-elected Pinarayi Vijayan as the State secretary of the party. The CPI(M) Polit Bureau member, Seetharam Yechuri, was the returning officer. Mr.Vijayan's name was proposed by the LDF convener, Paloli Mohammedkutty, and seconded by the former Finance Minister, T. Sivadasa Menon.

The conference also elected a 170-member delegation to the 18th party congress to be held in New Delhi in April and a five-member State Party Control Commission headed by C.P.Balan Vaidyar. The other members of the Control Commission are P.P. Vasudevan, Baby John, P.K. Harikumar and C. Jayan Babu.

The new entrants to the CPI(M) State committee are M.M. Lawrence, who was ousted from the party's central committee in 1998, C.S. Sujatha, MP, the party's Alappuzha Kottayam and Thrissur district secretaries, G. Sudhakaran, K.J. Thomas and P.R. Rajan, the KSKTU leader, V. Raghavan and the Associate Editor of the Deshambhimani, P. Rajiv.

The persons who contested unsuccessfully on behalf of the Achuthandan faction were K.V. Devadas, K.F. Davis, K.C. Rajagopal, T. Chathu, the CITU leaders, K.O. Habeeb, and N. Padmalochanan, A. Pradeep Kumar, the former DYFI State president, T. Sasidharan, E.V. Krishnan, C.V. Ouseph, O.G. Madhanan and D. Rajappan Nair.

Pinarayi Vijayan

E. Balanandan chaired the first meeting of the newly-elected State committee.

The State conference decided to peg the size of the new State committee at 76 against the sanctioned size of 80. The outgoing committee had only 78 members at the time of its formation. It came down to 69 at the start of this conference.

Mr. Achuthanandan mounted a strong attack against the party's state leadership accusing it of having gone soft on the "Fourth World Theory" and foreign funding of research and development activities. Mr. Achuthanandan and his supporters particularly criticised the People's Plan campaign. They accused the campaign of having accepted the apolitical part of development prescribed by the World Bank.

They had also forced the CPI(M) leadership to throw out M.P. Pameswaran, one of the founders of the Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad and the former Kerala University Vice-Chancellor, B. Ekbal.

During the run-up to the State conference, Mr. Achuthanandan and his allies, the pro-CITU wing in the party, mounted a scathing attack on T.M. Thomas Issac, former State Planning Board member for his role in the implementation of the plan campaign. Besides Dr. Issac, the CPI(M) Central committee member M.A. Baby, were also targeted.

The faction led by Mr. Vijayan was prepared to exclude P. Sasi, political secretary to the former Chief Minister, E.K. Nayanar from the new State committee, but the Achuthanandan faction insisted on the exclusion of Dr. Issac as well and this saw the two sides going in for a no-holds-barred show down, which ended in a severe set back to Mr. Achuthanandan.

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