CPI-M announces new 80-member West Bengal committee, Md Salim named state Secretary for second term

The CPI-M, at the conclusion of its 27th state conference on Tuesday, announced the new 80-member state committee in West Bengal with Politburo member Md Salim unanimously re-elected state Secretary for a second term.

The 80-member state committee includes 14 women. A total of 11 new faces were inducted into the committee.

The interesting factor was that the present West Midnapore district secretary and former heavyweight minister Sushanta Ghosh was not just removed from his post but also dropped from the state committee altogether.

Speculations were rife about the fate of Ghosh for quite some time after a complaint against him was filed with the party by a local woman. After the complaint was received, the party leadership asked Ghosh not to participate in any party-related activity for the time being.

However, he was not dropped from the state committee, and the leadership instead decided to wait till the state conference to take that decision. Finally, as the list of members of the newly appointed state committee was released on Tuesday afternoon, Ghosh’s name was not there.

Besides Ghosh, two veteran party leaders, namely Ashok Bhattacharya and Jibesh Sarkar, were also dropped from the party because of their age. Bhattacharya was the Municipal Affairs & Urban Development minister in the erstwhile Left Front regime.

Party’s Rajya Sabha member and senior Calcutta High Court advocate, Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, was also dropped from the state committee on age grounds.

Although expected, no one from the youth and student wings from the party was included in the new state committee. Political observers feel that since the new state committee will be leading the party for the crucial West Bengal Assembly elections in 2026, in all probability the leadership refrained from much of the revolutionary experiments in the selection of the new committee.

The present committee met for the last time on Tuesday morning and finally, at the end of the conference, the new state committee was announced.

Ahead of the announcement, a party Central Committee member had said that the "effort will be to make a perfect combination of ‘experienced organisation individuals’ and ‘fresh blood’. At the same time preference will be given to constitute the new committee with those who will not just lead the grassroots level party workers from the forefront but also take responsibility for disasters".

Political observers feel that the new state committee will have to be ready for both eventualities, the first of which is to contest alone in 2026 and the second being the continuing alliance with Congress in West Bengal that started since the 2016 Assembly elections.

A decision on the matter is likely at the Party Congress scheduled at Madurai in Tamil Nadu in April. However, there are already indications that the party’s central leadership will opt for the first option of contesting alone as indicated in the draft resolution for the forthcoming party meeting.

In that draft resolution, which was released in Delhi earlier this month, the party leadership had focused more on an independent political line in the coming days rather than on electoral understanding.

"The party should pay more attention to the independent political campaign and mass mobilisation around the political platform of the party. There should be no blurring of our independent identity or diminishing of our independent activities in the name of electoral understanding or alliances," the excerpts of the draft political resolution, a copy of which is available with IANS read.

As regards maintaining the independent line, the draft resolution had cautiously touched upon the two states of Tripura and West Bengal, where the CPI-M-led Left Front had electoral understanding and seat-sharing arrangements in the past elections.