PRAGOTI

Any honest member of the party will only agree with the transgressions you have pointed out. Though there would be voices which would state that we ought not to weaken the only credible voice against imperialism in India, I believe and agree with you that such a shock therapy is necessary to shake the party system.

Could not be more correct. Well argued, to the point and leaves no loopholes. The Party must ponder upon this seriously if it does not want to make a mockery out of itself.

I wish these averments are taken seriously by the party. I also wish the party leadership does not view any criticism borne out of genuine difference is not again looked at from a preconceived prism of "deviation" from the party. Com.Bose joins i think many who are diappointed about the party though holding left dear to their heart.

Oh, come on Prasenjit! Suddenly you have found the inconsistency and hypocrisy in CPI (M) and still you have the audacity to quote the shames of Nandigram and Singur for the fall of CPI (M). Everybody knows that under your stewardship, SFI in JNU had lost its credibility despite pyrrhic electoral victories. The reasons were obvious to both insiders and observers. Don't try to be a saint, because you have a past which you can't erase.

Appreciate your decision. One thing I would like to point out. The practice of regional Bengali Chauvinistic politics is nothing new with the West Bengal state committee. One example is the slogan the CPI(M) coined during the early phase of Gorkhaland agitation - Chaer patai rakter dagh, Ghising chai Bangla bhag.

Dear Comrade Prasenjit Bose,

You and I are at two ends of the political spectrum but I hold you in high esteem. I have had the opportunity to debate issues with you in television studios and each time I was impressed by your knowledge, commitment and, if I may add, your sense of humour which is sadly absent in the Left. You and I have vehemently disagreed, but to your credit you have been decent and polite, qualities which have disappeared with the Bangali bhadralok.

The clarity with which you have contested the CPI(M) leadership's decision to support Mr Pranab Mukherjee in the coming presidential election is at once impressive and reflects the pain and the anguish you have had to go through. The rage, though restrained, is obvious. Good. That's the way it should be.

But Comrade, there really was no reason for you to wait all this while to register your protest against the various sins of omission and commission committed by the CPI(M) leadership. The rot set in long ago; the party lost its sheen much before that. I am sure you have been troubled by what you saw and heard all this while. Yet, the fact that you did not call out earlier does raise the question: Why now?

After all, the Polit Bureau's decision to support Mr Mukherjee in the presidential poll is a natural culmination of the party leadership's political philandering and ideological promiscuity. I do wish you had taken a stand much earlier than you have done.

Yours, etc.

Kanchan Gupta.
New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore.

Comrade Prasenjit, I am nearing 60 and have been in some way or other attached to the Party since my teens. Late last evening I went through your your letter of resignation. With utter anguish and shock, I must admit that the decision to support Pranab’s candidature betrays compromising the party’s ideology and programme. Tactically also it is likely to backfire soon. But, as I am told, the decision had not had a smooth sailing either in the PB op or in the CC. That goes to suggest that there are still opportunities to carry on struggles within the Party, and the opinion against such short-sighted pragmatic decisions of Buddhadeb variety may gradually snowball.
The Party and the left movement are passing through grave crisis. You are an important comrade of the party and working in an area where the Party is most vulnerable. I am sure after your long association with the party you won’t want its further decline. Here in West Bengal our task is far more difficult. We have to struggle with violent enemies outside and important ‘leaders’ like Buddhadeb Bhattacharyya, arrogant, with near-total lack of political acumen and dipped in neoliberal illusion, inside.
Considering all these I earnestly request you to reconsider your decision of resignation. I also intend to write an open letter to members of the PB in this regard.

I have never seen such an immature decision taken by any comrades who is leaving under the shadows of big veterans of communist movement. I am also against the party decision to support the parnab's candidature for presidency. But resignation of personjit on such an small issue shows ideological and political Bankruptcy on his part. Let me remind all the comrades that communist movement is in very bad shape and at the receiving end, therefore present time is full of errors and more errors will come until unless party engaged itself in mass movement against the policies of the govenrment. the communist movement will have to work in great unity to take the challenges posed by the imperialist forces which includes indian ruling class. it is unfortunate that parliamentary democracy is killing the fighting spirit among the cadres. And resignation of personjit is one example of that where he is resigning from the party on a tactical line not on ideological or political line of the party.

Com Dipankar lived and died a committed leader of the Cpim. To cast doubts on this when he is no longer there to respond is a form of intellectual dishonesty that is condemnable.

Comrades, I am sure that Prasenjit has not taken the decision of resignation suddenly, it s accumulated response of several do's of this leadership. we have to get back to our basics, have to shift our focus from "winning elections".the rest will follow you.If he leadership doesn't understand what the member's and supporters actually looking for it will be a party only with leaders and no one behind them.

"Red salute to a young communist" -

http://blogs.rediff.com/mkbhadrakumar/2012/06/23/red-salute-to-a-young-c...

"Hailing from a “communist family” in the “red rain land” of Kerala, growing up in an environment where communist stalwarts would all of a sudden drop by at home – iconic figures such as AKG, E K Nayanar, K R Gowri, M N Govindan Nair, C Achutha Menon, T V Thomas — and as an inquisitive school boy with intellectual pretensions at a highly impressionable age eavesdropping on their animated conversations with my late father, and then in the privacy of the mind co-relating those poignant impressions with my own readings from my father’s vast library (and the Indian realities as I saw them around me in the 1950s and early 1960s) — it won’t come easy for me in this lifetime at least to criticise India’s communist leadership.

Somehow the conviction got deeply embedded that if India didn’t have a communist movement, it surely needed one. That conviction got battering many a time over the recent decades as one could see the decline of the movement and kept agonising why it had to be so when the historical need of the party for the country at a defining point of transition in its history was only becoming more than ever as India began bifurcating into a “shining” part with iron in its soul.
A rare moment when that conviction lingering from childhood got reinforced and reinvigorated was in late 2005 when I came across a young communist by name Pransenjit Bose.

Communists neither expect nor accept personal compliments, therefore, I refrained from ever articulating my sense of admiration for him. That admiration steadily grew when I began working under his inspiring leadership of the research unit of the central committee of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Prasenjit combined a brilliant mind to total 24x 7-hr dedication as a committed communist. His austere life, his integrity, his hard work, his precocious intellect, his child-like intensity and his great sensitivity as a humanist — I’ve seldom come across such optimal combination in a single personality.

Thus, I am stunned to read in the newspapers today that Prasenjit has resigned from his primary membership of the CPM. Let me put it starkly: The party has lost one of its best comrades. Prasenjit belongs to a fast-dwindling tribe of communists and he is hard to replace. In true Marxist-Leninist jargon, CPM might claim sometime today in a statement that the party will carry on regardless and no individual is indispensable. But I hope the CPM will instead keep a vow of silence and introspect deeply why such a calamity took place.

The painful truth is that the CPM is at a crossroads. It is no more having ideological clarity and it is in the very same boat as the Bharatiya Janata Party — and that’s not a good thing to happen for the country when the opposition gets disoriented and begins to meander at a crucial juncture in our national life.

This is the third time that I know of that the CPM took a party line to accommodate the exigencies of “bourgeois politics” in West Bengal. The other two were in not sensing the great contradiction in the party’s stance on Singur and Nandigram and the heavy toll it was going to take, and, second, the fatal mistake of delaying the withdrawal of support to the UPA-I over the US-India nuclear deal by close to an year before the horse bolted away from the stable because the local elections in West Bengal were the priority.

As I wrote yesterday, the fateful decision taken by the CPM leadership on Thursday to extend support to the candidacy of Pranab Mukherjee cannot be justified except as one of rank opportunism. The CPM is once again — as it happened over the nuclear deal fiasco — going to fall between two stools. For ever will the Congress string the Trinamool and the CPM. The Grand Old Party is unbeatable in the art of politiking, and, ironically, Pranab Mukherjee has been one of its ablest tacticians (including, paradoxically, in steering the nuclear deal to safety across the choppy waters of the UPA-1 politics during 2007-2008 period).

Any comeback by the CPM in West Bengal should be on the basis of a rediscovery of the party’s ideological moorings as a movement of the poor people and it should not be predicated on the palace intrigues in Delhi with the Congress leadership.
Above all, CPM should have shown sensitivity to what appears to have been a robust opposition by the leaders from Kerala to identifying with the Congress even remotely at this juncture — especially when the party unit in Kerala is facing a crisis and at the same time locked in a “deathly” fight with the Congress.

Given the overall scenario, Prasenjit is right: the only principled (and tactical) course available for the CPM was to follow the lead of the CPI and abstain in the presidential election. Lal salaam, Comrade Prasenjit! "