Mohd Salim is CPI(M) West Bengal’s New State Secretary

Kolkata : Former Lok Sabha MP Mohammed Salim, a member of the polit bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), was on Thursday unanimously elected as the party’s West Bengal  state secretary.

Addressing the press after the state conference, Salim termed West Bengal at present as the “kingdom of hangmen” and said the CPI(M)  would fight tooth and nail against it.

“We won’t let those people sleep who have taken away sleep from the common people of the state”. He said, referring to BJP and TMC, and called for collective functioning of the party in the coming days.

The just concluded 26th state conference of CPI(M) in Kolkata also elected an 80-member state committee leaving a single place vacant for co-option later. Minati Ghosh was elected chairperson of the state control committee and has been inducted into the state committee.

Among those who opted out are senior leaders Biman Basu, Surjyakanta Mishra , Ashok Bhattacharya , Mridul Dey, Rabin Deb  and many other veteran faces in West Bengal.

The other new names in the state committee include, Debasish Chakraborty, editor of the party’s mouthpiece Ganashakti, youth leader Meenakshi Mukherjee, student leaders Srijan Bhattacharya, Palash Das, Sayandeep Mitra, Satarup Ghosh, Mayukh Biswas among others.

The state secretariat will be constituted after the Party Congress in April, which is being held in Kannur in Kerala.

Commenting on leadership changes in the party, Apurbo Modal, a district committee member of South 24 Parganas, said: “Our party is moving through a transitional phase, with stalwarts like Bimanda giving way to the newer generation.”

Earlier on Thursday, Mishra, the outgoing state secretary, stressed on the continuation of the party’s effort to assimilate all anti- Bharatiya Janata Party and anti-Trinamool Congress forces in a broad-based platform in the state.  He said the party cannot be subdued by any attacks.

Mishra also called for stiff resistance to the Far Right forces and the neo-liberal policies being pursued by the country's government led by the BJP.

Earlier, CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury said the state conference was ‘historic’ in terms of transitional value . “A generation of party leaders is giving way to a new set of leaders,” he said, adding that the older generation giving way for newer generations was a “healthy communist transition”.

Yechury also reminisced his early days in the party when Basu was a leader of the Students Federation of India in the 1970s. He recalled that Mishra too had been co-opted into the party state committee and had been leading the party for decades.

In his speech, Yechury called for rebuilding  the party once again as the “vanguard” of the Left movement in the country, and mentioned  movements, like the Tebhaga movement , food movement  and present acts of Red Volunteers were in the forefront of  serving the common people of Bengal.  He said many people ask him whether the Left has any future in the country, and his reply is always that “the only force which has a future in the country is the Leftists.”

The newly elected 80-state committee of CPI(M) has 30% new faces. The 23 new members include 14 women and faces and 12 from the minority communities.  The conference also elected 160 delegates and three observers for the party congress.

Among the delegates in the state conference, 45 were from working class families, 10 from agricultural labourer families, 59, from rural poor backgrounds, 48 from middle income farmer families, 208 from the middle class families and 14 from rich farmer backgrounds.