 "M A Baby")
It was May 1996. Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s 13-day government had fallen. A page was about to be turned in the history of the communist movement and the country. Jyoti Basu was on the threshold of becoming the first communist Prime Minister of India. Never before had the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or the CPI(M), got so much attention in national politics. Eight chief ministers, the top leadership of the Congress, all clamouring for Jyoti Basu to accept their offer… the air was electric with possibilities.
The CPI(M)’s central committee met at A K Gopalan Bhavan in Delhi over several days. Harkishan Singh Surjeet spelt it out: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had to be kept out of government. If the Left parties joined the government and Basu became Prime Minister as the consensus candidate of the United Front, it would be impossible for President Shankar Dayal Sharma to turn the proposal down.
Some disagreed. With just 53 Left Front members in the Lok Sabha, the CPI(M) would be in no position to influence the government’s policies even if it participated in it, said Prakash Karat. S R Pillai from Kerala and Benoy Choudhury from West Bengal supported him.
Surjeet’s line was not without advocates. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee argued the party must not let a historic moment pass it by. Those who felt the party must seize the day
were Hannan Mollah, Samar Mukhopadhyay… and M A Baby, the lone member from the Kerala unit in this group.
Marian Alexander Baby, now secretary general of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), spoke before the central committee with passionate conviction. He echoed the Leninist line of using all the parliamentary institutions to further the revolution. If this opportunity to become part of the apparatus of power was lost, the Left risked becoming a footnote in history. He was challenging the wisdom of stalwarts from his home state of Kerala — E K Nayanar, V S Achuthanandan, and Susheela Gopalan — collectively representing more than 100 years of political experience. He was just 42 and would face a lot of difficulty in Kerala later, as leaders like Pinarayi Vijayan, Kodiyeri Balakrishnan, and M V Govindan would eclipse him. At that meeting, 27 members turned down the proposal against 22 who voted in favour. Who knows what might have happened if the numbers had been reversed.
Mr Baby has never been an orthodox or conservative communist. He became president of the state unit of the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) at 21, and didn’t complete his first degree because he was arrested. That was during the Emergency, an exceptionally difficult time for the Left in Kerala. Around 8,000 persons were imprisoned, many put through physical torture. For those who lived, pain is a constant companion and reminder of those days in Kerala when the Congress was part of the government and K Karunakaran was state home minister. P Rajan had died in custody. Despite this, Mr Baby’s conviction that the Left should seize any and all opportunities to change the system, including joining hands with the Congress to defeat fascism, endures.
But he faces many internal challenges. In West Bengal, the Left Front is in crisis with no light at the end of the tunnel. In Tripura it is in bad shape. In north India, including Uttar Pradesh, its influence is dwindling in the face of rising identity politics. Retaining Kerala in 2026, the lone state where the Left is in power, represents an uphill task in the face of anti-incumbency. Its primary Opposition? The Congress.
This is the central existential issue: What should the CPI(M)’s relations with the Congress be? The Left has to show the way. It has the ideological competence to do so. But the contradictions are lost on no one. In Kerala, the Congress and CPI(M) are at hammer and tongs. Just a few kilometres away, in Tamil Nadu, they are the best of friends, allies of the government, led by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam.
Within the CPI(M), six to seven senior members have retired. The central committee is full of new faces. Many sneer at the party as a gerontocracy. But the felt experiences of senior members have guided the party so long. It will be Mr Baby’s task to groom new leadership, to take on board the criticism that the classical Marxist parties are class reductionist and believers in economic determinism, and do not address gender, race, and caste.
Born a Latin Catholic, Mr Baby is an atheist. He got into trouble when, as education minister (2006-11) in the V S Achuthanandan government, he was charged with promoting atheism in school books and forced to recall some. He was the youngest in the party to be given a place in the Rajya Sabha (1986-98). Few know that he is an avid sportsman: He plays badminton and follows football with fanatic zeal. And he has a deep love of music: Only he could have brought A K Antony and K R Narayanan life membership of his cultural organisation, Swaralaya, envisaged as Kerala’s answer to the Indian People’s Theatre Association.
A member of Parliament says jokingly that the CPI(M) is the largest Hindu Party in Kerala. So there is little space for the BJP. Keeping it that way is M A Baby’s central priority.
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