On all that one is now hearing about Somnath Chatterjee and his inclinations!!!!!!!

It is difficult to maintain that the Lok Sabha Speaker must detach himself from the party that he was elected. The fact that the Speaker happens to be an MP and is there only because he had been a part of one or another political party cannot be denied. And it is hence difficult to insist that he is detached from his party the day he becomes the Speaker. More so because the Speaker’s job is not an ornamental one and there is no ban on the Speaker contesting elections after the term of the House ends.

Given this, it is somewhat ridiculous to expect that Speakers behave the same way that judges of the higher judiciary do. It may be noted here that judges of the High Court and the Supreme Court are barred from practicing in the bar of the same court after their retirement. This is not the case with the Speakers. They are free to come back to the same House as ordinary MPs!

In this sense, there is nothing seriously wrong with the Lok Sabha Speaker, Somnath Chatterjee, maintaining his connections with his party. He will, after all, have to get back to the party by May 2009 (or earlier if the Lok Sabha is dissolved before that) and stand up as the CPI-M’s candidate from Bolepur. Well. He has the choice to retire from electoral politics, return to his legal practice and appear for one or another corporate group. Chatterjee, we know, was a corporate lawyer with a roaring practice and he can return to that.

This choice is entirely his own and in the event he found the party to be deviating from its principles, he had the liberty to register his objections in the forum he belongs to in the party and fight it out. In this instance, and if reports in the media that Chatterjee is unhappy with the line his party has taken to vote along with the BJP in the confidence vote on July 22, 2008, Chatterjee has the right to raise his objections.

This, however, must have been done, only in his capacity as a member of the CPI(M) and that must have been done without making a public statement. In other words, Chatterjee could not have and must not have glossed over the fact that he happens to be the Speaker of the Lok Sabha too. And in his capacity as Speaker, he is the custodian of the rights of the BJP and its MPs as much as he is the custodian of the rights of the CPI(M), Congress, and other party MPs.

In this light, he had no right to dismiss or condemn the BJP as a party and particularly so in the context of a vote in the Lok Sabha. The Speaker’s duty is to treat every MP as an entity and ensure that their rights are not trampled upon simply because they belong to a party with which he has political and ideological differences. Hence, if it is true that Chatterjee had raised the issue of the right or the wrong of the CPI(M) voting with the BJP and held that as something wrong, he has no right to remain the Speaker.

Be that as it may. There is another serious issue in this discourse and that involves the internal dynamics of the CPI(M). This is so because Chatterjee is not alone in raising the issue. We now see reports of several senior leaders in the CPI(M), including the West Bengal Chief Minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, the State Transport Minister Subhash Chakraborthy and a few others having problems with the party’s decision to withdraw support to the UPA coalition and the fact that this is being raised in the public.

The signals are very clear. As it happened in the several years between 1952 and 1964, leading to the split in the CPI and to the formation of the CPI(M), we find a section in the CPI(M) wanting to support the Congress. This is indeed the culmination of a political crisis that has been on inside the CPI(M) for at least a decade or more and manifest in the party’s Chandigarh Congress in 1995. Recall the fact that Saifuddin Chaudhury, a well known face of the party in the Lok Sabha then, being dropped from the Central Committee and subsequently expelled from the party for having spoken in favour of building a working relationship with the Congress.

Incidentally, Somnath Chatterjee too belonged to that league then. But he was retained in the party only because his case was defended by some other important senior leaders at that time. It included Jyoti Basu too.

The point is that things have taken a concrete shape now and it is time that Prakash Karat and those in the Central Committee who think like him on the question of the Congress gear up for a battle in the same way as those who founded the CPI(M) did in 1964. It looks like the CPI(M) may undergo another split soon. The party faithful may still argue that this is reading too much into a situation and call it a tirade against the party. Well. The answer, like Bob Dylan sand in the Sixties, is blowin in the wind!