Bengal governor, CPI(M) lock horns on SFI protest, attack on Mamata

Kolkata: Does he, or doesn’t he? Is West Bengal Governor MK Narayanan, a former national security adviser, well versed with the communist party’s power structure? While the CPI-M says “no”, Narayanan begs to differ. Condemning the heckling of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and Finance Minister Amit Mitra in Delhi, Narayanan on Wednesday had said in a statement: “The attack on the democratically elected chief minister and her cabinet colleagues is serious enough to warrant a public apology by the politburo of the CPI-M.” This angered state secretary of Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPIM) Biman Bose, who questioned the governor’s credentials to make such a comment. [caption id=“attachment_696115” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Prakash Karat wrote a letter to the President against the West Bengal governor. Reuters[/caption] “He might be knowing how the police operate but does not have any knowledge how the politburo or the CPI-M committees operate… it is his ignorance,” Bose told media persons. On Thursday, the governor put forth a rebuttal. “The honourable governor would like to clear this misconception. He has been a student of communism for over six decades, and has read and digested the works of Marx, Engels and Mao and has spoken extensively at national and international conferences on the subject of communism,” it said. “He is, therefore, well aware of the role and functions of the politburo and the central committee of the CPI-M,” the governor’s office said in a statement. Mentioning that one of the basic axioms of the communist ideology was the principle of “democratic centralism”, the statement said it was in that context that a suggestion was made that an apology by the politburo of the CPI-M was warranted on account of the action of some of the lower functionaries of the CPI-M and its bodies. Banerjee and Mitra were Tuesday heckled by activists of the Students Federation of India, the students wing of the CPI-M, when she went to the Planning Commission office in Delhi for a meeting. IANS