CPM Kolkata committee to decide Ajanta Biswas fate on September 20 – Times of India

Kolkata: The CPM will decide the quantum of disciplinary action against former CPM state secretary Anil Biswas’s daughter Ajanta Biswas in a meeting of the party’s Kolkata district committee on September 20.
The CPM area committee for college and university teachers under the Kolkata unit had recommended a six-month suspension for Ajanta, a teacher at Rabindra Bharati University and a party card-holder, after her article on participation of women in Bengal politics appeared in the Trinamool daily ‘Jago Bangla’.
The recommendation of the CPM area committee came up for discussion in a recent secretariat meeting in which majority members held that the suspension period proposed against Ajanta be brought down to three months.
Chances of scaling down the proposed punishment don’t seem likely because that might give rise to views that the party was making an “exception” for Anil’s daughter. Senior CPM leaders had earlier engaged with Ajanta and tried to persuade her to refrain her from writing in the Trinamool daily.
Ajanta, in her four-part article, wrote about prominent women participants, namely Basanti Devi, Sarojini Naidu, Suniti Devi and Mamata Banerjee. In the article on Banerjee, Ajanta wrote at length on her political career and termed the movement at Singur as “gana bikhobh” or mass movement, raising eyebrows in CPM circles.
CPM leaders held that the views expressed by Ajanta were not in sync with the party line. Accordingly, the CPM area committee served her a showcause notice, asking her to explain her stand.
In her reply, Ajanta said she was doing research on women’s participation in politics in Bengal. She reasoned that the series of articles provided a historical perspective to women leaders during the struggle for Independence and after. “It also mentions the role played by women leaders of the Congress and the Left Front. The mention of CM Mamata Banerjee in the article is therefore quite pertinent,” she said.
The CPM area committee, after scanning Ajanta’s articles, felt that Banerjee’s role in Singur and Nandigram was not at all “positive” given the perspective of the land stir. The land acquisition bid by the Left Front government for setting up industry drew criticism from Left intellectuals close to CPM, who held that the land stir and the Nandigram carnage did do harm to the credibility the Left parties had among the peasants.