Between elections in two key states for the CPIM and the Parliament about to begin, Sitaram Yechury is a busy man. We did manage to catch up with him at Alimuddin Street, his party’s headquarters in Kolkata.
Yechury insists that his party still has “irreconcilable differences” with the Congress and that the alliance is actually something that came from the ground up. Workers from both parties wanted to come together to defeat Mamata Banerjee.
In Kerala, where the CPI(M) and Congress are bitter rivals, the alliance in Bengal is being used as a political tool. Yechury claims that this is not worrying and that the voters in Kerala are mature enough to discern the differing circumstances.
In Parliament, TMC’s Derek O’Brien maybe in trouble after he put out a morphed image of CPI(M)‘s Prakash Karat and Home Minister Rajnath Singh.
The Saradha chit fund scam will have resonance beyond urban Bengal according to Yechury. It was the rural poor that had lost their meagre savings in the ponzi scheme.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)