CPM to hoist Tricolour 74 yrs after ‘ye azadi jhoota hai’ days

Kolkata: CPM will unfurl the Tricolour at the state headquarters at Alimuddin Street on Independence Day on August 15, taking the over-seven-decade communist journey from the ‘ye azadi jhoota hai’ days of 1948 to a full circle in 2021.
The proposal to hoist the national flag at party offices was adopted in the three-day virtual meeting of the CPM central committee that ended on Sunday to emphasize the point that the Left, unlike the BJP, had a glorious role in the freedom struggle.
“The national flag has been hoisted earlier by Left mass organizations. We have issued a circular this time urging party units to hoist the national flag to mark the 75th anniversary of our independence,” said CPM leader Rabin Deb.
The party will firm up its future programmes at the Party Congress to be held in Kerala in April 2022.
“Communists had a glorious role in the freedom struggle. But there is a concerted campaign against the role of the Left in the country’s freedom struggle. What the communists said was India won political independence but the people didn’t attain economic independence,” said CPM central committee member Sujan Chakraborty.
Chakraborty left it to the CPM CC to announce the national flag hoisting programme on Independence Day.
The undivided CPI, under the leadership of BT Ranadive, had reached the ‘ye azadi jhoota hai’ formulation that was later discarded as a “Left adventurist” line. Jyoti Basu, a CPI politburo member who later joined CPM after the split in 1964, held that India won political independence but had to go a long way to achieve economic independence in a class-divided society.
A few years ago, CPM’s youth wing DYFI decided to unfurl the national flag to send out the message that Left youths were no less patriotic than the “fascistic” BJP that is spreading hatred in the name of nationalism.