Economist leaves

J.P. YADAV

Kozhikode, April 8: Marxist economist Prabhat Patnaik is learnt to have left Kozhikode in a huff after his line came under attack from a delegate from Kerala during the ideological discussion yesterday.

Patnaik, who had last year written in The Telegraph that the party must ensure space for debate and dissent, was scheduled to leave for Delhi after completion of the six-day-long CPM congress on Monday.

Patnaik could not be contacted but sources close to him confirmed he had cut short his visit and reached Delhi.

Patnaik, a Cambridge-educated economist and former professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, participated in the discussion yesterday but skipped the voting today.

Other sources said a delegate from Kerala charged Patnaik with advocating reforms for Indian communists in his articles and felt his suggestions were against the basic tenets of a Marxist-Leninist party like the CPM. The sources also suggested that he was upset with the attitude of the leadership that was not keen that he speak.

Patnaik is highly regarded as a Marxist academic who has remained a CPM member despite differences with the way the party functions. As vice-chairman of the Kerala Planning Commission when the CPM's V.S. Achuthanandan was chief minister, Patnaik is credited with ushering in policies that blunted anti-incumbency and ensured that the Left-led front lost only narrowly last year unlike the rout the combine faced in Bengal.

Despite his value to the CPM at a time most intellectuals have left the party, his forthright views on the lack of inner-party democracy have made him unpopular with sections of the leadership.

Patnaik is known for praising Indian democracy and suggesting that the communists should shed their monolithic character and inject more democracy into their structure.

"… they (the communists) must ensure space within the party for debate, discussion and dissent, so that it becomes a thriving hub of intellectual activity, rather than a monolithic entity where a decision taken at the behest of some local satrap or bureaucrat in a Left-ruled state is defended, as revolutionary duty, by its members and sympathisers all over the country," Patnaik had written in The Telegraph on May 24, 2011.