MA Baby (Second from left in the front row) Photo credit: MA Baby's Facebook page
By G Krishna Mohan Rao*
New Delhi: After an intense internal power struggle, Mariam Alexander Baby was unanimously elected as the new General Secretary of the Communist Party of India – Marxist (CPM), last Sunday, April 6, 2025, at the 24th party congress in Madurai, Tamil Nadu.
Baby succeeded Sitaram Yechuri, who died in office after serving as party General Secretary for about 10 years. Initially, the CPM Kerala unit itself was not in favour of Baby’s candidature since it wanted Brinda Karat to be the General Secretary to run the party. However, the Bengal Unit fiercely opposed Brinda Karat. Baby is the first Christian to lead the party.
The Bengal unit and some others were not particularly keen on Baby and opposed his candidature when Prakash Karat proposed his name. But Baby sailed through when his name was put before the Central Committee, the CPM’s highest decision-making body. After Bengal state secretary Mohammad Salim made it clear that he was not interested in contesting, an effort was made to pit All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) president and one of the architects of the 2020-21 farmers’ protest, Ashok Dhawle, as an alternative to Baby.
The Kerala unit left with little choice but to go with Prakash Karat’s suggestion and picked MA Baby. For the Kerala chief minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, Baby was certainly a better option than comrade Dhawle, who always sided with his bitter rival and former chief minister V S Achuthanandan in the party’s internal fights.
71-year-old former Kerala minister and two-term Rajya Sabha member, MA Baby, belongs to the coastal district of Kollam in Kerala. A college dropout, his entry into politics was as a student leader, rising through the ranks of the Students’ Federation of India (CPM’s student wing). His election saw a generational shift in the CPM, with some of the most prominent faces of the Left in India, including Prakash and Brinda Karat, bowing out of the party’s decision-making structures in keeping with the age limit of 75.
Baby faces a tough task, considering he is stepping into the shoes of Yechury, who had built links across the political spectrum and could bring divergent political parties together for the common goal of defeating the BJP. Prakash Karat had been steering the party as coordinator since Yechury’s death. Besides Karats, also out of the politburo, having attained the age of 75, were former Tripura chief minister Manik Sarkar and Subhashni Ali. Altogether, eight among the old guard are out. An attempt was made by some members of the outgoing Central Committee to have the age limit relaxed, but Prakash Karat is said to have shot it down. The lone exception to the rule yet again is Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan, 79.
For Baby, one of the biggest challenges will be to halt the BJP’s progress in his home state of Kerala, where assembly elections are due early next year. But the real task before the new CPM General Secretary would be to balance the internal groupism and build consensus between the Kerala and Bengal units of the CPM, which are pulling in opposite directions on several issues.
Further, Baby has taken charge as General Secretary when CPM’s fortunes are almost at an all-time low. The party is in office only in Kerala, and not even in the reckoning in West Bengal, which CPM governed for 34 straight years from 1977 till 2011, and Tripura, where the party helmed the state for 20 years from 1993 to 2013. Nationally, at present, the CPM has only 4 MPs in the Lok Sabha. In the recent 2024 general elections, the party’s vote share was a dismal 1.8 per cent.
Baby has a difficult task at hand. He has to strengthen the party’s ties with Congress, which involves a delicate balancing act. In Kerala, CPM contests against Congress in state polls, while it needs to put up a united fight against the Bharatiya Janata Party in Lok Sabha polls. The contradiction can be overwhelming. And then, he needs to breathe life into the state units in Bengal and Tripura. Most importantly, he needs to make the party relevant again nationally. Just 20 years ago, in 2004, CPM had 43 MPs in the Lok Sabha, a sizeable number that made the party count.
Surprisingly, the BJP is forging ahead with the support of the Church in Kerala. During the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP opened its account in Kerala by winning from Thrissur. This happened because the Christian Churches have been cosying up to the BJP. Though Marxists are said to be atheists, Baby’s Christian origins may help him bring the community over to the Left camp at a time Kerala politics appears divided partly along religious lines. He also needs to mend ties with the Communist Party of India (CPI), and that might prove difficult. CPI leaders say that as a cultural minister in the state, Baby never honoured their requests for posts in cultural departments run by the government. CPI state secretary Veliyam Bhargavan had then said Baby was a “fake man” who defied the rules of coalition politics.
Baby is soft spoken and friendly. A person who always takes phone calls, and if he ever misses one, he makes it a point of returning the call. He is well read, fluent in Hindi and English and has the knack of getting along with difficult individuals and winning them over. And no one has ever accused him of corruption, a rare thing in today’s politics.
The new 85-member Central Committee of CPM now has 21 fresh entrants. The Karats, Subhashni Ali, and Manik Sarkar have been made special invitees to the Central Committee, a category that now has seven members, including former Bengal state secretary Birman Bose and former MP Hannah Mollah. Eight new faces are included in the Politburo.
M A Baby is the 6th General Secretary of the CPM in succession. The earlier Party General Secretaries were : 1) P Sundarayya (1964-78) , EMS Namboodripad( 1978-92), Harkishan Singh Surjeet (1992- 05), Prakash Karat ( 2005-15) and Sitaram Yechury ( 2015- 2024). But he has much to prove, unlike his predecessors.
*Senior journalist
