THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The crisis in the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) in its southern citadel deepened with small groups taking to the streets throughout Kerala hailing Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan’s stand against the tainted state party secretary Pinarayi Vijayan. Posters have sprouted everywhere with huge cutouts of the “crusader” against corruption within the party.

To counter this, the CPI-M have started organizing local level marches and meetings vowing to protect Vijayan tainted by the Rs3.74bn SNC-Lavalin scam in which he is accused of illegally awarding a contract to the Canadian engineering and construction major while serving as the state’s power minister a decade back. Vijayan too launched a statewide Nava Kerala Yatra or the march to build a new Kerala, which entered the fourth day yesterday.

The party governed by democratic means is in utter confusion over how to go about the revolt by Achuthanandan, the senior-most politburo member who has rejected the party line on the corruption charges against his archrival.

The support to the one-man crusade of the party’s only surviving founder-leader in Kerala against a “corrupt leadership” is swelling at the grass-root level. Though the chief minister may just be playing his usual factional politics, the public perception is so heavily loaded against Vijayan, the “corrupt” party secretary that even he does not dare antagonize Achuthanandan any further.

“You cannot equate him with Somnath Chatterjee who is a traitor. Comrade V.S. (Achuthanandan) has done nothing like that,” Vijayan told reporters in Mukkam in Kozhikode district during the yatra that the chief minister has boycotted. He hastened to add that all party men are with his yatra. Chatterjee’s refusal to follow the party directive to vote against the federal United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s confidence motion on the Indo-US nuclear deal forced the party to oust him.

The CPI-M general secretary, Prakash Karat, who had put up a spirited defense of Vijayan against the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) move to prosecute him as the ninth accused, remains mum on Achuthanandan’s rejection of his theory of political vendetta.

The CPI-M suffered another setback with the former additional director general of police Upendra Verma rejecting its claim that the central government was using CBI to fix its leader after the state’s Vigilance and Anti-Corruption Bureau (VACB) absolved him. “We made a preliminary inquiry only. We haven’t started detailed investigation,” he told Manorama News, a regional television channel.

For Karat, the new development in his home state is a perfect Catch 22. He has to act swift and effectively to save the party and its government from the worst crisis as the elections are just three months away.

The CBI investigation was ordered by the Kerala High Court on a public interest litigation based on the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report that revealed gross irregularities in awarding the contract to the Canadian firm to renovate and modernize three hydropower projects.