KOZHIKODE: Imagine when your entire party fits in a room! For the Goan state unit of the CPM, it is something they experience whenever the party holds a conference.Official party estimates show that of the 10,44,833 members of the party, only 54 are from Goa, making it the smallest party unit in the country. But on the brighter side, while Communists across the country are worrying about dwindling memberships, the Goans are not, as they know that things can only get better from here on. State secretary Thalmann Pereira, who is the sole Goan delegate at the party congress, is confident that the party will have much more influence in the coming years.Pereira says that while Goa has all the right ingredients for the CPM to grow, the most important of which is a monumental economic gap between the mine-owning rich and the working class, the party’s growth has been stunted due to a number of reasons. “Even after India got independence, Goa was under a fascist and dictatorial Portuguese regime till 1961. The leaders who went to places like Bombay and got influenced by Marxism were not allowed to come back and plant the seeds of a communist movement. It was only after the liberation in 1961 that they were able to come back and propagate Marxism,” he says.He adds that while they were then hindered by an unfavourable attitude taken by the Goan Church towards communism, they did manage to build up a strong trade union movement in the state. But now, the party leaders are trying to solve the conundrum of how to harvest the fruits of the seeds planted back then. “The CPM’s condition in Goa is something of a paradox. While the CITU is the strongest trade union present in the state, the CPM is lagging behind the likes of Congress, BJP, Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party and the NCP. We are pondering over how to convert this trade union strength that we possess into political power,” he says. Pereira believes that the way forward is to organise more struggles. “There are a lot of burning issues in the state. The mine owners who supported the Portuguese in the pre-liberation era still own all the mines. There are local unrests over Russians and Israelis buying huge tracts of land in the state while villages are opposing unplanned urbanisation. Our role is to link these individual struggles to other ones and give a sense of ideology to them,” he says.
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