Summoning all the sophisticated vocabulary at his command, and shrewdly sneaking in an informal term of endearment reserved for a senior, CPM general secretary M A Baby on Tuesday spelled out that his new position as the party's official numero uno would not place him above Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan in the party.

"As far as the CPM is concerned, no one individual is above the other. There are over 10 lakh comrades in this party, and for the party, all these 10 lakh comrades are assigned the same value," Baby said while interacting with reporters in Thiruvananthapuram. "However, certain leaders, through their work and the lives they lead, achieve great acceptance among the people," he said. K R Gouri was cited as an example. "In the party hierarchy, Gouriamma had reached only up to the state committee. She was not even in the Central Committee. Just because she was not in the CC or the politburo, has her place in the hearts of people ever been affected?" he said.

Logically, Baby cannot present Pinarayi as the second example. Because, unlike Gouriamma, who was not given her due in the party, Pinarayi is a PB member and the Chief Minister of Kerala. 

So before he held up Pinarayi as someone special as Gouriamma he meandered a bit.

Baby's primary objective was to demonstrate that he stood below Pinarayi. So while dwelling on Gouriamma's greatness that transcended party positions, Baby threw in a non-essential line about Pinarayi, addressing him in a star-struck school-boyish lingo. "Vijayettan had also gone to felicitate Gouriamma," Baby said. The information was irrelevant, yet significant. This was the first time Baby was heard publicly referring to Pinarayi as "Vijayettan", a clear message as any that he would always play second fiddle.

But the new general secretary also wanted to convey that, like Gouriamma, Pinarayi has also stolen the hearts of people. Baby said that Pinarayi, who was battered by various allegations, acquired an exalted status after the leadership role he took in steering Kerala through natural disasters and the pandemic. "Right in front of our eyes, he emerged as the 'karanaver' (patriarch) of the Kerala society," Baby said.

Baby's 'karanaver', though the word stinks of feudal imperiousness, was yet another addition to the Pinarayi mystique. Ironically, especially while referring to Kannur leader P Jayarajan, Baby emphasised that the party repelled the cult of personality. This theoretical objection to personality cult also did not prevent Baby from giving his approval for the moniker 'captain' that was bestowed on Pinarayi.  "In Kerala, Pinarayi was called captain and this attained wide acceptability," Baby said. Any qualification other than a comrade was spurned by greats like E M S Namboodirippad and A K Gopalan.

He seemed so blinded by his warmth for Pinarayi that Baby was soon lost in his own thicket of words. He unwittingly mocked at his own party ideology trying to say that people like Pinarayi Vijayan are the chosen ones, to whom such mass love and adoration come automatically. "This (the mass appeal) is not something that can be created or negated by appointing or removing a person from a position," he said, suggesting that it was Pinarayi's birthright. But he was quickly self-aware of the folly of the statement. "Pinarayi could do all this only because he was the Chief Minister," he hastened to add.

It was natural for CPM's Kannur strong man P Jayarajan to pop up at this juncture. How come the people's admiration for Pinarayi is extolled while that for P Jayarajan is seen as deviant, Baby was asked.

The way he began, it seemed that, after Gouri and Pinarayi, Baby was about to name Jayarajan as the other example of a rare breed of CPM leaders born to rule the hearts of people. "Jayarajan has many followers in Kannur. He is a living miracle," Baby said. This was an explosive tribute, or so it seemed. Soon enough, it was revealed that Baby was actually saying that Jayarajan was not supposed to act bigger than the party.

In what can be interpreted as insensitive, Baby said Jayarajan owed his life to the party and its cooperative movement. He said that when Jayarajan was mutilated (Baby did not mention that it was RSS goons), it was the quick response of the CPM-run Thalassery Cooperative Hospital  - giving him preliminary treatment, converting an ambulance into a temporary ICU and swiftly transporting him to a referral centre in Kochi - that saved his life. "If all of this had not been done, he wouldn't have been alive," Baby said.