CPI-Dead-Centre Politics

November 17, 1973 CPI Dead-Centre Politics M R MOSCOW-lining communist parties in the subcontinent are being overtaken by the crisis of the left-of-centre politics they have been trying to institutionalise at the Kremlin's behest. At one end of the spectrum is the odd spectacle of the Communist Party of Ceylon splitting vertically and the minority faction continuing to share office with the petit bourgeois Sri Lanka Freedom Party and the Trotskyites. The CPI has maintained an embarrassed silence over this development just as the Soviet Party has not seen reason to denounce either of the factions. In Bangladesh it is a different picture, somewhat. There have been two pro-Moscow parties from the beginning