Senior Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader and former West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee officially stepped down from the party’s state committee on Thursday, The Indian Express reported. The new 80-member team does not have any leader above the age of 75, except Left Front Chairperson Biman Bose.
“We have tried to maintain a balance between young and aged leaders,” CPI(M) State Secretary Surjya Kanta Mishra said at the end of the four-day state conference. “Seventeen new faces have been included in the state committee and 20 leaders from the previous committee have been removed. As a result, the average age of the state committee has been reduced by six years.”
Madhuja Sinha Roy, 33, is the youngest member of the committee. The average age of the committe members is 54.5. Of all the members, 15% are women.
Bhattacharya will, however, continue to have a presence in the party organisation as he has been accorded the status of a special invitee, The Hindu reported. He participated in two sessions at the conference, where the party’s senior leadership requested him to stay on. “But once he takes a decision, it is very difficult to make him change his mind,” Mishra told reporters. “He wanted the state committee to release him. We resisted but, finally, we had to release him owing to health-related issues.”
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