Karat re-elected CPI(M) General Secretary

Coimbatore, Apr 3: The 19th Congress of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) today re-elected Mr Prakash Karat as party General Secretary for a second term.

The newly-constituted 87-member party Central Committee unanimously re-elected Mr Karat for a three-year term on the concluding day of the Congress. The announcement of Mr Karat's re-election was received by the comrades with a thunderous applause, which Mr Karat acknowledged. The party Congress elected 15 Polit Bureau members -- Messrs Prakash Karat, V S Achuthanandan, S Ramachandran Pillai, Sitaram Yechury, M K Pandhe, Biman Basu, Manik Sarkar, Pinarayi Vijayan, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, K Varadarajan, B V Raghuvulu, Brinda Karat, Kodiyeri Balakrishnan, Mohd Amin and Nirupam Sen. Of them, Messrs Balakrishnan, Amin and Sen are the fresh faces.

The previous party congress had elected 17 members.

The party congress requested former West Bengal Chief Minister and senior leader Jyoti Basu to assist the Politburo as a special invitee.

It also elected a five-member new Control Commission, chaired by Mr N Shankaraiah from Tamil Nadu. The other members of the Commission were Kanti Biswas (West Bengal), G Ramulu (Andhra Pradesh), Rekha Goswami (West Bengal) and P Rajendran (Kerala).

UNI