Sources, which are informed about the developments at the Vijaywada meet, said that the rift between the two top leaders was mainly with respect to the CC’s analysis of the party’s set-back in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections.

Karat and the CPM’s Delhi lobby have been saying that the functioning of the Left Front government and the party’s Bengal unit were responsible for the string of pathetic electoral performances since the 2008 rural elections.

However, Bhattacharjee had a different view.

He pointed out that it was the withdrawal of support from the UPA government over the US civil nuclear deal that forced the Congress to come closer to the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress, which had been a partner in the earlier BJP-led NDA government.

“Following this rift, the CC had criticised the state government over Nandigram and land acquisition issues.

Our Delhi leaders have been saying that large-scale corruption among a section of the party’s ranks had led to such a debacle,” sources said. “But things have changed; now they have asked us to highlight the success story of the government and there was no reference to failures of the government,” added the source.

“Moreover we have been asked to fight the Trinamool and Maoists, not the bourgeois vices in the party,” the leader explained.

The document adopted at the Vijaywada meeting said that efforts were on to forge an alliance of all reactionary forces, led by the Trinamool Congress, to defeat the Left Front in the coming Assembly polls.

All right-wing forces including communal and fundamentalist elements, foreign-funded NGOs and corporate media had joined the Maoist-backed Trinamool in this effort, it added.

It said, these forces sought to completely negate the advances made by the democratic movement and pave the way for the restoration of “earlier forms of exploitative order”.

There are already reports from some areas of dispossessed landlords attempting to recapture their formerly illegally held land that was acquired and distributed to the landless.

According to sources, about 45 delegates from across the country discussed the draft resolutions.

CPM District Committee Secretary Dipak Sarkar and state Backward Classes Welfare Minister Deblina Hembram spoke on the separate documents on Kerala and West Bengal that had been placed by Politburo member and Rajya Sabha MP Sitaram Yechuri.

“The document will be placed and discussed at a state committee meeting later.