New Delhi, 29 Sept

Senior CPI(M) leader Prakash Karat will be the coordinator of the party's Politburo and Central Committee as an interim arrangement until the 24th party Congress to be held in April next year, the Left party said on Sunday.

The decision comes in the wake of CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury's death on September 12 at the age of 72.

"The Central Committee of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), now in session in New Delhi, has decided that Comrade Prakash Karat will be the coordinator of the Polit Bureau and the Central Committee, as an interim arrangement until the 24th party Congress to be held in April 2025 at Madurai," the CPI(M) said in a statement.

"This decision was taken due to the sad and sudden demise of the sitting general secretary of the CPI(M), Comrade Sitaram Yechury," it added.

Karat (76), one of the seniormost leaders of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), was its general secretary from 2005 to 2015.

Karat was born on February 7, 1948 in Letpadan in present-day Myanmar, where his father, C P Nair, was employed with the Burma Railways and later, at the Burma Oil Pipeline Project.

He studied in the Madras Christian College Higher Secondary School in Chennai and later, went to the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom for a master's degree in politics. He became active in student politics at the university.

He returned to India and joined the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in 1970 and also worked as an aide to veteran CPI(M) leader A K Gopalan.

One of the founders of the Students' Federation of India (SFI), Karat was elected as the third president of the JNU Students' Union. He also became the second president of the SFI between 1974 and 1979.

He was the secretary of the Delhi state committee of the CPI(M) from 1982 to 1985, was elected to the Central Committee of the party in 1985 and became a member of its Politburo in 1992.

One of the key faces of the party for decades, Karat was at the helm of the CPI(M) when it decided to withdraw support to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government at the Centre in 2008. The following years saw a decline in the strength of the Left in Parliament.

The CPI(M) had 43 MPs in the Lok Sabha in 2004, which came down to nine in 2014. As a part of the INDIA opposition bloc, the Left party won four seats in the Lok Sabha polls held earlier this year. -PTI