india

Updated: Jul 22, 2019 06:46 IST

Rajya Sabha MP D Raja was appointed as the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (CPI) on Sunday.

The veteran leader, who replaced S Sudhakar Reddy, said the party’s fight against “retrograde” forces would continue.

“The country is going through a critical period under the fascist regime of (PM) Narendra Modi. The Left might have lost seats in the Lok Sabha election and might have been reduced to a smaller force in Parliament, but it does not mean that we have shrunk within the country or our ideological and political influence has shrunk,” Raja said.

“We are the hope for the people of this country,” he added.

Raja said the Left parties would continue to fight against the “retrograde policies” of the present government. “The BJP government may have won the electoral battle but not the social or the political one. We want all communist parties to come together. We will have to rework our strategies...,” he said.

Raja was unanimously chosen as Reddy’s successor at a meeting of the CPI National Council, the top decision-making body of the party, earlier this week.