As this poll season ends, the country’s west coast has shed any residual semblance of the left coast. No voter was even trying to look left or right in Maharashtra where multiple parties were doing denatured politics. Further south on the coastline in Kerala it was still possible to tell the left from the right till the other day.
All distinctions vanished a couple of weeks ago right in the middle of the campaign. Till then the most attention-grabbing contest in the state was Priyanka Gandhi’s one-sided fight in Wayanad Lok Sabha constituency vacated by her brother Rahul. Two other by-polls to the state assembly in Chelakkara and Palakkad were supposed to run on expected lines. It was the same old drill of fighting each other for the CPI(M) and Congress-led coalitions with an eye on the BJP-led NDA, a bigger player in Palakkad.
In Kerala, which has since the 1970s enjoyed a broadly bipolar coalition politics, Palakkad town and its suburbs have stood out as the most triangularised electoral space. The RSS has long been a factor here and the BJP a significant vote catcher, often enough to tilt the polls. In the last assembly election, the BJP ran a maximised campaign fielding Metroman E Sreedharan from here. It took the vastly resourceful and popular Shafi Parambil of Congress to manage a narrow win, pushing the Left to the third position.
This time the CPI(M) was expected to do something out of the box to avenge the slight but it sprang an underwhelming surprise. It decided not to field its own candidate in a region that was once a safe zone for any candidate including parachuting stalwarts like AK Gopalan, EK Nayanar and VS Achuthanandan. The place has long ceased to be a Left bastion but the party still counts, enough to run its own candidate. Instead, it chose to back Dr P Sarin, a freshly minted Congress deserter who walked across just in time to file papers as an independent.
A medical graduate who left the Indian Audit & Accounts service to join politics, Sarin was among the two young stars presented on behalf of the Professional Congress by Shashi Tharoor in 2021 at a town hall meeting in neighbouring Ottapalam. Sarin was then the assembly candidate and the other new face introduced with much fanfare as a key tech resource was Anil Antony, AK Antony’s son. Anil has since joined the BJP and now it was Sarin’s turn to switch — within the secular INDIA bloc, if it is any comfort.
The Left party, with a formidable legacy in these parts, ran a high-voltage campaign for a candidate contesting not even under the party symbol. The good doctor had to settle for the apolitical stethoscope, however befitting. The hammer, sickle and star wasn’t there on the EVMs and this could matter in a close contest. Old-time loyalists would have groped for the readily recognisable thumbnail. More glaringly, the classic Communist birthmark was notably absent on poll posters. You had to look for the symbol in the red flags and festoons that surround the poster. What went missing from the wall poster was not just the symbol but the party itself and in this highly politicised state, this could mark the end of much that is familiar.
The rivals, Congress and BJP, who were flaunting their symbols, were doing so with no greater conviction. Congress picked a non-local candidate, Rahul Mamkootathil, yet to find broad acceptance within. In the famously factionalised state party, he is seen as part of a new strident youth wing in a hurry to replace the old guard. Ironically, the BJP seemed to have produced the same outcome by doing exactly the opposite. The party couldn’t have found a more locally connected candidate. C Krishna Kumar is a familiar face with a long public record in the municipality at the end of which he has even less inner party acceptance than his Congress rival.
The three major parties were projecting candidates not to necessarily win but to pass the buck in case of defeat, cut losses and run. With the winnable BJP at work, what the other two dread most is the third position. This Number Three Trauma drove their campaign more than any urge to win. All sides seemed to follow the same event management template. There was saturation publicity. You couldn’t swing the camera in the town to find a frame without a candidate on a hoarding, billboard or poster. Often all three faces crowded into your frame. All three looking equally young and photoshopped and smiling uniformly toothy smiles from every neighbourhood.
The sameness was getting tiresome when the season’s second sensational crossover happened to perk up the campaign. Sandeep Varier, a prominent BJP face on TV channels, quit the party and the parivar. For someone who constantly underlined his core RSS values, the mid-campaign move couldn’t have looked just opportune. He did air his pent-up grievances against the candidate and the state unit head. This was understandable. The BJP in Kerala is far from faction-mukt.
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Sandeep had to do more. He needed a tougher ideological closure. Here he was helped in no mean measure by the no less ideological Left, which showed a hasty urge in welcoming the sinner if the sin was denounced. The somersault suddenly looked legit. But the thankful acrobat chose Rahul Gandhi’s “mohabbat ki dukan”. He walked in and belonged without as much as a jet lag. Almost instantly, he was paraded in the Congress campaign as a prize catch.
How would voters react if Himanta Biswa Sarma suddenly started talking like Jairam Ramesh? What math prompted the Congress party to risk the considerable Muslim vote in this constituency? This vote is always cast tactically against the BJP and floats between Congress and CPI(M). With candidates floating more freely than the vote, best to wait for the result on 23rd.
Meanwhile, one thing is clear. Kerala has busted some of the distance to Maharashtra. Its major parties are working towards their redundancy.
ep.unny@expressindia.com
