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Thiruvananthapuram: A year after he stormed back to power with an impressive tally, Kerala Chief Minister and Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI-M) stalwart Pinarayi Vijayan is facing his worst ever image crisis.
It all started with the defeat in the assembly by-election at Thrikkakara, in Ernakulam district, which saw the hubris of the CPI(M) leadership playing out brazenly. This was followed by a barrage of allegations unleashed by the sensational ‘diplomatic channel’ gold smuggling case accused Swapna Suresh, directly targeting the Chief Minister and his family. Swapna’s allegations still continue to shake the state’s political architecture, providing much-needed ammunition to the main opposition Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF), and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Thrikkakara by-election would have passed off as a minor event in the state politics, but for the costly strategic blunder committed by the over-confident CPI(M) leadership. In 2021 assembly polls, Thrikkakara withstood the Left Democratic Front (LDF) wave. Congress’s P T Thomas, who enjoyed the reputation of being a clean and forthright politician, had won the seat with a comfortable margin. Thomas died a few months later, after battling cancer.
Though a divided house, the state unit of the Congress was unanimous in choosing Thomas’s widow Uma Thomas as the UDF candidate for the by-poll. Like her late husband, Uma too enjoys an unsullied reputation, though she had largely kept away from the hustle and bustle of day-to-day politics.
Thrikkakara, an urban seat that encompasses large swathes of Kerala’s commercial hub Kochi, has traditionally been a Congress stronghold. Due to its socio- economic and demographic features, the Left had always found it hard to breach the Congress’s stranglehold. Though the Congress still suffers from organisational weaknesses and crisis of confidence after the drubbing in state polls, its leaders knew that sympathy for Uma would be an overriding factor in favour of the party.
What went utterly wrong with the CPI(M) was that it miscalculated that all plus-points that the Congress enjoys could be upset by organisational might and money power. The campaign saw the chief minister and almost all his cabinet members joining the top party functionaries in overseeing the electioneering that rolled out to every nook and cranny of the constituency.
The party had narrowed in on Jo Joseph, a cardiac surgeon of a Catholic-church run hospital as its candidate. Obviously, communal considerations played a part in the selection. ‘’Let us hit a century’ was the tagline of the campaign, a call to raise the LDF’s strength to 100 from the present 99 in the 140-member house.
The issues hotly debated in the campaign included the semi-high speed rail project Silver Line, touted as the flagship project by the government. The social impact survey, carried out as part of the project, has generated widespread protests from people who fear that they would lose home and hearth if it is implemented.
Till the counting of votes moved to its second round, the self-deluded CPI(M) bigwigs believed that the seat was theirs.
But by the end of the day, it turned out to be a humiliating rout for the party. Uma Thomas came out in flying colours with a high margin of over 25,000 votes, an unusually high tally given Kerala’s highly competitive political ecosystem.
Though the CPI(M) leadership is yet to concede that it had unwisely hyped the by-poll, the ranks are rankling with the feeling that if the party ran a normal campaign and lost the humiliation would not have been so glaring. The victory in the keenly fought by-poll victory, one the other hand, came as a morale booster for the Congress, which has been in low spirits after the 2021 rout.
While the party is struggling to recover from the by-poll humiliation, the dormant gold smuggling case has returned to haunt. Swapna Suresh, one of the accused in the case, dropped a bombshell alleging that no less a person than the chief minister was aware of all the shady deals that happened. Before going public, she had given a statement under Section 164 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) to the PMLA court concerned. Many of her allegations are directly aimed at the chief minister and his family, whose veracity is yet to be proved.
As expected, the party has closed ranks and rallied behind the 77-year-old Pinarayi Vijayan. The party leaders blare, in high decibel rhetoric, that there is not an iota of truth in these allegations. They assert that the ‘Sangh Parivar’ is behind the move, since Swapna is now an employee of a pro-RSS NGO. They also accuse the Congress of turning the issue into a ruse to reconfigure the decrepit alliance it leads.
Swapna’s allegations have triggered massive protests by the UDF across the state. The Congress, as the lead partner of the front, is determined to keep the street-show running, as it proves to be an excellent drill to reconfigure the long-dormant ranks.
In the latest turn, Swapna has been issued notice by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to come for questioning, based on her 164 statements. Much will depend upon what the investigation agency will decide after grilling her later this week.
