The ruling dispensation in Kerala had lost two by-elections in as many years and the Chengannur bypoll was truly the litmus test. Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan had no qualms in sticking his neck out and saying so unequivocally in an interaction with this newspaper early last month. It turned out on Thursday this was not a case of misplaced bravado as the CPM candidate Saji Cherian returned a record victory margin of almost 21,000 votes while decimating the opposition.
Sure, one could argue two years is a rather short period for the anti-incumbency sentiment to kick in. As a corollary, the same argument could be extended to, say, four years is perhaps a more appropriate period for what is akin to a marital seven-year-itch to set in with the electorate and start feeling dissatisfied with the elected office holders.
Maybe all that is true; perhaps not all of it is right, it is a kaleidoscope of truths, half-truths and outright lies. People do eventually see through mere sloganeering, no matter if it is ‘We will make everything right’ or ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas’. That is unless such turns of words and phrases are backed with real action.
Now, the task is cut out for the NDA government to hold fort in the last few months as its government hits the home stretch. It is going to be an even more onerous task for the LDF government to keep it going for another three years.
There is no denying the presence of dark clouds that had started gathering over the horizon. Try for size a clutch of cases that reeked of police atrocity, apathy and the sudden outbreak of the killer Nipah virus in north Kerala and the mood was rather stark in the run-up to the Chengannur polls.
Yet, the Kerala Chief Minister has been able to steer his government into the third year on a winning note. Sure, there are now theories and counter-theories being spun out on divisions within the Congress ranks, the BJP’s inability to hold on to its allies and the CPM wooing votes on the basis of caste and religion. So, what is new here as we have heard all these excuses and accusations many times over?
At a time when there is a visible consolidation of the anti-BJP parties at the national level, quite reminiscent of the days of the anti-Congress plank not too long ago, the fight for that position in Kerala has clearly gone to the CPM-led LDF. In effect, that pushes the Congress into an unenviable position of a junior partner in the southern state, a position it seems to have already come to terms with, in many other states.
The Congress-led UDF seems to have played right into the hands of the LDF by peddling a soft-Hindutva line. Result: A good number of Muslim and Christian voters now seem to be moving out of the ‘safe’ Congress camp to gravitate towards the new champion of the minorities. In other words, the CPM has succeeded in transporting the Chengannur electorate back to a state of mind which existed during the 2016 Assembly election days.
Perhaps, this is part of a larger play at the national level by the Congress to reclaim the shrinking space at the centre in the political spectrum by expanding to the right, the space where the Indian voters have been occupying in recent times. During the recently-concluded Karnataka polls, Congress president Rahul Gandhi had hit the campaign trail with numerous stops at temples to woo the Hindu votes. As the results showed, this line was not swallowed hook, line and sinker by the voters.
With political expediency taking off from where ideologies stop, the experiments are getting bolder by the day. What else can define the swing in the sanctity of sloganeering that was once defined by Congress-Mukt-Bharat to BJP-Mukt-Bharat, all in a matter of a few years? Meanwhile, the Narendra Modi government’s attempts to woo the people of Kerala with quite a few plum postings, the latest being governorship to its state president, seemed to have drawn a blank. Can’t really blame the national leadership for wondering what more it can do to get the state’s electorate to respond.
Can it be that the Kerala electorate, by not being persuaded by the nationalist discourse that swayed much of the country, right from north to south and from east to west, is once again going to be proven the harbinger of things to come? Just as it did by ushering in a new era of coalition politics decades before a good number of states got persuaded by its advantages of the realpolitik kind. One really will have to wait and see how effectively a real rainbow coalition of multiple political persuasions can trigger pain for the Hindu hriday samrat. And it’s anybody’s call as to how, given such a short gestation period for an alignment of forces for those on either side of the political divide.
Meanwhile, in retrospect, when the Chengannur results are viewed as a sub-text of the pan-India by-poll results, we get to realise how nuanced the word ‘referendum’ really is. To sum up, we have on one side a two-year-old government that has been racked with many controversies, the worst of them showing the state police in poor light. The flip side is a four-year-old government at the Centre that till very recently could not make a wrong move, despite some serious miscalculations like the note-ban that had the public clutching their hair in sheer despair.
No doubt the Indian polity will witness some major upheavals before we get to see the formation of the 17th Lok Sabha in less than a year’s time. It may not be as turbulent for the voters of Kerala, as a good percentage of them seem comfortable to be on one side of the political divide. Unless something drastic happens and this equipoise becomes a thing of the past. Unlikely. But then in political lexicon, there is no word called unlikely.
Vinod Mathew
Resident Editor, Kerala
Email: vinodmathew@newindianexpress.com