THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Political life has never been a cakewalk for Kudumbakudi Sudhakaran. Coming from Kannur, the Communist fortress, Sudhakarn’s political life is marked by tough challenges and even tougher fights. His daredevil approach and the tit-for-tat style, which haven’t gone down well with other leaders in the Congress, earned him a strong base of supporters in the party.
K Sudhakaran started his political career by organising KSU in Government Brennen College, Thalassery, when Pinarayi Vijayan was leading the Kerala Student Federation in the same college. There had been tussles between both leaders in the college which often got re-enacted in our political theatre. The latest was Sudhakaran’s casteist slur against Vijayan during the election campaign and the retort with the sportsman spirit by the latter. Both 77-year-old Pinarayi Vijayan and 73-year-old K Sudhakaran, who belong to Ezhava community, have dominated the politics of Kannur for several decades before Pinarayi shifted his base to the capital in the late 1990s.
As a student and youth leader, Sudhakaran was not impressed by the dynastic politics of Congress. When the party split in 1969, he joined the Organisational Congress along with senior leaders who had opposed Indira Gandhi. When the Janata wave swept the country post-Emergency, Sudhakaran who had been the state president of Youth Congress (O) snapped ties with the Organisational Congress and joined the Janata Party and later the splinter group Janata (G). It was K Karunakaran who brought Sudhakaran back to Congress in 1984.
In the Kannur Congress, Sudhakaran filled the vacuum of a leader who was daring enough to take on CPM which had been using muscle power to gain total control over the region. He had slowly built a cadre party and even trained workers in weaponry. There were intelligence reports that Sudhakaran had stocked bombs in the Kannur DCC office. Political fights continued unabated in the district with the leader assuring the cadre that an eye for an eye was not a bad strategy.
When there were organisational elections in 1991, Sudhakaran contested to become the president of Kannur DCC. Resembling the current scenario, both ‘A’ and ‘I’ groups tried all their cards to get Sudhakaran defeated. But, local leaders from the grass roots forgot their group affiliations and rooted for Sudhakaran. The killing of CPM leader Nalpadi Vasu allegedly by the gunman of Sudhakaran when he was the DCC chief had triggered a political storm.
While senior Congress leaders in Kerala had nurtured safe constituencies from where they were repeatedly elected, Sudhakaran chose to take on CPM in their bastion. His debut election was from Edakkad, the birth place of A K Gopalan, in 1982. He tasted defeat in Thalassery and Edakkad before registering a hattrick of victories from Kannur from 1996. During the AK Antony government of 2001-04, Sudhakaran served as the forest minister. He won the Lok Sabha polls from Kannur in 2009 and 2019 but lost in 2014.
When party workers of Kasaragod wanted him to contest and win the Udma seat during the 2016 assembly poll, Sudhakaran took up that gamble and tasted defeat. The leader, however, said an emphatic ‘no’ when outgoing Congress state president Mullappally Ramachandran asked him to take on Pinarayi in Dharmadom this year. By that time, he knew well that the better strategy would be to wait till his time came.
