Kerala polls: A campaign marked by spite and bitterness

Kerala seems to be entrapped in one of the most bitter and spiteful election campaigns in recent history, one in which people's issues are submerged and vicious targeting of individual politicians and rancorous political disputes have come to the fore.

The latest in a series of flourishing controversies is a complaint filed before a magistrate's court by Ms Latika Subhash, the Congress(I) candidate at Malampuzha, alleging that her rival candidate, the Chief Minister, Mr V.S. Achuthanadan, had cast aspersions on her character while speaking at the Palakkad Press Club on Tuesday.

Sonia slams LDF govt

Even Ms Sonia Gandhi, on a day's tour in Kerala on Wednesday, launched her campaign from Haripad, in south Kerala, with an unusually fierce attack against the Left Democratic Front (LDF) Government: “The LDF has raised its fingers towards others (on the issue of corruption). But they are steeped in corruption. Scam after scam has taken place under their government. Their government has been destroyed by liquor, land and lottery syndicates and these gangs have actually ruled in these rural areas.”

The verdict in 2006 had tilted in favour of the LDF mainly as a result of the infighting within the ruling Congress(I), a sex scandal involving the Muslim League leader, Mr P.K. Kunhalikkutty, which dominated the campaign, and a string of anti-incumbency factors against the UDF Government. It was also a result of the triumph of the crusader Opposition Leader, Mr Achuthanadan, within his own party, the CPI(M), and the instant popularity he acquired in the State as a result.

The LDF won 98 out of the total 140 seats then, and Mr Achuthanandan himself emerged at the helm of that victory, to lead an LDF Cabinet dominated by his party rivals — a sure recipe for political disaster, as the Congress(I) and the UDF had amply proved earlier.

Waning enthusiasm

Without doubt, people's enthusiasm for Mr Achuthanandan and the Government led by him waned within the first three years, mainly as a result of the factionalism within the CPI(M). Despite the government initiating a number of welfare and development measures targeting the poor, its key message, arguably, of offering better governance than the previous UDF Government, never really reached the people.

In the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, therefore, the UDF won 16 of the total 20 Parliament seats in Kerala. The CPI(M) itself lost 10 of the 14 seats it contested. In the local body elections that followed in October 2010, the UDF won 509 of the 804 grama panchayats, 92 of the 148 block panchayats, eight of the 14 district panchayats, 25 of the 37 municipalities and two of the five corporations.

Such unambiguous verdicts were widely seen as a sign of what awaited the ruling coalition in the Assembly elections that were to follow too.

Regaining ground

Yet, in the run up to the April 13 election, the LDF had been able to regain a lot of ground, thanks to a rash of scandals against several Opposition Leaders, the re-emergence of Mr Achuthanandan, once again as the crusading champion of the LDF election machine, and the poll-eve power struggles and seat sharing controversies that erupted within the Congress(I) and the Opposition coalition.

If the prospect of the ruling LDF coming back to power seemed out of the question soon after the Lok Sabha and local body elections, many felt, therefore, that it was not so on the eve of the Assembly elections. Once again, as the campaign began, Mr Achuthanadan, fresh from his second victory in the party, began to attract huge crowds at LDF meetings as he repeated his litany of charges against Opposition leaders, ridiculed them for their criminal indulgences and toyed with the possibility of sending some more of them to prison.

Controversies galore

The fresh disclosures in the 15-year-old ‘ice-cream parlour sex scandal case', the subject of an ongoing police inquiry, were not made by the LDF or its leaders at all. They tumbled out at the initiative of Mr Kunhalikkutty himself, who in a do-or-die gamble of spoiling its impact, had convened a press conference on January 28 to claim that some people were out to create false evidence and discredit him further on the issue and that he had received some death threats too.

It was a shrewd move that forced his opponents to make the disclosures much earlier, rather than just before the elections, when their impact on the UDF campaign would have been devastating. Among the important new allegations were that the judiciary too had been influenced through bribes to obtain favourable verdicts for Mr Kunhalikkutty in the ice-cream parlour case.

Barely had its implications sunk in, when, just before the election process began, Kerala Congress leader Mr R. Balakrishna Pillai, too, was sentenced to a year's prison term by the Supreme Court in a 25-year-old corruption case. The Apex Court also reopened another sensational corruption case in which another senior UDF politician, T.M.Jacob, was earlier an accused. And, through some seemingly innocuous arguments in their own defence, two of the accused persons in the controversial Palmolein case, including a former Congress Minister, put the Opposition Leader Mr Oommen Chandy too in a spot, implying that he too, as the then Finance Minister, had been aware of the details of the controversial import deal.

An anti-corruption court subsequently accepted the State Vigilance department's claim that there were sufficient additional reasons to investigate the Palmolein import case further, in what seemed to be a perfect political trap laid out for Mr Chandy, allegedly by invisible hands within his own party.

Achuthanandan's role

What was politically significant in all this was the tenacious role played by Mr Achuthanandan over the years in trying to expose the culprits in all these cases. The poll-eve commotion that followed, therefore, surely put the Opposition on the defensive. It also brought the double-edged issue of morality in public life to the core of this election campaign.

From then on, at every opportunity, the Opposition began pouncing on the Chief Minister with a series of allegations against his son, Mr Arun Kumar, a government employee. The UDF also continued to target the CPI(M) State Secretary, Mr Pinarayi Vijayan, in the SNC Lavalin Case, several other CPI(M) leaders for their alleged links with “the lottery mafia”, and Mr P. Sasi, the former Kannur district secretary of the party, for his alleged misdemeanours, perhaps, as a counter to the LDF campaign in the ice-cream parlour case.

Pre-poll surveys

The pre-poll surveys conducted so far have all brought out evidence of a seemingly contradictory trend in the results.

They indicate a higher rating for Mr Achuthanadan as the preferred candidate for the Chief Minister's post, but, at the same time, predict a UDF victory in this election.

The decisive question in Kerala would be whether the Achuthanadandan factor and allegations against Opposition leaders alone be enough for the LDF to overcome the negative issues that had led to its poor showing in the elections to the Lok Sabha and the local bodies, the latter held only a few months ago.

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