Kerala may be a small coastal state spread across the Western coast but the political situation here is unparalleled in comparison to any other region of the country.The state being number one in literacy is an too old thing to cherish as by and large it has no significance to the typical on goings throughout the year.
In a way the accomplishment of boasting cent percent literates,more than adding quality to the lifestyle has only contributed in a negative manner if you happen to glance over incidents of political killings and never ending list of controversies.
Even many decades back Swami Vivekananda wondered as to how the visionary and religious personality Lord Shankaracharya took birth in the ‘insane’ land.Such utterances of great people may not augur well with Malayali speaking people also popularly referred as Mallus.But the recent catastrophes in the form of landslips,landslides,tremors,marooning of large tracts of land as a result of excessive rainfall and releasing huge proportion of water in order to save the dams doesn’t give any indication that the Keralites are far better than the rest of population of the country.
And when it comes to politics they continue to remain the worst possible human beings and are in close competition with their comrades of West Bengal and Tripura.
The only difference perhaps is that while the Communist parties have become redundant in the Eastern and North Eastern state they continue to remain a formidable force here.
A lot of hue and cry is generated during different intervals of the year here as both right wing and left wing activists are continuously butchered like flies and pests!Kannur,the home district of the present Chief Minister holds the dubious distinction of being a ‘killing field’!
In fact the neighboring Kasargod district bordering South Canara(Mangaluru) district of Karnataka is no better as it’s also equally volatile with enough sporadic violent incidents throughout the year.
Apart from the Mallus migrating across the globe in search of green pastures,these days many of them have also become notorious enough by indulging in anti national activities.Many of them have joined terrorist outfits like the ISIS and some of them are also reportedly slained.Although the Bharatiya Janata Party has been struggling since long to have its own public representatives in the state Assembly and Parliament it hasn’t been successful the way it’s aiming for.
The Bharatiya Janata Party may have been successful in wresting Tripura from the clutches of comrades just like Didi could do so in West Bengal.But its plight is paradoxically diverse in Kerala.
But for the initial few decades after the state came into existence Congress by and large has remained restricted as the major partner of a group of parties just like the Communist Party of India(Marxist) continuing to lead the other smaller left outfits.
If the Bharatiya Janata Party has managed to surge ahead by taking Trinmool Congress(TMC) head on in West Bengal and enjoys the distinction of coming second in many constituencies it’s altogether an opposite situation in Kerala.
In spite of both United Democratic Front(UDF) led by the Congress and Left Democratic Front(LDF) under the captaincy of Comrades walk and remain together in the Parliament,back home in Kerala they continue to remain sworn enemies.
All the elections here are bitterly fought among the two main contenders while it hasn’t been possible for the BJP to elevate itself from the third position so far although its vote share has been increasing gradually over a period of time.
For instance the May 2014 Parliamentary polls in Kasargod, also having the dominance of Kannada speaking people in some pockets, the straight fight was between CPI(M) and Indian National Congress and turned out to be a neck to neck fight.
P Karunakaran of the CPI(M) polled 3,84,964 votes and defeated T Siddique of the Congress by a slender margin of 6,921 votes whereas K Surendran of the BJP remained far behind by being pushed to the third position.
Though the BJP’s vote share increased by 2.93 percent in comparison to the previous Lok Sabha polls the 1,72,826 votes polled by the party candidate remained abysmal to the votes polled by the main rival contestants.
So it goes without saying that the path to victory for the saffron party is nothing else but a Herculean task and it only needs to be seen if it has grown in leaps and bounds in the last five years to register a maiden win?
In comparison to Kasargod BJP appears to be far behind in the adjoining Kannur Lok Sabha constituency if you were to take into cognizance the votes polled by individual candidates last time.
PK Sreemathi Teacher won the constituency to the CPI(M) by bagging 4,27,622 and defeated K Sudhakaran of the congress by a slender margin of 6,566 votes while PC Mohanan Master of the Bharatiya Janata Party although came third by electoral parameters could get only 51,636 votes.
And if you expect the BJP candidate to romp to victory here you may also have to ponder about the uphill task all along the route.
Perhaps Thiruvananthapuram is one constituency in the whole state where the prospects of BJP look too bright and it may not be a big surprise if the party manages to wrest it from Shashi Tharoor,MP from the constituency twice.
For the first time in 2009 Shashi Tharoor,former diplomat turned politician won in the constituency on a Congress ticket by a whopping margin of 99,998 votes defeating P Ramachandran Nair,his nearest CPI rival.
However PK Krishna Das of the BJP remained far behind by occupying the fourth place and garnering only 84,094 votes.It was quite an opposite turn of developments in the subsequent elections.In 2014 Shashi Tharoor just managed to sail by a margin of 15,470 votes defeating O Rajagopal of the Bharatiya Janata Party in a triangular contest.
The position of the BJP looks very optimistic in Thiruvananthapuram provided triangular elections are held.But there is also a catch in this so called three cornered fight for the ensuing elections.If the local sources are to be believed,by and large the talk of triangular contest is only meant to be for public consumption.These sources confide that there’s already been a ‘match fixing’ by now.
According to them although the ruling LDF has announced its nominees for all the 20 Lok Sabha constituencies in the state long back it’s merely formal in most of them.In that situation even the rosy picture for the BJP may turn out to be bitter later.
Manohar Yadavatti
