Is anti-incumbency working against Pinarayi?

John Cheeran
17 May 2014, 02:58 PM IST

Considering the outright rejection of Congress and UPA across India, chief minister Oommen Chandy and KPCC president V M Sudheeran can console themselves for avoiding a rout and keeping the party intact in the state.

The Congress had to battle anti-incumbency both at the Centre and state.The fact that UPA's six ministers from the state, five of them Congressmen, in the fray – Shashi Tharoor (Thiruvananthapuram), K V Thomas (Ernakulam), K C Venugopal (Alappuzha), Kodikunnil Suresh (Mavelikkara), Mullapally Ramachandran (Vadakara) and E Ahamed (Malappuram) - have won is important.

What saved the day for Chandy, who had turned this election into a referendum on the performance of his government, was the fear of Narendra Modi among minorities and the anti-incumbency mood against CPI(M) state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan (who is leading the party since 1998) among non-partisan voters.

Despite winning an additional seat (LDF has won four seats more) compared to 2009, for the CPM the results have come as a dampener since it reveals the party's inability to turn the nationwide anti-UPA mood into votes. Remember, CPM lost Vadakara, despite a 'faction-less' party and V S Achuthanandan's new-found bonhomie with Vijayan.

It's clear that UDF received the support of Christian and Muslim communities apart from retaining its goodwill among upper caste Hindus. But Chandy would do well to remember that the minority support comes with a caveat — defeats in Kannur, Idukki, Chalakudy and Thrissur prove they can be tough bargainers.

The big message is, however, that Modi's version of Hindutva is ready to swamp the state's traditional Hindu parties - CPM and CPI. In six constituencies – Thiruvananthapuram, Pathanamthitta, Kasaragod, Palakkad, Kozhikode and Thrissur - BJP logged more than one lakh votes and in three others – Ernakulam, Chalakudy and Attingal - it crossed the 90,000 mark. In Thiruvananthapuram, O Rajagopal almost pulled off the impossible, logging 2,82,336 votes to finish an impressive second.

LDF had played the 'minority' card across the state – it had fielded 10 minority candidates compared to UDF's nine. And the Hindu backlash is evident, especially, in Thiruvananthapuram and Pathanamthitta. Lowering the Left guard as they did would have disastrous consequences for Communist parties in the long run.

CPM's second setback is its failure to defeat first, N K Premachandran, and RSP in Kollam. The loss is not merely that of a politburo member, but the party's political antenna consistently picking up the wrong signals.Another interesting pointer emerges from Ponnani where Muslim League struggled to win. E Mohammad Bashir's margin of victory has come down from 82,864 to 25,410, thanks to splinter Muslim groups and the growing presence of BJP.

The large number of first-time, young voters have not changed the entrenched political equations in the state, at least for now. Aam Aadmi Party's first tryst with Malayalis has been disastrous when one considers that non-political Anita Pratap managed more votes in Ernakulam (51,517) than the anti-corporate, neo-Left, feminist litterateur and culturally sensitive Sara Joseph in Thrissur (44,638). May be there are more politicians in Kerala than Aam Aadmis.