Is anti-incumbency working against Pinarayi?

By John Cheeran

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.
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Birla, Ambani and Achuthanandan

By John Cheeran
Despite Monsoon, Kerala’s current political climate remains hot. Anti-bourgeoisie grandstanding is a box-office hit there. CPI (M)’s Chief Minister incumbent V.S. Achuthanadan is against the rich and might in Kerala.
Achuthanandan has been declaiming that Ambani’s Reliance will not be welcomed in Kerala to open their retail chain. V S wants to get applause from the thousands of retailers in Kerala who act as obscurantist middlemen as far as consumers are concerned. And these retailers rarely contribute to the tax kitty.
Once Reliance comes to Kerala, these retailers will have to shut their shops, though it will take a long time to happen such a thing. Consumers will and should get a better value from for their money from hypermarkets such as Reliance is planning.
To oppose such business ventures, as Achuthanandan and his acolytes are doing, is not good Communism or good economics. I’m afraid that CPI (M) secretary Pinaryi Vijayan can, for once, see eye-to-eye with his bete noire on handcuffing Anil Ambani.
But is that the course the LDF, and CPI (M) in particular, must be adopting when Kerala is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first democratically elected Communist government in the world?
Let me remind comrades that EMS Namboodiripad as Chief Minister of Kerala in 1957 wooed north Indian industrialists to set shops in the state. EMS always believed in subjecting the society to the hammer blows of industrialization, ostensibly to advance the class struggle. But the point is that EMS also wanted Kerala to prosper and to that end he was willing to set aside puerile dogmas. Comrades did not hesitate to woo the private sector in 1957.
Let me quote from Sarvepalli Gopal’s biography of Jawaharlal Nehru, volume 3.
“Curiously what gave the planning commission concern was that the state government appeared to be unduly favouring the private sector. The Birla group was given permission to set up a wood-pulp plant, and plans were drawn up to invite a private company to construct a refinery for the manufacture of lubricating oil, in contravention of the industrial policy of the Government of India. There was, in fact little that was Communist in the official activities of the state ministry and even the Communist Party disapproved of some provisions of the agreement with the Birla Group.”
Ah, how I wish VS Achuthanandan abandoned his phoney ideological posturing and build on the advantages that Kerala has.