Oommen Chandy’s New Job

Posted: Sunday, Sep 05, 2004 at 0000 hrs IST
Updated: Sunday, Sep 05, 2004 at 0000 hrs IST

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: For the first time in the last three decades, Kerala has decided to venture beyond the charmed AK (A K Antony and K Karunakaran) circle in its date with Congress chief ministers. For better or worse, Oommen Chandy, who dons their mantle, cannot escape comparison with either Antony or Karunakaran.

Ironically, the first to realise the comparison question was the outgoing CM. “Chandy will succeed in delivering everything that I have failed,” was Antony’s Parthian shot as his ‘once-closest friend’ was identified as his successor.

The 60-year-old is in many ways like Karunakaran and Antony — even though both have been opposites in functioning styles. Chandy is not idolised as Mr Clean like Antony but at the same time his ministerial tenures were never littered in litigation like those of Karunakaran. If unlike Karunakaran or Antony, the new CM is a relative dark horse to national politics, it is because power was never his trip: “I am content in my public life,” he says.

Chandy, who lost the CM’s chair by a whisker to Antony in 1996, had been the grassroots campaigner, the lobbyist with forces close to the high command and political troubleshooter who put an end to Karunakaran’s controversy-ridden tenure in early 90s, facilitating a parachute entry for Antony from his Cabinet posting at the Centre. In fact, it was his gung-ho risk-exposure to all and sundry as the party’s resource person that came in between. The son of Puthupally village, however, not has shaken off his rustic next-door image. In austerity, he can better Antony himself. The day after he took charge, he dropped the CM’s police escort. Security is further distraught since he has also thrown open all the Secretariat doors to the public.

However the real tests lie ahead as the state’s development inheritance ties his hands backwards. Kerala tops the country in unemployment with 40 lakh job-seekers. Compared to other emerging south Indian states, the consumer-state is a business laggard. Its Global Investor Meet held two years before, slated to bring Rs 50,000 crore in five years, has so far brought less than Rs 90-crore investment. It was obviously a late wake-up to the fact that Kerala badly needed a snap shift of gears to an investment-driven, employment-generating mode.

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