Despite the discreet handholding from CPI(M) politburo, the rejig in the party’s State Committee has left 85-year old V S Achuthanandan jolted in the Kerala Chief Minister’s chair. In the sheer game of numbers at the four-day state party Congress at Kottayam, the reaffirmed state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan has nearly decimated the VS faction in the constitution of the new state committee.
Some of the 500-odd delegates did not hesitate to blast even the politburo for not seeing VS getting too big for his party boots and allowing him to contest the elections. Prakash Karat retorted that it was after gauging the senior man’s public appeal that the politburo recommended his candidature.
It is understood that, at one point of the election process, Achuthanandan even requested Karat to allow him to step down from the Chief Minister’s chair. This was turned down.
In all kudos to the organisational marksmanship of Vijayan, it was the climax of the Kottayam meet that was ready first. There were no surprise punches. The run-up to the meet through the district committee elections ensured that seven out of eight turning up as the state committee electorate were Vijayan’s men.
These nominees complained that the party gave the go-ahead to the state taking a loan from Asian Development Bank, the Chief Minister took a contrary stand. The senior comrade was also known to throw his Cabinet collegues in bad light, by stirring up dust on non-issues like the land-sale for Cybercity in Kochi, they raged.
For Achuthanandan, one of the oldest living founders of CPI(M), it is his camadarie with West Bengal comrades like Jyoti Basu that had earlier toughweathered many of his skirmishes with Vijayan’s growing organisational muscles. Ironically, it was Achuthanandan who named Vijayan the party’s state secretarty in 1998 for the first time.
Political pundits postulate the emergence of a head of state with hands tied back in the coming days. But then, the CPI(M) octogenerian’s Phoneix track-record rules out any possibility of a lameduck Chief Minister. And its anybody’s guess that the biggest casualty of the tensions unabated is going to be whatever is left of good governance in Kerala.