Thiruvananthapuram, Aug 10 (IANS) Three months should ordinarily be enough time for a political party to finish licking its wounds, bury its dead and start planning the next battle.
Not the CPI(M), it seems. The Kerala unit is still trying to understand how the political equivalent of a supposedly certain train journey ended up at the wrong station.
The Pinarayi Vijayan-led Left went into the Assembly elections convinced that history was waiting to be rewritten, with a third consecutive term.
Instead, voters rewrote the script themselves, reducing the LDF from a formidable 99 seats to a humble 35 in the 140-member Assembly.
The BJP, meanwhile, returned to the House with three seats after being wiped out in 2021.
But that was not the part that really made the CPI(M) uncomfortable. The real sting came from within.
Three CPI(M) stalwarts managed to retain their seats after the Congress-led UDF, in a generous display of political magnanimity, decided not to put up candidates against them.
Two of those victories came in Kannur, the political backyard of former Chief Minister Vijayan himself.
That was perhaps the moment when the fortress walls began looking a little less formidable.
The state leadership has since attempted the familiar political exercise of explaining away defeat without quite explaining the defeat.
However, this time, the questions have travelled beyond the state committee room.
The national leadership, with general secretary M.A. Baby among those raising uncomfortable questions, has ensured that Vijayan’s leadership cannot simply be parked outside the review meeting.
Therein lies the problem. For years, questioning Vijayan inside the party was almost akin to questioning the weather in Kannur. Now, suddenly, there is a forecast.
The Vijayan camp, however, is not sitting idle. Its social-media machinery has gone into overdrive, picking apart every move of the new V.D. Satheesan government.
The floods, administrative lapses and every available controversy have been pressed into service to revive an increasingly familiar refrain: “Only if Vijayan were still there…”
Nostalgia, it appears, has become the latest political survival strategy.
All this assumes greater significance ahead of the CPI(M)’s extended three day State Committee meeting next month, when the electoral disaster gets the microscope treatment.
The big question is no longer whether the defeat will be reviewed.
It is whether the review will review Vijayan.
For the man who once seemed politically untouchable, that may be the most uncomfortable question of all.
–IANS
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