Last month, Tejas, a newspaper based in Kerala’s Malabar region published the results of a political survey. It made two points: if the Left Democratic Front (LDF) continued with V S Achyuthanandan as chief minister, it could get up to 76 of the 140 seats in the Kerala Assembly elections on April 13; and the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) was not as comfortably placed as it was about three months ago.
The reason: Kerala Police last month registered a case against P K Kunhalikutty, former minister and general secretary of the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), a partner of the Congress-led UDF coalition, in the ice-cream parlour sex scandal (a brothel in Kozhikode that used an ice-cream shop as front office about eight years ago that Kunhalikutty allegedly used to frequent). With this police action, based on a directive from the Home Department, the Congress-led coalition, which had been tipped to win the Assembly election, has been pushed into the defensive. In 2006 the case, which involved a minor girl, went right up to the Supreme Court and was closed. Now, Kunhalikutty’s relative Rauf (his wife and Kunhalikutty’s wife are sisters) has said two high court judges were paid off. True or not, the IUML – and the Congress – is battling these charges.
Another former state power minister, Kerala Congress leader R Balakrishnan Pillai was awarded one year rigorous imprisonment by the Supreme Court (overturning acquittal orders passed by the high court) in the Idamalayar dam corruption case. The court ruled that the former minister entered into a criminal conspiracy under which contracts were awarded at extraordinarily high rates, causing the Kerala State Electricity Board (KSEB) a loss of over Rs 2 crore.
And now there are murmurs that the principal Congress contender for chief ministership, Oommen Chandy, must be held responsible for the palmolein import case, which has engulfed the Central Vigilance Commissioner. Chandy was finance minister at that time. The loudest clamour that Chandy must own up to culpability in the case is coming from the Congress.
This is part of the problem. Way back when the Congress in Kerala was essentially run by two men and their groups – A K Antony and K Karunakaran – Congress President Sonia Gandhi decided another pole was needed and implicitly recognised Chandy as the third. But now Karunakaran is dead, Antony is pushing for an altogether new candidate for chief ministership (Maharashtra Governor K Sankaranarayanan, who was finance minister in Antony’s government from 2001 to 2004) and the party has developed six groups.
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However, Chandy continues to be the front runner to lead the Assembly elections and though the gap between the winning UDF – in keeping with Kerala’s tradition of voting in the Opposition – and the LDF will be narrow, the odds are in favour of Chandy.
What sort of man is he?
The trivial stuff first. His wife Mariamma, an officer with the Canara Bank, is his personal barber. Chandy allows his hair to be trimmed only when he is sleeping or reading the morning newspaper. He is very particular that the hair cut should stop as soon as he gets up. So he ends up with quite a few hair-cutting sessions a month.
He is enormously popular. In fact, when he was chief minister of Kerala, his colleague and rival Ramesh Chennithala led the campaign that he must stop meeting people and attend to work in the secretariat — he just cannot say no to anyone. In this he is different from his erstwhile mentor A K Antony, who, while being in the public eye, is a much more private person. Chandy was Antony’s chosen successor and long-time lieutenant. But later he became a silent critic of Antony’s unpopular and unpredictably idealistic political positions.
A former bureaucrat who worked with him wrote in his autobiography that Chandy is a details man. When he was finance minister, the two happened to travel together on the same flight and discussed details of agricultural financing. Three months later, a few days before the Budget, Chandy called the bureaucrat to hold a few more rounds of discussion on how this could be done.
Kerala has been a financially troubled state. The Vallarpadam Trans-shipment Terminal, Vizhinjam Port, Smart City, Metro Rail, Capital City Development, Kerala State Transport Project, Sabarimala Master Plan, Kannur International Airport and Trivandrum International Airport are all projects Chandy took up when he was either finance minister (1991-94) or chief minister (2004-06). Some materialised, some didn’t. But Chandy went about all of them methodically.
However, he couldn’t find the will to take tough measures. As chief minister, he led Kerala on the path to savage power sector reforms. These included strengthening the energy audit, enhancing the anti-power theft squads, bringing down transmission and distribution losses from around 31 per cent in 2001-02 to 23 per cent in April 2006, reducing the KSEB workforce from 32,000 to 25,000 in five years, and the swapping of high-cost debt. Consequently, KSEB reduced the revenue gap from Rs 1,316.43 crore in 2001-02 to Rs 144.58 crore in 2005-06. Upgradation of equipment should have followed. Instead, the government announced tariff reduction for domestic and commercial consumers.
So if Chandy is prepared to be tough this time, Kerala will take it. Otherewise, there’s always Achyuthanandan.