Factionalism has always been the bane of the Congress in Kerala. Come election time, the compromise talks would go on till the eleventh hour at quite a few constituencies before the belated candidate announcement.
This has been the pattern over many election seasons now. The stand-off used to be between the ‘I’ and ‘A’ factions or those pleading allegiance initially to Karunakaran and Antony and then to Ramesh Chennithala and Oommen Chandy camps in the past.
This time, the Congress managed to rub two stalwart leaders, K Muraleedharan and Adoor Prakash the wrong way. Result: The Congress has managed to lose Muraleedharan’s two- time sitting seat Vattiyoorkavu and Prakash’s five-time sitting seat Konni.
To borrow a phrase commonly heard in the past to describe a few Indian cricket teams of yore losing matches from a winning position, the Congress infighting has paved the way for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory -- at least in these two constituencies.
But all such talk cannot take the sheen off the remarkable turnaround in fortunes scripted by Thiruvananthapuram City Corporation Mayor V K Prasanth, whose victory by 14,251 votes almost matched the biggest victory margin by Muraleedharan in 2011. Connecting big time on the social media with his relief and rehabilitation initiatives during the recent floods certainly helped Prasanth.
What makes the victory sweeter for the CPI(M)-led Left is its climb from a third position finish in 2016, when it polled only 40,441 votes, to wiping out both the Congress and BJP at one stroke with 54,782 votes. How these numbers make for interesting reading is the remarkable erosion of 16,275 BJP votes, from 43,700 in 2016 to meagre 27,425 votes this time. As if by poetic justice, the UDF votes fell from 51,322 votes in 2016 to only 40,344 votes this time. Quite a role reversal!
The story is quite different in Konni. For one, it is less complicated as the numbers tell their own story. Winning LDF candidate K U Janeesh Kumar managed to poll 54,099 votes - only 2,047 votes more than 52,052 votes polled by LDF’s R Sanal Kumar in 2016. The Congress, on the other hand, managed to poll only 44,146 votes, which was the result of a massive erosion of 28,674 votes.
Adoor Prakash had polled 72,800 votes in 2016. Not all those votes went the Left way, as is evident from 39,786 votes polled by BJP’s Sabarimala poster boy K Surendran, a remarkable 23,000-odd rise from 16,713 votes polled in 2016.
Stemming the Congress rot in the by-election was the dramatic fight between its perennial second-best finisher Shanimol Usman and the CPI(M)’s Manu Pulickal which at one point threatened to go to a photo finish. If CPI(M) strongman and the lone Left winning candidate in the recent Lok Sabha polls A M Arif polled 84,720 votes, his wannabe successor to the state Assembly could garner only 66,538 votes, and Shanimol, whom Arif edged out in the Lok Sabha elections, took up UDF’s votes to a decisive 68,530 votes, from 46,201 in 2016.
It is widely believed that the Aroor constituency was making amends for letting her down last time, but she would not mind. It also helped that the SNDP community whose NDA candidate polled 27,753 votes in 2016 kept away and the BJP candidate could poll only 16,101 votes this time.
It would appear, as the results go, that the other two constituencies – Ernakulam and Manjeswaram – went pretty much along the expected lines for the UDF. Not quite. In Ernakulam, where Congress candidate Hibi Eden won by almost 22,000 votes in 2016 before moving with an equally comfortable margin to the Lok Sabha this year, Deputy Mayor of Kochi Corporation could manage to win with a margin of 3,750 votes.
One could gloss it over as a direct correlative of an almost 14 per cent drop in polling on account of rain and waterlogging that kept voters away. A more critical explainer would be the sorry state of navigable roads in the state’s business capital leading to voter disenchantment.
And, in Manjeswaram, there was an evident anti-BJP vote consolidation, in all probability triggered by how close K Surendran ran in relation to Muslim League’s late P B Abdul Razak in 2016. Clearly, the 7,923-vote margin by which the present candidate won speaks volumes about the fear of defeat that the BJP could instil in the UDF camp, following the 89-vote margin last time.
The Left is already calling it a 3-3 draw, considering its upset win in Pala recently. The UDF will expect the Congress to try and put its house in order beset as always with infighting – something that may be quite beyond its capability. And the NDA would consider how it can grow beyond only the BJP, if it’s to make a mark in Kerala.
Vinod Mathew is a senior journalist based in Kochi. Views are personal.
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