An irate and beleaguered Congress has vowed to keep up the pressure on the government after a stormy season of belligerent Opposition protests against the Navakerala Sadas, public outreach programme of the Cabinet, which concluded in the capital on Saturday.
The party believes it has several irons in the fire to singe the government and press home the perceived political advantage.
For one, the Congress will boycott the induction of Kerala Congress (B) leader K.B. Ganesh Kumar, MLA, into the Cabinet on December 29.
Mr. Ganesh Kumar, who defected from the United Democratic Front to the Left Democratic Front (LDF) in 2015, had become anathema to the Congress after the Central Bureau of Investigation allegedly named him as a conspirator in the purported plot to malign former Chief Minister Oommen Chandy in the politically sensational solar scam case.
The Congress has demanded a judicial inquiry by a sitting judge into the “government-sponsored police and CPI(M) attacks” against Congress protesters. It has moved a breach of privilege notice against Mr. Vijayan in the Assembly and Parliament and successfully petitioned a court in Alappuzha to prosecute the Chief Minister’s security detail for allegedly assaulting detained Kerala Students Union (KSU) black flag protesters.
The Congress’s 36-day anti-government activism, which cast Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan at its centre, had spilt violently onto the streets with Opposition black flag protesters skirmishing with the police and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] activists in 140 Assembly constituencies in the State.
The Congress feels that the anti-Navakerala Sadas campaign has galvanised the party. Some insiders believe that the party re-directed its energy, often spent on internal bickering, into rebranding the party as a centrist political force capable of fighting on two fronts against the CPI(M) and the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Moreover, Congress insiders assume that visuals of “the police and CPI(M) persons attacking” Opposition black flag protesters on roadsides have emerged as a “damning, enduring and recurrent” motif of the Navakerala Sadas the government tom-toms as a momentous chapter in the State’s political annals.
Left Democratic Front convener E.P. Jayarajan countered that political spite drove Congress’s violence against the government. He said the Congress and the BJP were conjoined twins in their animosity to the LDF. Both parties had no comprehensible demand or political slogan except hate.
