CP(M) State secretary M.V. Govindan pushed back against the Opposition’s insinuation that a personality cult revolving around Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan pervaded the government and the party.
Mr. Govindan accused the right-wing corporate media of furthering such a lie to steer public opinion, including that of literary figures, against the government.
However, he said, the propagandists made a mistake by cherry-picking the words of Jnanpith laureate M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s speech against strongmen rule, centralisation of authority and personality cults at the recent Kerala Literary Festival in Kozhikode. It helped the party’s enemies that Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan was sharing the dais with Mr. Nair.
Mr. Govindan said the anti-party and pro-corporate media realised belatedly that Mr. Nair was reading out a treatise on the pitfalls of the centralisation of power and personalist politics that put an individual leader above any party or ideology that he published in 2003.
He pointed out that Congress leader A. K. Antony was Kerala’s Chief Minister then. However, the media did not portray the speech as a critique of Mr. Antony.
Instead, it seized on a repetition of the same speech by Mr. Nair in 2024 to vilify Mr Vijayan. The lie smacked of a visceral hate for the proletarian working-class politics pursued by the CPI(M).
“I don’t blame the media, who twisted Mr. Nair’s speech out of context to attack the government and the party. Instead, the fault lies at the doorstep of bourgeoise and capitalist forces. They fearfully reckon the proletariat as an enemy of their elitist class. Journalists are merely the instruments of their employers, and the party empathises with them because they are also workers,” he said.
Mr. Govindan said he had compared Mr. Vijayan to the Sun when journalists asked why the myriad attempts by Central agencies to implicate the Chief Minister in false cases had repeatedly failed.
“I used the image of the burning Sun as an analogy for Mr Vijayan’s unassailable integrity and distaste for condoning or abetting any wrongdoing,” Mr. Govindan said.
He said Mr. Nair had recalled his 2003 warning against the democracies backsliding into autocracies via the ballot. The writer merely repeated the caution, given society’s drift to right-wing authoritarianism and fascism. He did not mean Kerala, an oasis of democracy, pluralism, liberal thought and secularism.
