At 6 p.m. on Wednesday, the curtains came down on a carnivalesque but deeply polarising public campaigning for the Lok Sabha elections in Kerala.
Opposing campaigns converged on district centres across the State, flaunting their respective party colours and creating competing last-minute made-for-television propaganda circuses.
However, the rackety melee of rival groups of revelling political workers thronging restricted street space in crowded town centres regressed into violence in several places, casting the campaign’s fraught nature into sharp relief.
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In Karunagapally, Congress legislator C.R. Mahesh was injured in stone throwing. The police used tear gas to disperse the crowd. News reports of similar clashes from Palakkad, Malappuram, Alappuzha and Kasaragod too have trickled in.
A novelty of the high-decibel finale of public campaigning was the use of skylift cranes by opposing campaigns to hoist their candidates dizzyingly and almost perilously above the chaotic crowds below. The contestants later posted vertigo-inducing selfies of themselves on their social media networks.
In many places, refreshing late afternoon summer showers capped a one-and-a-half month-long season of campaigning in sweltering weather.
Livelihood issues, cost of living crisis, unemployment, poverty, the yawning rich-poor divide, and seller inflation jostled for space with larger and almost existential questions of secularism, weaponisation of investigating agencies and tax administration to target political rivals, future of federalism at the hustings.
Threats to pluralism, muscular Hindu majoritarian nationalism, persecution of minorities, and the cult of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the sole benefactor of welfare schemes and guarantor of development animated the political debate.
Moreover, emotive issues such as Islamophobic messaging, denial of space for the political opposition, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, ethnic violence in Manipur, India’s alleged backsliding into an authoritarian and centralised electoral autocracy, development politics, perceived shortcomings of the State government dominated the noisy poll debate amplified on social and mainstream media.
The Palestine question, Ayodhya Ram temple, human-wildlife conflict, declining cash crop sector, agrarian distress, the backlog of social welfare pensions, Centre’s alleged discrimination against Kerala, misuse of “draconian” anti-terror and anti-money laundering laws, alleged lack of big-ticket development, fraying infrastructure and “truant” MPs were topics of heated political back-and-forths.
The vividness and liveliness of a fierce contest, manifested in colourful flags, wall writings, festoons, banners, corner meetings, and high-decibel roadshows, set the State’s drab summer landscape ablaze.
Celebrities, top political figures, rock shows, street theatre, parodies, arousing campaign theme songs set to martial music, trolls, mocking memes and digitally condensed political content that fits the size of mobile phone screens distinguished the poll campaign as it crescendoed to climactic finish across the State simultaneously.
As overt campaigning reached its last gasp, the competing coalitions expressed unalloyed optimism about their electoral chances. It also signalled the start of hectic but low-key door-to-door campaigning.
