State of play
There is finally some consensus in the beleaguered Congress party in Kerala. The usual wrangling over the selection of candidates for the Rajya Sabha election was missing despite some pulls and pressures on the State leadership. Overriding the claims by seasoned leaders, the All India Congress Committee (AICC) last week nominated Mahila Congress State president Jebi Mather for one of the three seats that the party is likely to win from the State to the Upper House in the biennial elections on March 31. Her selection has not only addressed the question of nominating a woman, a youth, and a minority member at one go, but has also silenced the orchestrated campaign of the CPI(M) about the absence of Muslim leadership in the Congress.
Soon after the party’s setback in the Kerala Assembly polls last year, the Central leadership stepped in when senior leaders called for reforms in the party and demanded cohesive functioning in the State unit. The rally for an organisational overhaul saw the AICC replacing the Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee president Mullappally Ramachandran with K. Sudhakaran, and MP and Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly Ramesh Chennithala with V.D. Satheesan.
State of disarray
But despite this change in leadership, the party continues to be in a state of disarray. At the national level, it is trying to recover from its debacle in the recent Assembly elections in Goa, Manipur, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. At the State level, it is trying to deal with the internal strife within the Kerala unit. The Congress has 15 Lok Sabha MPs from Kerala and is supported by four representatives belonging to allies out of the 20 seats in the State. The current plight of the party at the State level does not bode well for its future.
There was some hope for the party two years ago. That the opposition UDF of which the Congress is a part won 19 of 20 seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls was something of a redux moment for the national party — it thought that victory would be smooth in the State’s Assembly polls in 2021. But the UDF’s ambitions to get a majority in the Legislature proved too great. The coalition faced a humiliating defeat in the three-tier local body polls in 2020. The entry of the Jose K. Mani faction of the Kerala Congress(M) into the CPI(M)-led LDF, apart from other factors, saw Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan making a historic comeback to power in Kerala. The Congress’s attempts to accommodate Mr. Chennithala and former Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, both of whom are leading two hostile camps in the party, on the same page failed to take off in the Assembly polls.
The Sudhakaran-Satheesan duo have miles to go before the 2024 Lok Sabha election. Undoubtedly, Congress leaders are mostly disconnected from the grassroots though they have now latched on to the ongoing protests against the semi high-speed SilverLine project. But before they make it their main plank to take on the muscular machinery of the Left government, the party has to recover its lost ground following the erosion of its vote base across the State. The State leadership’s grandiose plans to build a semi-cadre party apparatus apart from its reorganisation efforts have yielded no positive results so far.
The situation for the Congress is salvageable even now. But it is possible only if the leadership redraws its contours for an electoral strategy in the State. It will have to deal with factional politics at play and deftly manage assertive coalition partners including the Indian Union Muslim League.
biju.govind@thehindu.co.in
