# Ajayan | As tents have been packed up and the loudspeakers have fallen silent, the voter is left alone, no slogans, no staged smiles, no choreographed outrage, just the echo of everything that was said and, more tellingly, everything that wasn’t.
Now comes the inconvenient part of thinking. Sifting through a landfill of half-truths dressed as vision, promises born out of desperation and deceit and can collapse under the weight of a raised eyebrow. What remains is not inspiration, but residue with the foul aftertaste of flattery, brittle skeletons of pledges and how effortlessly dignity was pawned for applause, how campaign descended to mud-slinging, as if scraping the bottom of a gutter. The voter stands at the edge of the ballot in reluctant clarity, less concerned with who deserves the vote, and more certain about who all have already disqualified themselves.
Three things stand out - manifestoes of false promises and one edited at the eleventh hour, as if truth were a typo; mudslinging so gleeful turning the Chief Minister into chief excavator; and that familiar conspiracy of the grand “deal” where sworn enemies supposedly moonlight as partners, united only by their allergy to the Congress.
First, the manifestoes, hurriedly stitched at the last minute, as if policy were an afterthought. No grassroots whispers, no cadre debates, just glossy promises without a trace of how they would ever work. Welfare pensions will rise, they all swear, never mind a treasury running on fumes and borrowed breath. And of course, free travel for women in a sinking KSRTC like adding weight to a vessel already going under.
Metro dreams are peddled like candy or ‘appams’, while long-promised rail lines, Sabarimala included, remain permanent mirages. The Centre’s indifference is old news, yet promises glide along as if tracks appear by wishful thinking. And the LDF, still nursing the SilverLine backlash, repackages the idea, only proving that in politics, rejection isn’t a lesson, just a rebrand waiting to happen.
The LDF even redrafted its own “green” buffer zone - trimmed not for ecology, but for electoral comfort. After all, votes age better than forests. Paired with the late-night leak of a ministerial call hinting the 2018 floods owed as much to design as to rain, the picture sharpens - echoing Madhav Gadgil’s blunt verdict: this was no natural tragedy.
Then comes the victory lap - promises ‘fulfilled’, yet the much-touted “room for river” floats in vagueness, and those globe-trotting investor hunts yielded little beyond frequent flyer miles. A decade on, the only thing that truly arrived was the slogan of development, everything else seems to have missed the train.
When it comes to venom and vanity, Pinarayi Vijayan stands in a league of his own, his so-called “rustic style” has less earthy charm and more crude contempt. Former comrades are casually trashed, questioning voices dismissed with a sneer and told to pose any question at home, and public discourse dragged into the gutter with choice words flung even at fellow Chief Ministers and leaving it to all fill the ‘dash’ with words of choice. If this is candour, it’s the kind that corrodes everything it touches.
And finally, the BJP-led NDA only lends weight to the whispered “deal”. Even in its supposed strongholds, it stumbles, elevating fringe, apolitical outfits beyond their worth and diluting its own prospects in the bargain. Its development pitch mirrors the LDF’s so closely, more like an echo with time in power doing the heavy lifting, not results.
So here stands the voter, staring at a pile of promises flung from every direction, mostly hollow, repetitive, weightless. The moment to separate grain from chaff has arrived. But the problem? There’s very little grain left and the decision is crucial to save the State.
