# Ajayan | Routinely thrashed at the hustings—from the Lok Sabha elections to the recent local body polls—the ruling CPM has suddenly rediscovered the rhetoric of “reaching out” to the people. Its claim that it must now explain perceived ‘misdeeds’ rings hollow, coming from a government that has steadily abandoned the grassroots. Nothing exposes this estrangement more starkly than the hike in prisoners’ allowances, even as ASHA workers, the backbone of Kerala’s Covid response, were met with arrogance and neglect. If one is compelled to ask what social merit this generosity towards criminal rewards, contrasted with the studied arrogance shown to agitating ASHA workers, it is certain that even rhetoric cannot justify this. The contrast is damning, more so when a section of prisoners are greeted by party leaders when they are out on bail or given parole at the drop of a hat. Yet the party hopes the public will easily buy the performance.
More such largesse can be expected in the forthcoming Budget session, a last-ditch effort by a party and government punished at the polls and pushed to the wall to claw back confidence and votes. The pre-election hike in welfare pensions ahead of the local body polls was a clear signal. The script is familiar, and as the old adage warns, familiarity breeds contempt.
The last such “people’s outreach” followed the backlash over women’s entry into Sabarimala. That episode exposed a crisis of legitimacy. Today, it is the alleged Sabarimala heist—unfolding over a decade of rule—that haunts the party. The response is familiar: desperation, damage control, and a frantic bid to outrun mounting public wrath.
Reduced in practice to the will of a single individual, the party and its government refuse to acknowledge their own failures. The public sees through the charade. Devotees’ offerings were allegedly looted, yet the regime neither accepts responsibility nor shows the resolve to act against its own leaders implicated in the gold robbery case. Instead, it asks people to believe that the heist was the work of a few rogue hands, carried out without the knowledge of either the government or the party hierarchy. A former Devaswom Minister even claimed his job was not to oversee temple administration but merely to sign files placed before him. All there are no arguments, but an insult to public intelligence.
The communal card has been played too crudely to deceive anyone. A parody song is manufactured into an outrage. Certain party leaders, as if on cue, habitually spew communal venom. The Chief Minister rushes to shield them, even as his own party signals unease. Voters remember all this when cadres now knock on doors with rehearsed explanations. They remember Ministers’ extravagance, masked by sycophancy toward the supreme leader. They remember the iron hand used against protests by a party born of agitations. And they remember the reflexive defence of a community leader notorious for divisive rhetoric, one who only the late VS Achuthanandan ever dared to confront. These are not lapses of memory. They are the record.
With a track record of misdeeds, fiscal extravagance even as it blames the Centre for starving it of funds, and quiet deals signed with New Delhi in defiance of its own stated positions, this etches it the image of a party that thrives not on principle but on compromise.
But voters are left stranded because the alternative is scarcely reassuring. Despite a clear popular verdict, the UDF, especially the Congress, resembles a Tower of Babel, with leaders speaking in different tongues and cancelling each other out. The firm stand taken by Opposition Leader VD Satheesan in the Rahul Mangootathil episode briefly exposed the CPM, which has far more skeletons rattling in its cupboard. Yet that moment of clarity was quickly squandered.
In its scramble to manufacture a political “Vismayam”, the Congress leadership, under pressure from allies, is now chasing anyone and anything, track records be damned. Voters are weary of parties pandering to communal and community blocs, mistaking arithmetic for principle. A clear, uncompromising refusal to play that game, unlikely though it may be given the UDF’s composition, could yet prove transformative. But indecision and opportunism continue to betray the trust people placed in them.
Despite delivering a capital punishment to the CPM in the State capital, the BJP’s vote share has shrunk. It pins hopes on Sabarimala devotees, many still CPM sympathizers. If the CPM pushes its communal divide strategy, BJP may gain, but many will see through this as mere political opportunism and compromise by the CPM to let it gain a foothold in the Assembly.
