21/05/2016
In the end, Pinarayi Vijayan smiled.
In an interview with Tehelka magazine last year, Vijayan had said, "by stubbornness, do you presume that I never smile? No, I do smile, but that'is only when I have reason to do so."
Reasons, he has aplenty these days.
The man who has led the CPI (M) in the state for the longest period is all poised to be the next Kerala chief minister on May 25; it will take a long time for his main political opposition, the United Democratic Front, to pick itself up the debacle it has suffered in this month's Assembly polls, and time and tide have stood against his longtime in-party adversary, V.S. Achuthanandan.
Vijayan can afford to brook a smile now.
The CPI (M) State Secretariat and Committee met yesterday in Thiruvananthapuram and chose the 72-year-old Politburo member Vijayan to lead the new LDF government without much expected ado from the supporters of Achuthanandan.
For Vijayan, a hard-nosed party-man who has waged many a battle in his long political career, the chief ministership was longtime coming. Known for his reticence and stubbornness, Vijayan has often drawn flak from the so-called 'purebred' Communists for his right-leaning approach. It was no secret that there is no love lost between Vijayan and Achuthanandan, but the CPI (M) leadership did well to make sure that both the leaders buried the hatchet, at least for electoral gains, and it has paid back rich dividend — 91 seats in the assembly.
For Vijayan, political trials and tribulations aren't new. But he has always put his foot down for what he has believed in.
"It is quite natural for the Communist party to change according to times. In that sense our party has also changed. It, for sure, might have departed from its old style and methods. However, the point is that we are firm on our working class ideology as we were in earlier times," he told Tehelka.
A former power minister in the 1996 E.K. Nayanar cabinet, Vijayan has mastered the fine art of balancing sagely silence and stinging offence. A man of seemingly few words, Vijayan is canny enough to know when and where to attack his political adversaries with searing adjectives.
Born in a toddy-tappers' family in Kannur, Vijayan grew up soaking in the hardships of the downtrodden and police atrocities against the workers.
"My mother used to tell (me) the tales of police brutalities during my childhood days. I still remember a childhood incident vividly; one day, my mother was standing beside the well of our home, holding me in her hand, and narrating an incident of police hunting down Communists in a nearby area. It was at that very time that the police and hooligans charged into my home. They picked up household items and threw them out of the house. The police took my elder brother, who was a Communist sympathizer, into custody after brutally beating him. This incident, along with other stories of police brutalities and the story of brave Communist resistance, are still etched in my mind. These stories and real-life experience have influenced me to become a Communist from my school days," he has said.
Vijayan, who says he has Communist DNA in him, rose through the ranks as a student activist of what is now the Student Federation of India (SFI). In his early political days itself, Vijayan was in the forefront of political clashes. He was arrested and tortured during the Emergency. The speech he made at the Assembly following his release from police custody, holding up his blood-stained shirt, is an often quoted incident in his political life.
As chief minister, Vijayan has his challenges as well, even though the UDF will be a weak Opposition, mostly licking its own wounds.
Vijayan, who has always fought against the communal forces in Kannur, is coming to power at a time, communal elements in the state have become more evident than ever — both camouflaged or blatant. One of the challenges of Vijayan as the chief minister and CPI (M) leader will be how to purge Kerala from these communal factions.
Another task will be to make sure Kerala doesn't drown in debt. The UDF government in spite of all its development projects has left behind a a huge financial burden. According to this year's CAG report, Kerala has failed to meet fiscal deficit targets and capital expenditure on development declined during the last four years while debt liability increased with over 400 billion rupees to be paid back in seven years.
With the crude oil crisis in the Middle East, which could see thousands of Malayalee expats losing job, turning Kerala from a consumer state to a producing state may prove to be a hard nut to crack, unlike the many he has cracked in his political career.
These challenges will surely test the efficient administrator in Vijayan, who in his two-year tenure as power minister has proved his mettle despite landing in a prolonged controversy involving SNC-Lavalin.
The boy who grew up in Pinarayi, listening to his mother's depiction of workers' struggles, and the young man who has worked in a handloom mill, now has a chance to prove his Communist DNA and prove to his detractors that dogmatism and pragmatism can be woven into a single fabric.
(Photos are from a Facebook page on Vijayan)