It hit 41.5 degrees Celsius in Palakkad this week. In the blistering heat, there is an 89-year old man campaigning for the post of MLA from this storied town that sits in a gap in the Western Ghats between Tamil Nadu and Kerala. He is the legendary Dr Elattuvalappil Sreedharan, India’s most accomplished engineer.
At his age, he has no need to prove anything to anybody. He has been awarded India’s second-highest civilian honor, the Padma Vibhushan, as well as the French Legion d’Honneur. I have suggested that he should be made President of India, because he would be a fantastic role model, and an inspiration to youth.
Dr Sreedharan has frequently faced long odds in his engineering career spanning seven decades, and defeated them. There are very good reasons to honor him with a Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian award, as well, as argued delightfully by kaipullai who recounts the herculean tasks that Dr Sreedharan set himself. To take just three: the Pamban sea bridge, the monumental Konkan Railway and the Delhi Metro — all bhagiratha prayatnams.
At the age of almost 90, when most people prefer to take it easy, he has taken on another huge challenge: he is on a mission to revive the BJP’s chances in Kerala. In 2016, after a fine campaign, the BJP had to be content with just one seat in the legislature. Conventional wisdom is that it will not get much more in 2021.
There are several reasons for this grim forecast. One is the entrenched nature of the two fronts (LDF led by the CPI(M) and the UDF led by the INC) which have alternated in power for a long time. Another is the highly polarized nature of the electorate, where ideological metastasis has set in. The third is demography: Abrahamics, who tend to form vote-banks, make up more than half the voters.
The Hindu vote has been fragmented. The numerically largest group, the OBC Ezhavas, have long been the backbone of the Communists. The next largest group, the FC Nairs, have been Congress supporters, but have moved somewhat to the BJP. Other groups, including SC, have been wooed by the BJP with little effect.
In 2016, the BJP made an explicit call for Hindu unity by headlining their campaign around Sri Narayana Guru, Chattampi Swamikal, and Mahatma Ayyankali, who were respectively from the three groups mentioned above. However, groupism and internecine warfare especially among the Ezhavas and Nairs, along with tactical voting by both LDF and UDF, buried its chances.
Several things have changed since then, though. See articles in the Indian Express and the Hindu about a consolidation of Hindu votes (although the articles may also represent the respective biases of the two newspapers).
One big difference is that the Indian National Congress seems to be running a lackluster campaign. So much so that typical alternation every five years between the Communists and the Congress (much as between the DMK and the ADMK in neighboring Tamil Nadu) may not happen this time.
The second is the changes in the previously monolithic Abrahamic vote. Christians of all stripes have viewed the Congress (and allies) as their own party. But now some of them, especially some Eastern Orthodox groups (as compared to the dominant Vatican-affiliated groups) seem to be vacillating a bit.
The Muslim League has been a Congress ally, but this time they are being challenged by the more radical SDPI, which has made a strong alliance with the CPI(M). So the Congress, despite their safe Parliamentary seat in Wayanad for the current Nehru dynasty scion, can no longer count on the Muslim vote.
There are also allegations that there are lakhs of illegal alien Bangladeshis and Rohingyas in the Kerala voters’ list. There are many lakhs of them working in Kerala doing everything from construction to plucking coconuts. It is not hard to believe that ruling parties (both LDF and UDF) have stuffed the rolls with them.
There are regional differences too: Northern Kerala is Marxist and Muslim dominated; Central Kerala is Christian and Congress dominated; Southern Kerala is where Hindus may have a chance: and indeed the one seat the BJP captured in 2016 is Nemom, south of Trivandrum.
The state has also been wracked with stories and rumors of large-scale corruption, including gold and dollar smuggling, scams in construction, deep-sea fishing boats, the sale of coronavirus patient data, and a whole lot more. Whether these have an impact on the ruling LDF’s chances remains to be seen.
There are interesting twists. It is said that in 2016, the BJP spent 64 crore rupees, while the LDF spent only 14 crores, and the UDF somewhere in between. But there appear to be other, hidden factors. On March 25th, three boats with alleged Pakistan links were captured off Minicoy. So there could be unaccounted sources of money and muscle in the fray.
There was also a tweet from Kanchan Gupta about what has happened in his native West Bengal, and, well, much of the same is applicable to Kerala as well.
The only difference in Kerala is that there has not been a TMC here. However, the explicitly anti-Hindu nature of those in power is exactly the same. We saw this in the Sabarimala agitation, which brought tens of thousands of apolitical Hindu women on to the streets with lamps, to protest the desecration of their temple. People4Dharma (led by Shilpa Nair, Padma Pillai, and Anjali George) and Indic Collective (led by Adv J Sai Deepak) were able to arouse the silent majority out of their lethargy.
There is also the fact that two of the most striking modern Hindu artifacts in the country are in southern Kerala: the Gangadhareswar murti at Aazhimala, and the Jatayu sculpture at Chadayamangalam, both in the suburbs of Trivandrum.
This possibly means that if the NDA is able to energize injured Hindu sentiment, based on the continuous hostility of the LDF (e.g. contemptuous statements about Hindus by their leaders) and the UDF (e.g. an ostentatious slaughter of a calf and a beef fest conducted by their leaders), there is a possibility that the BJP may yet do better in Kerala than we think.
If that happens, Dr Sreedharan may have pulled off yet another impossible dream.
Episode 22: Kerala, the BJP's final frontier