The Hindu : Opinion / Editorials : INSCRUTABLE WAYS

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Tuesday, Aug 31, 2004

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INSCRUTABLE WAYS

IT IS A commentary on the state of health of the Congress in Kerala and on the non-transparent ways of the party high command that it has taken a full three months for permission to come for pulling the plug on a patient in a vegetative state. The three year regime of A.K. Antony provides rich data for a political case study by a top-flight management school: a case study of how a State ought not to be governed; of how a party ought not to conduct its internal and external affairs; of how quickly an alliance with a strong popular mandate can alienate all constituents of a forward-looking society and make a mess of governance. The third innings of Mr. Antony was easily his worst. Plagued by a full-scale insurgency within the party led by his mortal enemy, K. Karunakaran, distanced from every ally in the cruelly misnamed United Democratic Front, locked in an awkward posture on majority-minority relations, at odds with government employees, students, the rural poor, and the majority of Dalits and tribal folk, and growingly high-handed in his style of governance, a Chief Minister who once enjoyed an enviable reputation for simplicity and personal honesty presided over his party's worst-ever electoral performance in the State.

It was a debacle waiting to happen even if no opinion or even exit poll was able to catch the trend. Mr. Antony fiddled as factionalism grew worse; his own supporters lost faith; relations between the Government and its employees went into a prolonged standoff; tribal folk were terrorised (after the Government went back on its promise to distribute forest land); rural distress led to a shockingly large number of suicides in Wayanad; and students went on the warpath over the gross inequities of a higher education system that triggered the suicide of a young Dalit woman. When the UDF Government responded, it was to the symptoms, not the disease. Further, the response was harsh or wooden, the opposite of sympathetic. By-election humiliation, Mr. Karunakaran's brinksmanship or worse, the Chief Minister's divorce from ground reality, mass protests, unprecedented signs of mass distress — nothing could make the Congress high command stir itself and order a mid-course correction. Everyone knew that the Left Democratic Front was gaining rapidly, through mass struggles, but nobody was prepared for the UDF wipe-out of May 2004.

Had Mr. Antony resigned his Chief Ministership immediately, the attempt to reverse the trend would have had some credibility. While accepting "full moral responsibility" for the debacle, he has noted there were "several reasons" for this (without spelling them out). But what can explain a swing of 7.5 percentage points in the popular vote against the ruling coalition between 1999 and 2004, a massive and unprecedented swing by Kerala's standards? A post-poll survey done by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and published in The Hindu of May 20, 2004 revealed some disturbing realities for the Congress. There is widespread dissatisfaction with the UDF Government's record on meeting basic needs (such as drinking water) and, at a deeper level, coping with the crisis of employment, rural distress, and industrial stagnation. Secondly, the LDF makes substantial gains at the expense of the UDF not merely among non-privileged sections but among all social strata (excepting, to some extent, Christians and Muslims) and especially among women. Mr. Antony's successor, Oommen Chandy, who was once close to him, is reported to believe in a more consensual style of working with coalition partners. But given the popular mood against the UDF in Kerala, that will not be enough. The new Chief Minister has an extraordinarily tough — and in all likelihood, unenviable — job on his hands.

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