Not many rulers in democratic systems would have gone through what Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy is facing on a daily basis these days. Forced to take circuitous routes to reach places, avoiding main roads fearing protests from people against his refusal to resign over his alleged involvement in the solar scam, Chandy has virtually become a fugitive in his own State.
Chandy was not even spared in his home district Kottayam, where activists of the pro-CPI(M) youth outfit DYFI forced him to avoid main roads to reach his house in Puthuppally village on Sunday.
Not just this, protests even forced Chandy to abandon the inauguration of a dairy plant at Kunnamangalam near Kozhikode on Saturday. Sources close to him claimed that the CM decided to avoid going there on the basis of Intelligence reports on the possibility of trouble as DYFI activists had vowed not to allow him to enter the dairy plant even if they had to die.
Chandy’s ‘fugitive life’ under the shadow of the solar scam started on June 29, the day he returned to Kerala from Manama, Bahrain after receiving the UN Public Service Award.
While he hoped to get a hero’s welcome from his Cabinet colleagues and Congress workers, what awaited him outside the Thiruvananthapuram airport and on his way to the Cliff House, the Chief Minister’s official residence, were black flags and anti-Government slogans.
Chandy was forced to take the by-lanes to reach his office in the State Secretariat instead of going to Cliff House. Since that day, Chandy has not known peace on the roads of Kerala.
He was received in Malappuram on Saturday by thousands of slogan-shouting activists of the DYFI and pro-CPI outfit AIYF with black flags. Hundreds of policemen had been deployed along the route but that did not prevent the protestors from fulfilling their mission. There were even attempts to throw slippers and hurl mud at his vehicle.
Similar scenes greeted the beleaguered Chief Minister when he arrived at Tirur in Malappuram district to
inaugurate the headquarters of the Thunchath Ezhuthachchan Malayalam University on Saturday. Activists rushed to the middle of the road as Chandy’s motorcade arrived, breaking the police cordon and black flags fell on his car.
Chandy-loyalists in Malappuram accused the police of silently allowing the protestors to humiliate the Chief Minister even as DYFI and AIYF leaders said that their protests would not end till Chandy resigned, indicating that the Chief Minister would have to continue walking on egg shells in the days to come.
“It is a serious situation,” commented a senior leader belonging to the Congress’s ‘I’ group opposing Chandy and his ‘A’ group. “I am sure no Chief Minister in Kerala has so far had to go through what he is now going through. It is pathetic when a ruler has to run away from his own people. I’ve thought it could happen to an autocrat but not in a democracy,” he said.
Protests demanding Chandy’s resignation over the solar scam intensified all over Kerala after scam victim Mallelil Sreedharan Nair alleged that he had given Rs 40 lakh to scam perpetrator Saritha S Nair for a solar power project after Chandy gave him personal assurance on her business during at a meeting in the Chief Minister’s office on July 9, 2012 in her presence.
Since then, Chandy had been claiming that he had never met Saritha but he admitted on Saturday that she had taken part in a programme he had inaugurated at Kadaplamattom in Kottayam district recently.