loss of seats and under-performance in certain key seats in the 16th lok Sabha elections have pushed both the CPI(M)-led lDF and the Congress-headed UDF of Kerala into disquiet. The UDF had lost four seats it had won in 2009, while the lDF had failed to make the expected gains.
The biggest debacle that the left suffered in this election was perhaps in the Kollam seat, where CPI(M) Politburo member and MlA MA Baby suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of NK Premachandran of the RSP, who contested as a UDF candidate after his party, a partner of the lDF for 35 years, quit the left camp to join the Congress-led front on the eve of polls.
The impact of that humiliation was made worse with Premachandran getting a huge lead of 6,911 votes over Baby in the Kundara Assembly segment which the CPI(M) leader represents in the State Assembly. Baby the other day had reportedly sought the permission of the Politburo to resign as MlA as he had lost the right to represent it in the new situation.
The top CPI(M) leadership is now claiming that Baby had not made any such request to the Politburo and that reports in this regard were mere figments of imagination of the media. But sources in the party say that Baby is sore about certain obscene remarks made by State CPI(M) secretary Pinarayi Vijayan against Premachandran which was not received well by the electorate.
At the height of the election campaign, Pinarayi had described Premachandran as Paranari (a stinking creature) which was said to have created a negative impact in the minds of the voters as far as the lDF candidate was concerned. However, Pinarayi and his loyalists in the party justified the remarks even after the results were out.
On Monday, R Ramachandran, Kollam district secretary of the CPI, second biggest constituent of the lDF, said Pinarayi should not have made that comment, confirming that it had proved counter-productive in the election. A war has already broken out in the lDF of Kollam over this with CPI(M)’s district secretary Rajagopal strongly rejecting Ramachandran’s suggestion.
At the same time, Pinarayi Vijayan on Monday admitted through an article he wrote in Deshabhimani daily, the CPI(M) organ, that the left had not been able to win the seats it should have got in the present political situation even when he claimed that the left had been able to widen its base as its vote share had increased considerably.
According to Pinarayi, the left had not been able to win more than eight seats out of the total 20 in the State because the minorities had rallied behind the Congress and the UDF. He said the minorities had taken this position thinking that the UDF would be more effective in countering the Narendra Modi wave than the left.
The CPI is also making some introspection as to why its Independent candidate Bennet J Abraham was pushed to the third position in Thiruvananthapuram, a seat which it used to win in the past but where the main fight this time was between Shashi Tharoor of the Congress and BJP’s O Rajagopal. A section in the CPI has already criticised the leadership for fielding Bennet.
Meanwhile, Congress leader MI Shanavas, who was elected MP from Wayanad, criticised his party’s State and central leaderships for the ‘wrong selection’ of candidates. He said the UDF could have won a minimum of 17 seats - instead of the 12 it actually won - had the candidate selection been flawless.
Complaints have come out from the Muslim league, second biggest UDF constituent, to the effect that the winning margin of its candidate ET Muhammad Basheer in Ponnani had come down to 25,410 votes from the 82,684 he himself had bagged in 2009 because of the lack of proper cooperation in the campaign stage from the Congress leaders.