CPI(M)’s Kerala secretary Pinarayi Vijayan is one of the staunchest materialists in the whole party but the joke doing the rounds in the State on him is that it is high time he consulted astrologists on why the high-profile Kerala Yatras he has been undertaking in the past one decade have been turning into failures.
Pinarayi is currently leading a 26-day Kerala Raksha Yatra which began on February 1 with the goal of reenergising the party units Statewide ahead of the lok Sabha polls. However, reports suggest that this yatra has already lost its popularity, thanks to the hullabaloo over the party’s alleged role in the murder of rebel Marxist leader TP Chandrasekharan.
What is really disturbing for Pinarayi is the fact that there is nothing to prove that any of these yatras, undertaken just before very important elections with the intention of making the party and the left popular among voters, has been useful in attracting voters to the left or in improving the sheen of his image as a leftist leader, observers say.
“After his discharge by a court from the SNC lavalin corruption case, the current yatra should have become a hit. Unfortunately, the entire energies of the party and Pinarayi are being spent on defending themselves against the charge of involvement of the top leadership in the conspiracy behind the rebel’s murder,” said a former CPI(M) theorist on condition of anonymity.
“The yatra had started just two days before the slain rebel’s widow began her indefinite fast demanding a CBI probe into the alleged role of CPI(M) leaders including Pinarayi in the conspiracy. That campaign is sure to affect the possibility of success of his yatra,” he pointed out.
Pinarayi had undertaken his first yatra in the beginning of 2006, on the eve of the Assembly election which the left was sure to win mainly because of the voters’ ire against the then Congress-led rule and the popularity of his enemy in the party, VS Achuthanandan. It was also a time when divisionism in the party was at its peak.
The party secretary had started that yatra from Uppala, Kasaragod posing himself as would-be CM but its popularity ended just when it covered half the distance mainly because of the divisionist war, his efforts to ally with anti-left parties and allegation that tens of crores of rupees were being spent to make the event a spectacle.
His second yatra, the Nava Kerala Yatra, was undertaken in February, 2009 ahead of the lS polls in which the defeat of the party-led lDF was certain and after the neo-liberalist group he led had taken total control of the party by defeating Achuthanandan’s hardliner faction. As expected, this yatra had shown loss of popularity immediately after its beginning as Pinarayi got visibly irritated at almost all the Press conferences he held on the yatra trail when asked about the CBI charge against him of criminal conspiracy in the Rs 374.5-crore SNC lavalin corruption case and about increasing incidents of violence with CPI(M) participation.