With less than a week left for the byelection in the Puthuppally Assembly constituency scheduled on September 5, the race to the finish line is picking up momentum by the day.
The Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)], the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have ratcheted up their electoral rhetoric by deploying high-profile political heavyweights to wring a last-minute advantage at the hustings.
The parties have also ensured that public meetings and vehicle tours march in lockstep with a vigorous knock-on-doors, household-level campaign by their respective foot soldiers.
The CPI(M) entered the final phase of its campaigning with Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan addressing three back-to-back election conventions in the constituency on Wednesday.
While pressing ahead with the government’s crucial poll plank of infrastructure development, Mr. Vijayan also opened a new front in the byelection battle by accusing the Congress of heralding the existential crisis in Kerala’s rubber plantation sector and the BJP at the Centre of doing little to alleviate the resultant sufferings of small-scale rubber farmers.
Mr. Vijayan seemed acutely aware that rubber farmers formed a crucial electoral bloc in the constituency, and latex prices lay at the local economy’s heart.
“The ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] pact, which was inked during the tenure of the Manmohan Singh government in 2009, has devastated Kerala’s rubber growers. Is the UDF [United Democratic Front] ready to admit this mistake and demand that the BJP at the Centre revoke the patently pro-corporate and anti-farmer pact?” Mr. Vijayan asked.
He said Kerala’s rubber sector suffered a cumulative loss of ₹50 lakh crore since 2009. The Congress and the BJP worked to the advantage of tyre manufacturing giants. The Congress and the BJP were notably silent on the failure of tyre oligarchs’ unwillingness to pay the ₹1,788-crore fine imposed by the Competition Commission of India, he said.
Mr. Vijayan will return to Puthuppally on Saturday to cap the CPI(M)‘s campaign season.
The Congress, meanwhile, tapped into Puthuppally’s palpable sympathy for the late Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, whose son, Chandy Oommen, faces off with the CPI(M)‘s Jaick C. Thomas and the BJP’s G. Lijin Lal in the bypoll.
Leader of the Opposition V.D. Satheesan said the cyber attacks against Oommen Chandy’s daughter and frontline Congress campaigner told badly on the CPI(M).
The BJP threw Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar and party national general secretary Radha Mohan Das Agarwal into the fray. The leaders campaigned on a development platform calibrated to appeal to the aspirational generation.
The BJP highlighted the Centre’s enhanced subsidy for cooking gas cylinders, new Vande Bharat Express trains for Kerala and critical infrastructure initiatives, including national highway development.
