Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan made an early campaign move to steal a march on the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) by setting the tone for the Left Democratic Front (LDF) ‘s 2024 Lok Sabha election campaign.
At campaign-style events in Kottayam on Sunday, Mr. Vijayan sought, at a stroke, to diminish the Congress’s sizeable influence among small-scale rubber cultivators and settler farmers in Central Kerala and retard the BJP’s focussed bid to woo the Church to the Centre’s side by empathising with the clergy’s concerns about the “love jihad and narcotic jihad”.
He also sought to rally rubber and cash crop cultivators facing hard times on a common apolitical platform and blamed the neoliberal policies pursued by successive Congress and BJP governments for their plight.
Mr. Vijayan portrayed the BJP’s brand of Hindu majoritarian nationalism as an existential threat to Constitutional values.
He spotlighted the attacks against minorities, including Christians, in BJP-ruled States and portrayed the CPI(M)-ruled Kerala as a bulwark against the divisive Sangh Parivar agenda.
Mr. Vijayan depicted the United Democratic Front (UDF) alliance, which has dominated Central Kerala politics for long, as frail and politically weak and dismissed a potential Congress-led front at the national level against the BJP unrealistic.
Instead, Mr. Vijayan mooted a loose alliance among “regional powers” to repulse the BJP, indicating a clear break with Congress.
Mr. Vijayan cast the impending electoral fight against the BJP as analogous to the counter-Emergency movement against the Congress in 1976. He called the BJP the political heir of the Congress’s brand of authoritarianism.
The CPI(M) has also geared up to undertake the rigours of the Lok Sabha campaign early on.
The party’s State secretary, M. V. Govindan, will launch a Statewide campaign in March to highlight the Centre’s “neglect” of Kerala and its “trespasses” on federalism and secularism.
The CPI(M) has attempted to pre-empt any whisper of intra-party dissensions ahead of Mr. Govindan’s propaganda tour by “withholding” internal enquiries against leaders accused of nepotism despite a course correction drive initiated by the State committee in December last.
The CPI(M) has also suggested a “broad agreement” with secular democratic forces, including the Indian Union Muslim League, to diminish the BJP’s electoral chances in Kerala, which the Congress fears would also hamper its poll prospects.
