Amid hype, media glare and high-decibel mass excitement, Congress president Rahul Gandhi will file his nomination papers on Thursday to contest the Wayanad Lok Sabha seat at Kalpetta, the headquarters town of Kerala’s highland district of Wayanad.
He will be accompanied by his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, senior party leaders from Delhi and top brass of the Congress in Kerala. The Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) is keen to make the event spectacular as it hopes that the ‘Rahul effect’ will radiate across all the 20 constituencies in Kerala in the April 23 election.
Mr. Gandhi will only get a little over a fortnight to campaign in the coffee-and-spice-rich agrarian constituency which borders Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. The dilly-dallying by the party over Mr. Gandhi’s candidature has cost the Congress precious campaign time. It took the party eight days to do the political cost-benefit analysis of fielding its prime minister material in a second constituency, that too in a place far away from the main theatre of war in the Hindi heartland.
Tortuous decision
Before the March 23 kite flying by State leaders about Mr. Gandhi’s Wayanad contest, the Congress had already announced its Wayanad nominee T. Siddique. His campaign was in top gear when party bosses told him that he would have to stand down for Mr. Gandhi. The campaign stopped abruptly. By the time the Congress finally announced Mr. Gandhi’s candidature on March 31, P.P. Suneer, the LDF candidate, who would be the main rival of Mr. Gandhi, had far advanced in his campaign.
The Wayanad constituency has for long been reckoned as a safe bet for the Congress/UDF. But in the 2016 Assembly polls, four of the seven Assembly segments in the Wayanad Lok Sabha constituency went the LDF way.
PM’s `communal’ taunt
Though the exact religion-wise headcount is not available, it is generally believed that Muslims make up close to a half of the Wayanad electorate. It was this demography that perhaps tempted Prime Minister Narendra Modi to make the `communal’ taunt that Mr. Gandhi, scared of the Hindu-majority constituencies, had fled to places where the Hindus were a minority.
Mr. Modi and BJP president Amit Shah are expected to campaign for NDA candidate Thushar Vellappally. Mr. Modi’s taunt gives a hint of the kind of campaign the BJP/NDA plans to carry out in Wayanad in the next fortnight.
