On a hot afternoon in Jaipur recently, a cab driver wanted to know where I was from. Kerala, I replied. Where in Kerala? Wayanad, I said. He smiled: Oh yes, Rahul Gandhi’s constituency.
The hilly district in northern Kerala has suddenly become a familiar name across the country thanks to the Congress president contesting the parliamentary election from there. And what a wise decision it turned out to be.
Ever since making its debut as a Lok Sabha constituency in 2009, Wayanad has been one of the safest bets in Kerala for the Congress, due largely to the unwavering support enjoyed by the party’s ally, the Indian Union Muslim League. The late M.I. Shanavas from the Congress had won both the previous Lok Sabha elections from Wayanad, after losing all the five he had contested elsewhere.
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Given Mr. Gandhi’s stature and the response to his campaign, he was expected to significantly improve Shanavas’s victory margin of 20,870 in 2014. He lived up to the expectations by winning 4.31 lakh votes.
Earlier this month, Mr. Gandhi came to Wayanad to thank the voters, thus ensuring that Wayanad continues to stay featured in national news.
There was a time when it hardly figured even in State news. I remember having to tell someone when I was a student at Thiruvananthapuram where exactly Wayanad is located. Most people then imagined Wayanad as a place full of forests and tribal settlements. This is sadly not true any more. Wayanad continues to lag behind many districts in education. In fact, it lags behind on most indices. It has among the lowest per capita incomes in the State. Its literacy rate is among the lowest. It has poor infrastructure. It only ranks high on tourism, which has paved the way for the mushrooming of a large number of hotels and a real estate boom. But this has come at a heavy cost to the environment. Wayanad is nowhere near as green it used to be, nor is it as cold. When I was young, very few shops used to sell fans. Now people switch on air conditioners during the summer. Earlier, we would see heavy showers during the monsoon. Lakkidi, the gateway to Wayanad district, had once recorded the highest rainfall in the country. That has now become a distant memory.
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What hasn’t changed is the quality of medical care, which remains as poor as before. Even now, a seriously ill patient in Wayanad has to go to Kozhikode, some two and a half hours away. During his campaign, Mr. Gandhi had talked about setting up a new medical college. Given the Congress’s poor show this election and reports about Amethi’s disappointment with Mr. Gandhi’s performance, the hope is that he will make more of an effort in Wayanad.
Ajith Kumar P.K. is Special Correspondent with The Hindu