[1]The Kerala chief minister, Oommen Chandy, should now get on with his dream projects and instill confidence in the people through a tough handling of law and order as he has done by pursuing killers of the revolutionary leader of Onchiyam.
He has enough task at hand; he will have to rein in larger than life aspirations of allies with overvaulting ambitions, manage individual ambitions of party colleagues and fight the image of the manager of a coalition of minorities.
This victory, which largely depends on his mercurial governance and a confluence of other political happenings, gives him the ammo to forge ahead and achieve his development targets. The Opposition disarray is both an opportunity and challenge to Mr Chandy.
In Neyyattinkara, everything had gone wrong for the Opposition LDF. The political climate was heavily loaded against the Left, especially the CPI (M).
The blame for it rests entirely on the CPI(M), which messed up by its callous tactics towards disparate bands of dissenters as in Onchiyam.
This was a symptom of its failure to reconcile itself to the loss of power by a whisker in 2011.
Organizationally, the CPI(M) is facing an existential dilemma, with its most popular face in Kerala, Mr V.S. Achuthanandan, determined to play the end game, not ready to sup with a Dange-ist party secretary, Mr Pinarayi Vijayan.
BJP, so far the marginal player in Kerala’s bipolar politics, has tasted blood; if other parties raise the card of communal appeasement, the beneficiary will the saffron brigade and not political parties that wear secularism on their sleeves.
Links:
[1] http://archive.asianage.com/16kara4jpgcropdisplayjpg-525