Thiruvananthapuram: The LDF Government's first-of-its-kind public outreach programme, the portable cabinet called Nava Kerala Sadas, came to a halt at Vattiyoorkavu in Thiruvananthapuram on Saturday, 36 days after the cabinet bus began its journey from Paivalike in Kasaragod on November 18.
In this Nava Kerala yatra, during which the entire Kerala cabinet held four public meetings a day while moving through 140 constituencies, two messages were sent out loud and clear. One could possibly work in favour of the government and the other against it. Both the messages were generated by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan.
The first was the Centre's discriminatory attitude towards Kerala. It was to convey precisely this message that the Chief Minister and his cabinet set out in their chocolate-brown Mercedes Benz bus.
The Chief Minister persistently argued that if his government was unable to pay even welfare pensions for a few months it was only because the Centre was not providing Kerala its due. While finance minister K N Balagopal said that the Centre had slashed over Rs 57,000 crore of Kerala's entitlements, the Chief Minister nearly doubled the figure in his speeches. He said the amount withheld from Kerala in the last seven years was a whopping Rs 1,07,500 crore.
During his Nava Kerala Sadas speeches, he reeled out the various big-ticket development projects initiated by his government - Digital Science parks, hill and coastal highways, Kochi-Bangalore industrial corridor, Gift City, K-Fon, Wayanad tunnel road, Virology Institute - and said that all of this required money. "The Centre does not want any of this to happen and they are stifling us by depriving us of even the money we are eligible for," the Chief Minister kept telling his audience.
In between the Nava Kerala yatra, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman was in Kerala. She tried to discredit Pinarayi's arguments saying that the centre has not withheld a penny from Kerala. If some funds have still not reached Kerala, Sitharaman said it was only because Kerala had not provided the necessary account statements. As it turned out, Sitharaman was right at least in the case of the UGC pay revision arrears. Kerala had indeed failed to correct and resend the proposal for receiving Rs 750 crore as pay revision arrears.
The counter-narrative died with the departure of Sitharaman. Neither the BJP nor the Congress attempted to question the Chief Minister's version in a sustained way. But Pinarayi went ahead, undistracted, with his sob story of the Centre's persecution of Kerala. "How are we supposed to transform Kerala if they are going to keep away one lakh seven thousand and five hundred crore from us," he kept asking along the length and breadth of Kerala.
It is at this point in his speeches that Pinarayi customarily tore into the Congress and the UDF. "We have repeatedly told them that this was the time to stand united and we had also offered that if at all they had any issues we were ready for a discussion. We did it for the sake of Kerala. But they outrightly rejected our offer. They are not interested in moving a finger against the BJP," the Chief Minister told his audience. Thus, he created the political narrative of the Congress being in cahoots with the BJP, a political line the CPM has always sought to push.
Nonetheless, it was the opposition's boycott of the Nava Kerala Sadas that induced the negative messaging from Pinarayi. This was an error the opposition forced out of Pinarayi by its dangerous black flag demonstrations.
The government machinery and the CPM feeder organisations exhibited absolute disdain for dissent from the get-go. The manner in which the opposition protests were sought to be suppressed, the flat-out brutality unleashed by the youth organisations of the CPM and even the personal security staff of the Chief Minister and Pinarayi's open encouragement for such oppressive tactics, somehow did not tally with a government that seemed to earnestly want the Centre to act democratically and fairly.
At the Nava Kerala Sadas, Pinarayi Vijayan was trying to present his government as a victim of the Centre's autocratic ways. While out in the streets, it was his government that looked authoritarian and undemocratic. As proof of his government's compassion for the poor, Pinarayi had in all his speeches showcased the Rs-1600 social security pension granted to 62 lakh people. But the manner in which the CPM tried to disgrace Mariyakutty, the 78-year-old widow who went to court against the delay in the receipt of welfare pensions, mocked at such claims.
So merciless was the government with anything it felt was unpleasant that even a journalist who merely covered the hurling of shoes at the Nava Kerala bus in Kochi was booked for conspiracy. Here was a classic case of one message (smothering of dissent) neutralising the other (call for justice and fairness from the centre).
Pinarayi adamantly refused to acknowledge that the DYFI and SFI cadres indulged in violence. Right till the last day, he insisted that they were on a mission to save lives. He even refused to acknowledge that violence was sparked in the wake of the cabinet bus.
"I had repeatedly told people not to fall for any kind of provocations. And people demonstrated astonishing restraint," the CM said.
And on a day when the capital city was turned into a veritable combat zone, Pinarayi marvelled at the self-control on show right through the Nava Kerala yatra.
During his Nava Kerala Sadas concluding speech at Vattiyoorkavu on Saturday, here is what Pinarayi said he witnessed during his bus journey through Kerala. "Among the massive crowds that arrive to greet us, there would be one or two waving black flags. But the people, even while enthusiastically greeting us, would look at these flag wavers in amusement. Such was the restraint shown by the people." Governor Arif Mohammed Khan, on the other hand, said there was a breakdown of law and order in Kerala, an ominous statement given his equation with the Chief Minister.
Though he had reserved the worst contempt for the Youth Congress and KSU "suicide squads", Pinarayi was all praise for SFI activists who had taken on the Governor. Blissfully unaware of the irony, and perhaps even of a potential Constitutional danger, he called them future prospects.
