Thiruvananthapuram: The last day of the brief seven-day 12th Assembly session coincided with the announcement of by-election dates. Palakkad and Chelakkara assembly seats and Wayanad Parliamentary seat will go to polls on November 13.
The Assembly session was the best chance the CPM had to dry-clean its image, sullied as it was by allegations of corruption and, worst of all, by the charge that it was secretly supping with the RSS. Could the CPM, like the obliterated cyborgs in movies whose splintered parts coalesce to become its old sturdy self, put back as one whole piece its shattered political credibility? The answer would be somewhere in between 'no' and 'yes', probably closer to 'no'.
Most of the grave allegations that have been hurled at the government and the CPM by P V Anvar and the UDF have been left unanswered. But, on the other hand, it looks like the government has managed to reverse the perception that it prefers to run away from uncomfortable truths.
And this it achieved mainly by agreeing to a comprehensive debate on the floor of the Assembly on all the controversial issues, a strategy rarely employed by embattled governments. It also helped that the CPI, which had publicly expressed outrage at the CM's reluctance to punish the ADGP, stood by the CM in the Assembly.
UDF's clumsy beginning
The government ploy worked, at least to begin with. The UDF was caught off guard on August 7, the first functional day of this session.
Rather than demonstrate shrewd, cunning restraint, the UDF staged what looked like disproportionate aggression in apparent retaliation for certain comments made by the ruling benches against the Opposition Leader. This allowed Speaker A N Shamseer to justifiably call off the day without the confirmed discussion on the Malappuram-PR issue.
This gave the impression that the UDF did not have the heart to fight. However, after this first-day bungle, the UDF was better prepared.
10 big questions
Though seemingly courageous, the government's combative stance was still a risky gamble. As it turned out, the government had no intention of facing any of the charges head-on.
Many pertinent questions on various controversial issues ranging from ADGP M R Ajithkumar's RSS links and the mishandling of Thrissur Pooram to the mysterious intervention of a PR agency were raised by the UDF during this Assembly session. Here are the 10 most important ones.
1. Has the intelligence wing informed the Chief Minister of the ADGP's unofficial meetings with RSS leaders? If so, has the CM sought any explanation from the ADGP?
2. Why was an investigation into the ADGP's RSS links ordered only on September 25 this year, 16 months after the ADGP met RSS general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale in May 2023?
3. After the Chief Minister's interview with the Hindu, under whose instruction did a PR agency ask the daily to add a few sentences that were not originally spoken by the CM?
4. If this was done without the sanction of the Chief Minister's Office, would the government initiate legal proceedings against the PR agency?
5. Why was the ADGP removed from law and order? Is it for meeting RSS leaders? Or was it for his links to gold smuggling and murders, as P V Anvar alleged? Or was it for mishandling Thrissur Pooram?
6. When ministers were told by the police not to enter the 'pooram' grounds, who allowed an ambulance carrying NDA candidate Suresh Gopi to reach the spot?
7. Why was there a five-month delay in submitting a report for which the CM had originally set a deadline of one week? Did the CM ever enquire about the delay?
8. Did the CM get information about the chaos that was happening at the pooram grounds? If so, did he call either the ADGP or the district commissioner to seek details?
9. If the government believed that the RSS was behind the conspiracy to sabotage the pooram, why did it take five months to declare a comprehensive probe? Did the police even register an FIR?
10. Why did the police delay the submission of the chargesheet in the Manjeshwaram bribery case related to BJP president K Surendran? Why did the police not even file an application to condone the delay?
Were these questions answered?
The government went nowhere near any of these questions. But it did respond partly to one question, to the one related to the PR agency.
It held up one part of the Hindu clarification that said that words not spoken by the CM were included in the interview but chose to deliberately ignore the other side of the Hindu clarification that these words were inserted at the behest of a PR agency.
Instead of mounting direct counters, the government used whataboutery, the tendency to respond to an accusation by hurling a counter-accusation. For instance, when told that the CM had used the ADGP as a middleman to strike a deal with the RSS, the government spoke of how Rajiv Gandhi despatched former Goa governor Khurshid Alam Khan to meet RSS sarsanghachalak Balasaheb Deoras in 1989.
There was yet another defence that the government employed in the Assembly and this can be best described by the title of an iconic Basheer novella: Ntuppuppakkoranendarnnu (My grandfather had an elephant).
CPM speakers kept recalling the past deeds of the CPM and Pinarayi Vijayan, virtually admitting that in the present, there was nothing celebratory about the party and its leader.
It looks like many of the questions it had deliberately refused to answer in the Assembly will return to haunt the CPM during the by-election campaign.