Monthly Archives: February 2021

Elections Declared: Whom to Vote

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EVM
Voters of Kerala, which goes to Assembly polls on April 6 , will have to be very diligent in casting their votes. (The same goes for other States too).
Otherwise, your suffrage would be undermined by your elected representative choosing to change sides. The political climate in the country is such that it is not easy to predict who would be changing their loyalties and when. Here is an advisory.

Do not vote for the candidates who are liable to be blackmailed because of their involvement in crime or corrupt practices. Avoid voting for greedy politicians. If your candidate has wealth beyond his known sources of income, never vote for him or her. (They are in politics for amassment of wealth and they will change the side the moment they get a good offer.)

Avoid voting for candidates of small parties which are prone to change sides. There are a few exceptions  in this regard like CPI and CMP which has not switched sides for  decades (four and two and half decades respectively).  Most have changed sides or split with groups migrating from one front to another. New parties such as the Twenty-twenty are to be judged by the caliber and integrity of the candidates they are putting up.  If it is a retired civil servant, check whether they had faced allegations of corruption. If it is a media person or businessman, evaluate his or her professional conduct. If they had been honest, fair and ethical, they may not change sides.

BJP State president K.  Surendran has stated that BJP will rule Kerala if 30 to 40 of its candidates are elected. This is to be taken seriously because seven State governments have been brought down by the BJP in the last seven years by engineering defections. Actually, the party will not need even that many members to gain a share in power in Kerala. 

It is notable that the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer, Kerala, is yet to State the reasons for malfunctioning of electronic voting machines during last Lok Sabha  polls despite an order from the State Information Commission to release the information under RTI Act.

Keep an eye on the legislators and the voting machines too. Ensure that your verdict is not miscarried.

“Democracy’s a very fragile thing. You have to take care of democracy. As soon as you stop being responsible to it and allow it to turn into scare tactics, it’s no longer democracy, is it? It’s something else. It may be an inch away from totalitarianism.” Sam Shepard

Kerala Assembly elections: Congress needs a paradigm shift

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It will be an uphill task for Congress in Kerala to win the Assembly elections this year. The party will have to reinvent and meet new challenges.

Congressmen will have to forget its group squabbles and seat sharing and come up with a new array of candidates who could win the elections. It is also time for a generation shift.

The Congress has taken a big risk by alienating Kerala Congress (M) so that it could try to dominate in the UDF strong-hold of Kottayam— a long-standing dream of Congress men from the district such as the Kottayam MLA, Thiruvanchoor Radhakrishnan. They thought that the death of Kerala Congress leader K. M. Mani gave them the opportunity. However, erosion of votes seen in the panchayat elections even in former Chief Minister Oommen Chandy’s constituency (Puthuppally) showed that the dream is a difficult one to realise, though Mr. Chandy and Mr. Radhakrishnan will be able to hold their fort. In the strongholds of Ernakulam district, the emergence of Twenty Twenty as a political party is throwing up a new challenge.

These would force the Congress to pay special attention to districts which are not their strongholds and cut losses in districts such as Pathanamthitta. In this scheme of things, Thiruvananthapuram district becomes one where the party has to fight some important battles especially against the BJP.

It has been suggested that top Congress leaders like Oommen Chandy and Ramesh Chennithala should contest from Thiruvananthapuram to wrest the Nemom seat from the BJP and the Vattiyoorkavu seat from the CPI (M). However, the leaders were not willing to move out of their pocket boroughs.  Obviously, they could fail in Thiruvananthapuram if BJP and CPI (M) come to a tactical understanding behind the scenes. Many are already concluding that the BJP is forcing Chief Minister Pinarai Vijayan for some adjustment, as a quid pro quo against Central agencies going slow on the probes on involvement of the Chief Minister’s Office and some Ministers and Speaker P. Sreeramakrishnan in gold smuggling and other scams. Now, the party is trying to persuade V. M. Sudheeran to contest from Vattiyoorkavu while the strategies for other constituencies are not yet clear.

The party has members of Parliament Rajmohan Unnithan and K. Sudhakaran to hold the fort in Kasaragod and Kannur districts respectively. But K. Muraleedharan, MP, has stated that he would campaign only in his constituency (Vadakara), pointing to ongoing infighting in the party.

Though the honesty and suave manners of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is no match for the divisive politics of Narendra Modi at the national level, the presence of the Wayanad MP can cast a spell in Kerala.  But this has to be matched with selection of inspiring young leaders to win strong-holds of the CPI (M). Names such as that of AICC spokesperson Shama Mohamed has come up in this regard. Congress will also have to think of fielding winnable candidates from outside the party also as the stock of the khadi-wielding politicians with no worthwhile job of their own (other than politics) is fast diminishing. But the scramble for seats among party men has always prevented Congress from scouting for talents outside.

Yet, the party is showing some signs of mending. It is drawing up a well-studied manifesto under the leadership of Shashi Tharoor and other qualified persons.  However, barring Mr. Tharoor, the social media presence of Congress and its outreach to the young are still poor compared to BJP and the CPI (M). Though Congress men are active here and there solo, there is no coordinated action to project policies or political views. In fact, many leaders are found wanting or afraid to take on BJP and even the CPI (M).  This is why it is important for the party have a new generation of leaders with no baggage from the past to carry.

Covid 19: Kerala’s claims come to a nought

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Graph showing trend of Covid 19 cases in Kerala (source: GoK).

Kerala’s claim of lower number of deaths owing to Covid 19 among States in India has come to a nought.

Kerala’s deaths on account of Covid 19 per million population crossed 100 by the end of January 2021 with more than 25000 cases reported per million population. The deaths per million at the end of December 2020 was 84. This jumped to 105 by January 31, 2021. The total number of confirmed cases crossed the one million mark on February  14, 2021. 

Nearly half of the States and Union Territories in India have these figures lower than that of Kerala, as per officially-reported numbers. They include Uttar Pradesh, Telengana, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh.

Haryana, Maharastra, Punjab and West Bengal had similar number of deaths per million population to that of Kerala last month.  By now, Kerala has surpassed them also.

Active cases remain high Kerala while cases in other States barring Maharastra have come down. Some States are not reporting deaths anymore.

The official explanation for continuing higher number of infections in the State is that it had been able to contain spread of the disease significantly in the first six months while the disease had spread to a large proportion of the population in many other States. The latter had thus achieved some kind of herd immunity while the vast majority of Keralities are yet to be infected. (This will give some advantage to Kerala in the end if vaccination could stop the disease from spreading further). Sero-prevalence studies confirm this. The numbers of unreported infections were very high in other States, compared to Kerala.  The national average in this respect is nearly double that of Kerala, according to studies conducted in December 2020-January 2021. (11.6 per cent of adult population in Kerala was found to be infected while the national average was 21.4 per cent.)

However, this casts doubts about the claim that case fatality rate in Kerala, which currently stands at 0.4 per cent, is lower than in other States. Many other States would have had similar case fatality figures if most of the cases had been reported. For example, the cases reported per million population in West Bengal is below one fourth of Kerala and case fatality rate was 1.78 per cent last month end. But the deaths per million population was around the same as that of Kerala. (While Covid 19 cases could easily go unreported, deaths get reported to a large extent.)