Purportedly written by the Kerala Home Minister to the Congress high command, the letter squarely blames Chief Minister Oommen Chandy for the recent debacle in the local body elections.
The letter has now taken on a Damoclesian tinge for the tottering Congress leadership in Kerala.
Not surprisingly Ramesh Chennithala vehemently denies its authorship claiming not to be in the habit of washing the party’s dirty linen in public.
Given that it was a shoddily written one could have been an added impetus to Chennithala’s denial. One cannot blame him for that at least.
Juxtapose the letter’s call for a serious shake-up within the United Democratic Front (UDF) with Chennithala’s advocacy of drastic surgical measures required to revive UDF’s waning popularity among the masses to avoid a possible rout in the upcoming 2016 Assembly elections.
The mystery deepens!
No one can however deny that the letter does delineate a few stark in-your-face truths about how BJP has indeed emerged as a third force in Kerala’s hitherto bipolar political scenario.
The gradual drift of the Hindu community towards the saffron-bearers would undoubtedly spell a huge loss in the traditional vote-bank of the Congress.
Naturally anyone with a thicker hide would have been left squirming in his seat after the local body rout.
But of course, not Chandy who had famously expressed his inability to ask for former state Finance Minister KM Mani’s resignation in the recent bar bribery scam when he himself had not felt it necessary to put in his papers in the Palmolein import case in 2011.
A deadly cocktail of corruption, scams, nepotism and authoritarianism -as spelt out in the letter- would undoubtedly sound the death knell for the UDF’s dwindling fortunes vis-à-vis the suffering masses.
The fact that such a letter has surfaced –irrespective of who wrote it- clearly spells doom for the superficial cohesiveness that somehow managed to string together the state leadership till date.
Incidentally Chennithala leaves for Delhi on Friday evening for parleys with the Congress high command who has called for a meeting with the state’s top leaders including Chandy and Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) president VM Sudheeran on 22 December to resolve the party’s internal issues before the Assembly polls.