Unmindful of the blistering heat of 11 o’clock on an April morning in Kerala, a few elderly men take their place on a sidewalk in Mandayapuram of Kalpetta, the municipal town headquartering Wayanad. The men, with their choice of garments – white shirts, mundus, Nehru caps bearing the national flag – have chosen to exhibit their loyalty to the Congress party, on the day that campaigns for the upcoming general election were to peak. A few metres away, the sounds of trumpets and slogans turn progressively loud. The men raise the placards they have been holding in anticipation, and suddenly, painted pictures of Rahul Gandhi, Wayanad’s Member of Parliament, are everywhere. A cacophony of celebratory sounds emanate from the road as he finally passes.
“Of course Rahul Gandhi will win, people are voting for democracy. Even supporters of the CPI(M) – Congress’s main rival in the state – will stand with the Congress, just for upholding democracy,” says an autorickshaw driver in Kalpetta, after two big rallies passed through the town on the morning of April 3. That is the day that two rival fronts in Kerala – the CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) and the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) filed nominations for their candidates in Wayanad.
Rahul is re-contesting Wayanad, much to the chagrin of the Left, which has joined forces with the Congress in the rest of India to fight “the fascist rule of the Bharatiya Janata Party” that has been in power for 10 years now.
The Congress and the Left are part of the grand alliance called INDIA, formed by 26 political parties to prevent the BJP from winning a third term to form the Union government. However, the bloc’s allies are divided, and even pitted against each other in several states. In West Bengal, the Trinamool Congress had said as early as January that the party will be contesting the Lok Sabha polls alone. In Jammu and Kashmir, the People's Democratic Party of Mehbooba Mufti and the National Conference of Farooq Abdullah announced that they will declare candidates separately. Although some of the earlier differences between parties in the INDIA bloc (like the AAP and the Congress) were ironed out later, cases like the Wayanad standoff present the dilemma of the largest opposition to the BJP.
The conflict within the INDIA alliance is particularly stark in Kerala, where Congress’s top leader Rahul Gandhi is contesting against Annie Raja, a prominent national leader of the Left. Even though Rahul’s candidacy was expected in Wayanad this year, the Left did not hold back from bringing Annie Raja of the Communist Party of India (CPI) to the fray. Though belatedly, the BJP also announced one of their top leaders, the party’s state president K Surendran, as their candidate in Wayanad.
Kerala with its peculiar practice of alternating between the Left and the Congress party and their allies in all 67 years of electing governments, has never given the BJP a chance. The most that the saffron party has scored in Kerala is to win an Assembly seat in the 2016 state polls, only to lose it in the next election. The fight in Kerala, for the state and general elections, has always been between the LDF and the UDF. And Wayanad, a young district formed only in 1980, has always been a Congress territory.
Young constituency, Congress bastion
It took three more decades for Wayanad to become an electoral constituency, with the Lok Sabha elections being held there for the first time only in 2009. There have been three general elections since, the first two won by Congress leader MI Shanavas by margins of more than 1.5 lakh votes and 20,000 respectively. Interestingly, of the seven assembly constituencies under Wayanad, four including Sulthan Bathery and Kalpetta are held by the UDF, and three including Mananthavady by the LDF.
The Congress’s victory margin shot up when Rahul unexpectedly contested from Wayanad in 2019, while also contesting in his traditional constituency of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh. He won by a margin of 4.3 lakh votes in Wayanad while losing Amethi to the BJP’s Smriti Irani.
Unsurprisingly, the BJP brought Smriti, who is now Union Minister of Woman and Child Development, to Wayanad to campaign for K Surendran on April 4, in an unimpressive roadshow. A day earlier, Annie Raja and Rahul Gandhi had led bigger rallies swathed in red flags and the tricolour, with large turnouts. While it was Annie’s rally that had a diverse team of supporters – from the tribal women of Sathyamangalam forests to the Kuki entrepreneur from Manipur – Rahul’s was undoubtedly much more massive.
Thousands of people thronged the roads while a campaign vehicle carried Rahul, his sister and Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, along with a number of eminent UDF leaders from the state. Leaders of the Congress and their biggest ally in the state, the Indian Union Muslim League, were present. But unlike the 2019 campaign, the green flags of the IUML were not raised this time. Photos of the IUML flag were morphed to create a fake narrative that Rahul Gandhi campaigned with Pakistani flags. The Congress flags too were avoided this time, and leaders of the party, along with their thousands of followers, stuck to Indian flags.
KC Venugopal, VD Satheesan, Ramesh Chennithala, MM Hassan, and other top leaders of the party stood alongside Rahul as he squinted in the blinding sun and waved at the crowds on the pavements and the top floors of buildings.
“I have been really embraced by the people of Wayanad. Regardless of which party or community they come from, every single person in Wayanad gave me love, respect, and treated me as one of their own,” Rahul Gandhi told the voters that morning, adding, “I don't think of you as an electorate, I think of you the same way I think of my little sister Priyanka over here. In the houses of Wayanad, I have sisters, mothers, fathers, and brothers.”
Vinod, who runs a shop in Kalpetta, says, “Annie Raja is good but the anti-BJP vote will go to Rahul Gandhi and I say this even as a supporter of the Left. Those who are deeply political will wonder why he is contesting in Kerala where he will be facing the Left instead of the BJP, but then he has only a few other options like Karnataka and Telangana.”
‘Rahul will win, but with a smaller margin’
Despite the turnout and their faith in him – stemming perhaps from the devotion to the Nehru-Gandhi family – the people of Wayanad say that the victory margin will not be as high as last time. “He should visit the constituency more often. The Congress should win but they should bring some changes,” says Rajesh, a shopkeeper. Even on the day of his nomination, Rahul did not stay for long, visiting a few tribal colonies and making door-to-door visits before leaving in the afternoon.
There is a wave of disappointment over his rare visits to the constituency and failure to raise enough voice for Wayanad in the parliament. Annie Raja, the CPI opponent, says that people are hurt that he has hardly raised issues of the constituency in the parliament. According to PRS Legislative Research, Rahul has asked six questions and participated in one debate about Wayanad during the past five years. These include issues like inter-state connectivity, health facilities, and district action plans.
Like most people in Kerala, the commoners you meet on Wayanad’s streets can talk fluent politics and list out issues like seasoned politicians. There is an awareness of major issues — human-animal conflicts are attributed to the carelessness of forest officials, while restrictions on night travel on interstate routes are blamed on the government.
Wayanad, with more than 79% of its area under forest cover, has always faced human-animal conflicts. However, it has surged with the effects of climate change. Multiple deaths occurred in the last many months after elephants, tigers, and other wild animals stepped into human habitations, owing to the summer heat and lack of food availability.
But the biggest woe of all is the lack of a proper medical facility. Wayanad does not have a government-run medical college and the available facilities are insufficient to treat major health issues. “They refer you to hospitals in Kozhikode but it can take hours going down the Thamarassery Pass at peak time. Election promises are never implemented,” says Sunilkumar, another Wayanad native.
These issues find mention in the campaigns of both Rahul and Annie. Rahul especially presses on the lack of proper hospitals that has persisted even after he “wrote to the LDF government ruling the state’. is no Medical College and the government facilities are insufficient to treat major health issues.
Allies of INDIA bloc, rivals in Kerala
Even as Rahul and Annie's campaigns draw attention to each other's shortcomings, the larger issue that both the LDF and the UDF are projecting is the fight against communal, fascist forces. “They are looting the country, electoral bonds are nothing but corruption in the guise of law. Central agencies too are being used for corruption. I’d say the most corrupt person in free India today is Prime Minister Narendra Modi. They will destroy the federal system of our country,” says Annie while speaking to TNM.
Her words – against the ‘hatred’ allegedly spread by right-wing forces – are in line with the arguments of the INDIA bloc, the Bharat Jodo Yatra, and the Nyay Yatra taken out by Rahul Gandhi.
But for the people of Kerala, there is hardly any confusion in seeing two members of the INDIA bloc pitted against each other in Wayanad. It is also one of the four constituencies that the LDF has allotted to the CPI, the second biggest party in the Front after the CPI(M). But, as Wayanad-native Sunilkumar reminds us, it has always been a UDF constituency.
The LDF clearly is not happy with the Congress’s decision to bring Rahul Gandhi back to Wayanad. His candidacy last time had led 19 of the 20 Lok Sabha seats to go to Congress, in what was then termed the Rahul Gandhi wave (one of the 19 seats later became the LDF’s following the defection of Kerala Congress (Mani) group). Chief Minister of Kerala Pinarayi Vijayan, leading the LDF government, minced no words in condemning the Congress’s choice to bring Rahul to Wayanad a second time.
“Who is he facing in Kerala? Is he facing Surendran or the BJP? Here, the LDF is their main rival. When the INDIA bloc wants to stop the BJP from coming to power again, one of its important leaders is coming to fight [its ally] the LDF here. He is going to face Annie Raja here, a leader of the Left at the national level, someone who was called anti-national for standing against the BJP government during the Manipur conflict,” Pinarayi Vijayan said.
The Congress turns on the CPI(M) for “targeting Rahul Gandhi” in Kerala while Left leaders in other states are supporting him. “Our main aim is to bring down the Modi government and bring the INDIA alliance to power. But whenever Pinarayi Vijayan talks, he attacks Rahul Gandhi!” said KC Venugopal, the Congress general secretary who is also contesting from Alappuzha.
Annie Raja says that it is a question that the Congress has to answer, why two prominent leaders of the INDIA bloc are contesting against each other. “We had declared our candidates even before election dates were announced. Why did the Congress decide to field Rahul Gandhi here then? When you are in an alliance, it means you make certain adjustments in seats. Why does the Congress fail to recognise the biggest challenge here [of fighting the BJP]?” she asks.
Sensing that there is little chance for the CPI to win, and not wanting to improve the chances for the BJP, voters of Wayanad say that they will stick to their traditional choice. “Otherwise, if Modi comes to power for a third time, we will start seeing our currency notes with his photo instead of Mahatma Gandhi’s,” says the rickshaw driver who is sure of Rahul’s victory.