They say politics is about swings and roundabouts. They also say what goes around, comes around. Both sayings hold good for what is happening in the Kerala political spectrum these days. In the run-up to the 2016 Assembly elections, the last Left front had gone all out with a barrage of corruption allegations against the UDF government, leading the charge with a slew of controversial decisions taken by the UDF government, for which they coined a term from rubber cultivation. It was “kadum vettu” or slaughter tapping, the objective being harvesting as much latex as possible with least concern for the longevity of the rubber tree. An apt paradigm, as this mode of tapping is taken up when the time has come for replantation.
The UDF, led by Opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala, did not quite have to wait for the slaughter tapping period or the last year of its governance to mount counter attacks against the LDF. The Opposition leader in particular has been leading his typical brand of crusade against a series of misguided decisions by the CPM-led government. Though Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has made a point to ridicule Chennithala and get applause from his fans by dismissing outright allegations, a closer look reveals remedial measures being taken as well.
The recent personal attack on Chennithala by CPI (M) state secretary Kodiyeri Balakrishnan immediately after a party state secretariat meeting late last month suggests worry lines have emerged in the party about its government’s image taking a beating. He said Chennithala wears the RSS hat and that he was the RSS sarsanghchalak in Congress. Following media reports about CPI(M) politburo member S Ramachandran Pillai’s dalliance with the RSS during his high school days, SRP came out with the clarification that he was indeed with the RSS till he was 15 years old but became a Communist party member when he turned 18. Chennithala’s response was that his four decades in public life was an open book and he did not require a certificate from the CPI(M) secretary regarding his DNA.
It is yet another matter that any RSS link is still seen as a political liability in Kerala at a time when the BJP has a near-total sway over most of the country. Yet, both UDF and LDF trade charges against each other for maintaining a secret electoral alliance with the BJP. Even as the state political architecture continues to be governed by these boundaries, there seems to be no dearth of scams that keep popping with predictable frequency.
Therefore, it was with a clear plan that Chennithala began picking on the LDF government’s misdemeanours, one after the other. While it has always been the chief minister’s position that these salvos from the Opposition were of no consequence, that is getting to be a zero sum game as the corrective measures being taken are getting noticed by the public. So much so that even staunch Left supporters are finding it difficult to turn a blind eye to these setbacks. Result: Pinarayi Vijayan is finding it increasingly difficult to dismiss allegations raised against his government by the Opposition leader.
The most recent issue raised by the Opposition leader is the unilateral manner in which the Chief Minister has granted special favours to PwC allowing to set up a backdoor office in the state secretariat, based on the recommendation of the State Transport Secretary. Chennithala kept volleying questions at CM, pressuring him to come clean on why the state government was sold on having PwC Private Ltd as a smokescreen and sign up Hess AG Switzerland as technology partner with a majority stake to build electric buses jointly with Kerala Automobiles Ltd.
It was a meeting chaired by the Chief Secretary on February 17, with five PwC representatives in attendance against three from the state government and two from Hess, apart from a Swiss national of Kerala origin who brought together the potential partners to the negotiating table that gave an inkling on what was being planned.
Excerpts from the minutes of the meeting:
The project envisages the exports of electric buses/ cars to Australia and other overseas destinations through Cochin and Vizhinjam ports, thus making Kerala an electric vehicle hub.
After detailed deliberations, and presentations, the meeting directed the PriceWaterHouseCoopers (PwC) to submit the Detailed Project Report (DPR) by the end of March 2020. In the meantime, Kerala Automobiles Ltd. (KAL) can import chassis and start homologation works for approval of Automotive Research Association Of India (ARAI) to avoid delay. It was also proposed to sign MoU by the end of April 2020 after following all the required formalities.
Following the ruckus raised by the Opposition, the state government said it had discontinued the services of PwC from the E-mobility project on July 18. But no such decision has been taken on Hess.
“The cost that the state exchequer, struggling each month to pay it salaries and pensions, is phenomenal, as the CM keeps bringing in one international consultancy after the other. The `back-door’ office of PwC is being run by four `specialists’ and each one of them is being given a monthly remuneration in excess of Rs 3 lakh per month, more than what the Chief Secretary of the state is paid. All this cost is being borne to sanctify the entry of the Swiss electric vehicle manufacturer without a global tendering. It is clear there has been an underhand deal, giving rise to natural questions regarding kickbacks in the Rs 4,500-crore deal for 3,000 buses. Pinarayi Vijayan cannot keep saying I should not raise such corruption charges during the Covid-19 pandemic,” says Chennithala.
Chennithala has also been leveraging charges regarding the absence of transparency and propriety in the PwC-Hess deal to keep raising the lack of veracity and logic behind the LDF signing a two-year, Rs 8 crore consultancy deal in the second half of 2020 with KPMG for Rebuild Kerala, a project envisaged almost two years ago after the first floods ravaged the state in August 2018. It was first claimed KPMG was rendering its services free of charge but somehow all that changed and the CM had no qualms about hiring the MNC at a hefty fee when the LDF government had less than a year to complete its term.
Chennithala has also been voluble in non-stop demand for the resignation of Vijayan, right from the days he caught the government between a rock and a hard place on the unauthorised transfer of personal health data of thousands of unsuspecting citizens of the state to the New York-based data analytics company Sprinklr, with Keralite Ragy Thomas, its founder and CEO.
The state government defended the decision to rope in Sprinklr when a specific study on Kerala by John Hopkins University, Princeton University painted a scary picture of 80 lakh Covid-19 infections in April and data needed to be generated. But the Centre was severely critical of the state government, citing breach of the citizen’s basic right to privacy. It was a huge win for Chennithala as the issue also began shedding light on many such forays by the state IT department and IT secretary M Sivasankar.
Later, when Sivasankar get embroiled in the gold smuggling case due to his difficult-to-explain links primarily with second accused Swapna Prabha Suresh and by extension with first accused Sarith P S and fourth accused Sandeep Nair, it gave credence to Chennitala’s allegations about the CM going out of the way to protect the proactive role played his principal private secretary in the Sprinklr issue.
Chennithala says the Pinarayi government is aiming to execute its version of slaughter tapping with the Dream Kerala project, pegged to be LDF›s development plank for the 2021 Assembly elections. One sure fire candidate would be the Rs 63,941-crore Silverline project connecting Thiruvananthapuram and Kasargod with a 532-km high speed rail corridor. Yet another one likely to be featured alongside would be the Rs 1,548-crore K-FON (Kerala fibre optic network) project. This is apart from the controversial E-mobility project that plans to manufacture 3,000 electric buses for the state transport at a cost of Rs 4,500 crore with Hess AG as majority partner. And Chennithala has started picking holes in each one.
Consider some of the controversies flagged by Chennithala, which have got the LDF government backtracking:
October 2018: The LDF government, facing heat from Chennithala-led opposition or its decision to issue licences to private companies to set up distilleries and breweries in Kannur, Palakkad and Ernakulam, calls off the plan.
November, 2019: College students Alan Shuhaib and Thaha Fasal were booked under UAPA by Kerala police for alleged Maoist links. Following persistent criticism by the Opposition, spearheaded by Chennithala, the CM in February 2020 requested MHA to refer back the case from NIA to Kerala police. In retrospect, the state police had better things to do like tracking terror links flourishing on huge volumes of contraband gold smuggled in most of 2019 and early part of 2020.
June 2020: People of the state were jolted out of their April-May lockdown inactivity with astronomical electricity bills from the state utility. The CM initially chose to ignore the public outcry justifying the bill. Once the Opposition started raising the decibel level about a cashless government looting the public, it was forced to climb down on June 18, the CM said up to said up to 50 per cent of the additional charge would be underwritten.
It is in this backdrop, the persistent line of questioning by Chennithala gains credibility, going beyond Vijayan’s initially successful strategy of belittling and thus diminishing the gravitas of issues raised by labelling him politically naive and harbouring ambitions of grabbing the chief minister’s chair. It is this game plan belittling the persona of the one bearing news that is backfiring now, almost like a jammed gun with the used shell not ejecting properly.
All this would not have been a walk in the park as there have always been many voices trying to drown out each other from the Congress camp.
Evidently, Pinarayi Vijayan was trying to leverage this inherent party weakness while brushing aside the Opposition leader›s charges in the early days. Clearly, Chennithala has been mindful of this all along.
In sum, there could not have been a more ill-advised move than the attack mounted by CPI(M) state secretary against Chennithala. Not only did it boomerang, forcing senior politburo member SRP to clarify his foray into the RSS before seeing light, in this case red, it gave the Opposition a moral victory. Because, the message that came across loud and clear was that Chennithala had managed to rattle the comrades with his dogged single-mindedness. And that is almost as bad as showing your hand to the opponent a game of poker.
Vinod Mathew is a senior journalist based in Kochi.