New Delhi: A day ahead of Rahul Gandhi’s visit to Wayanad, his parliamentary constituency, the Congress faces the Left conundrum – the grand old party fights the Left parties in Kerala but is friends with them in West Bengal. Recently senior Congress leaders from across the country slammed the LDF government in Kerala over the alleged SFI attack on Rahul’s Wayanad office.
The Kerala unit, led by AICC general secretary in charge of Organization KC Venugopal, staged a massive protest march against the alleged vandalism by the SFI, the student's wing of the CPI-M in the capital Thiruvananthapuram and other parts of the state. Members of Congress and the CPI-M also clashed in several places.
The Leader of the Opposition in the Kerala Assembly VD Satheesan blamed the office of Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan for the attack on Rahul’s office and alleged that this was done at the behest of the BJP, which was against the Wayanad MP.
KC Venugopal was more direct in targeting the Chief Minister. “Pinarayi Vijayan resumed from where PM Modi had stopped. The move of the CPI-M is to find a place in the good books of BJP. The CPI-M wants to market its animosity towards Rahul Gandhi before Modi to escape from the clutches of gold smuggling mafia.”
The anger expressed by the Congress leaders is likely to be reflected when Rahul reaches Wayanad on June 30 for a two-day visit. He is expected to hold public meetings as well as interact with party workers during the visit. An anti-Left position suits the Congress in Kerala, where the party-led UDF fights the CPI-M-led LDF but the Congress and the CPI-M are friends in West Bengal, where they together take on the ruling Trinamool Congress as well as the BJP.
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The BJP tried hard to make inroads into Kerala, banking on the image of technocrat E Sreedharan, who was the saffron party’s chief ministerial candidate in the 2021 Assembly elections but did not succeed. At the national level too, the Congress and the Left parties are often on the same page in targeting the BJP-led central government.
The Left block supported the Congress-led UPA government from outside from 2004 onwards but got carried away by the anti-US sentiment and withdrew support to the Manmohan Singh government over the India-US civil nuclear deal in 2008. Party insiders said that over the past years Congress used to get the flak for outsourcing its public protests to the Left parties but that position has been changing of late as the grand old party is trying to revive itself across the country ahead of the 2024 national elections.
However, the Left conundrum is likely to stay within the Congress system as the grand old party’s equations with the Left parties had evolved over the past decades, keeping in mind the central and the state-level politics are likely to remain the same, the insiders said.
