Rahul Gandhi and Annie Raja, allies fighting BJP nationally, are rivals in Kerala
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.