If Tripura falls, can Kerala be far behind?

On February 27, as the exit polls predicted the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) winning the Tripura assembly elections, one man in the party was quite nervous as he was not sure if he would measure up to expectations. When reporters approached Sunil Deodhar, the man in charge of the BJP’s election campaign in Tripura, to give his assessment of the exit polls, he was said to be quite ambivalent. “Modiji (Prime Minister Narendra Modi) called me today and asked how many seats our alliance (with Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura-IPFT) will win. I told him around 30 to 32 (out of 60). But Modiji seemed not very happy. He said he wanted 45. I don’t know what will happen,” Deodhar was quoted as saying.He need not have worried, as eventual results showed the alliance winning 43 seats in what can only be described as the biggest one-sided show in an election in north-eastern India. For Deodhar it was the culmination of nearly three years of tireless work in a state that was totally foreign to him. The man from Mumbai, who spearheaded Modi’s campaign in Varanasi from where the prime minister got elected by the highest victory margin in 2014, had never set foot on Tripura before being asked to take charge of the state. Just two facts will prove how hard Deodhar worked. He became such a fluent speaker in Kokborok, the dialect of the local Borok tribe, that he addressed large rallies in the language becoming an instant favourite with the locals. To boot, Deodhar, who had been a vegetarian all his life till then, turned non-vegetarian because “almost everyone in Tripura ate meat and it would be churlish of me to decline an invitation to dinner because I am a vegetarian.”That’s the sort of dedication Deodhar and people like Ram Madhav, BJP general secretary in charge of the entire north-east, and Himanta Biswa Sarma, Assam’s finance and health minister who is the chief strategist for all seven states in the region, showed in ensuring their party’s sweeping victory.The BJP may have extended its hold over a geographically strategic region of the country but politically the party faces tougher – and more important – electoral battles in Karnataka, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh which also go to polls later this year. In all three states the Congress, which has now been wiped out of the north-east, will be the chief rival.The victory in Tripura was especially sweet for the BJP because it marked the end of 25 years of communist rule in the state. This was an encore of sorts of what Mamata Benerjee did to the Marxists of West Bengal who had reduced that once-vibrant industrial state into one of poverty and penury during their 34 years at the helm. The BJP sees the Left, despite its numerical weakness, as its main ideological rival because since Independence the Left had garnered much of the intellectual space in the country pushing the BJP and its fountainhead, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), into pariah status for decades.As the wheel turns incessantly, the Marxists will have to do some serious soul-searching though they don’t believe in souls and such. Banerjee and the BJP have relegated them to the third spot in West Bengal. With the kind of popular support that the BJP received in Tripura – the party rose from 1.5% vote share five years ago to 43% – it doesn’t look like the CPM is going to make a comeback in the state in the foreseeable future.That leaves Kerala as the last bastion of the Left. The Tripura defeat will strengthen the argument of party general secretary Sitaram Yechuri that they will have to align with the Congress Party to defeat the common enemy, BJP. Unfortunately, the enemy’s enemy principle does not seem to work here because the Kerala unit would not want to have anything to do with the Congress which, at least until now, is its main rival in the state. This position will naturally work to the BJP’s advantage both in the state and federal levels. If Tripura and West Bengal are any indication, it is only a matter of time before the BJP emerged as a strong contender for power in Kerala.For Kamal Haasan, a tough act to followKamal Haasan’s histrionic talents are beyond question. He is a far better actor than M G Ramachandran and Jayalalithaa Jayaraman, the two Tamil film stars who traded face paint for a supposedly more mundane career in politics and went on to become chief ministers. For better part of his film career Haasan had been a thinking man’s star rather than the rabble-rousing, hero-worshipping roles that the two earlier actors had ridden their way to political power. The star of such powerful films like Apoorva Ragangal, Mahanadi, Moonram Pirai, Nayagan, to name but a few, in the earlier part of his life, lapsed into some very mediocre but highly expensive ventures like Vishwaroopam and Dashavatharam that left him looking very forlorn.Knowing how well the people of Tamil Nadu had taken to film stars and those connected with films, a career in politics was a natural choice for Haasan, especially since the vacuum created by the death of Jayalalithaa was waiting to be filled and the best prospect was another star from the Tamil film industry. But comparisons with the two earlier actor-politicians who made it good would be useless because that was then, this is now. Those who idealised ‘MGR’, as Ramachandran was known, and ‘Amma’ Jayalalithaa are either no more or are grandparents now. The grandchildren are not so easily given to hero-worship thanks to the giant technological advancement in media and information dissemination. With better information comes the spirit of inquiry and questioning which naturally makes it harder for any aspiring politician to climb the power ladder. So, it will be difficult for Kamal Haasan to assume the role of a latter-day MGR.While launching his political party, Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM) or ‘Peoples Justice Forum’ in Madurai recently, Haasan denied having any big political ambitions except doing good for the people. Curiously, the man sitting next to him on the stage was none other than Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal who had also started his public life decrying politics and politicians as a whole and even pledging he would never get into the rat race for power. So you know where Haasan is headed, or at least aiming to.Haasan also had Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan delivering his good wishes through a video message, clearly indicating which side of the political divide his sympathies lie although time and again he had said he would follow a centrist path. The party symbol – of six hands holding each other with a star in the middle – was supposed to represent the six states, including the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, thereby declaring Haasan’s ambitious plans to take the MNM beyond the confines of Tamil Nadu.But mere plans without a roadmap will hardly hold any appeal to a heterogeneous population that has very little common ideological ground to meet. At a time when the leftist-Marxist thinking is taking a beating in one state after another, allowing Vijayan and Kejriwal to handhold him into politics may prove costly for Haasan. It is a fact that the two traditional Dravidian parties of Tamil Nadu – the DMK and the AIADMK – are facing serious existential crisis. But whether Kamal Haasan will emerge as a viable alternative is a question that remains to be answered.