‘We may not meet again’: Kerala Congress president remembers his colleague’s last words

“I have not spoken about this to anyone. He had come to the room at the guest house where I was staying at about 7 am in the morning. After discussing a lot of things, he said he had come to meet me, my wife and my daughter. And then he hugged me and broke into tears. I told him, ‘Shanavas, your life is a miracle. At several previous such circumstances in life, I told him how he had bravely survived. I told him to go ahead’,” Ramachandran told the audience.

“Shanavas, who has never cried before me ever, told me that he didn’t think we would meet again. He said his days are counted. I didn’t believe him because like all of us, I believed that his life was filled with a lot of miracles. I hoped that he would survive this occasion as well. But he has left us, drowning us in profound sadness,” he added, fighting back tears.

Shanavas, one of Congress’ prominent Muslim faces in Kerala who survived a series of electoral losses to finally get elected to the Lok Sabha in 2009 from the Wayanad constituency, passed away in the early hours of Wednesday at a private hospital in Chennai following prolonged health issues. He had undergone a liver transplant at the hospital earlier this month post which infection in the organ forced the leader to be put on the ventilator. Hundreds of people paid homage to the leader in Kochi on Wednesday and his burial took place at a local mosque in the city on Thursday.

Shanavas, who began his career through the student outfit of the Congress, shone in the spotlight during the 90s when he emerged as one of the three ‘correctionists’ within the party during the K Karunakaran era. Standing tall against Karunakaran, Shanavas and two others advocated reforms within the party at a time when Karunakaran was looking to promote his own son, K Muraleedharan.

Shanavas lost the first five elections he contested (3 Assembly, 2 Lok Sabha) but went on to win the Wayanad constituency for his party in 2009 with the biggest margin recorded in the state in that year. He went on to retain Wayanad, albeit with a smaller margin, in 2014. Earlier this year, he was appointed one of the three working presidents of the KPCC.