Kerala has had a long history of working with stable coalitions in government. While the two sides, the United Democratic Front and the Left Democratic Front, have seen partners come and go and while these partners have often quarrelled with each other, the internal discipline within the dominant party in each coalition — the Congress in the UDF and the CPM in the LDF — has helped ensure political stability. This may now be history given the manner in which both the CPM and the Congress are riven with internal factionalism. If it’s the wily old fox, K. Karunakaran, versus the plodder A.K. Antony in the Congress, it has been the E.K. Nayanar and now V.S. Achutanandan versus his detractors in the CPM.Thanks to this intense factionalism, the state’s economic development has suffered. Just when it appeared that Antony was finally moving Kerala out of its cloistered past and its excessive dependence on rubber, spices and the Persian Gulf into cyberspace, and his Global Investors Meet marked a turning point in altering investor perception of the state, Karunakaran has thrown a spanner in the works with his old game of nepotism and factionalism. On the other side, of the political divide, one faction within the CPM is busy hurling the favourite left abuse against another, dubbing one of its own a “CIA agent”! The target of attack, one of the architects of Kerala’s “peoples’ plan”, T.M. Thomas Isaac. Formerly an economist from the prestigious research institute, the Centre for Development Studies, and now a member of the state assembly, Isaac is being charged with writing joint research papers with “foreign scholars” and of being associated with foreign funded non-governmental organisation. Shades of Murli Manohar Joshi in the CPM? No less a radical scholar than Noam Chomsky has come to Isaac’s rescue, admonishing Kerala’s marxists for their xenophobia! Hopefully, the CPM’s rank and file will appreciate the dangers of calling ideological detractors names, for what you do unto others, they can do to you.If the Congress party’s national leadership has to step in to rein in Antony’s detractors, the CPM’s national leadership must step in to rein in Isaac’s. Kerala can do with a few more like Antony and Isaac.
