Storm gathers under red sky

Govindan pauses to watch a couple of his local comrades pull up in a black Lancer and a red Chevrolet respectively, in the party district office’s courtyard below. ‘‘Ours is a party for the downtrodden, and their response to this insult on Kannur will come through when the votes are counted.’’

Kannur, Govindan says, has been singled out for this ‘security humiliation’ only because it is Red. The EC, he alleged, was bowing to the Congress-led government’s diktats to paint the CPI(M) fortress as a hopelessly trouble-prone district to discredit the Left. He points out that the EC had not imposed such an overbearing security in Tamil Nadu, which he said had a lot more voters and constituencies than Kerala.

A few minutes later, Govindan’s car pulls up at the local Press Club, for an interface between leaders of the three sides in the fray — the Left, the UDF and the BJP.

He is asked if he seriously disagreed with a special security cover for the Kannur poll, when his party itself claims to have lost 143 of its men to political strife over the last couple of decades in Kannur, and faced allegations of rigging after almost every poll. Govindan hotly denies the rigging part, but reiterates that the party will ‘‘continue to defend itself’’. He says the Congress had killed more political opponents than his party here.

Sunny Joseph, Kannur DCC president, counters that saying the Congress had killed no opponent here in the last ten years, unlike the CPI(M). An angry Govindan reels out a list of alleged Congress-sponsored political murders. He then points to journalists who had reported a Congress public meeting wherein the earlier DCC president had turned up late and requested to be excused since he had to stop to shoot down a man on his way. Sunny, however asserts that many of those incidents predate the last decade he had mentioned, and insists there should be a cut-off date for trading allegations.

The DCC chief berates the CPI(M) for ‘political dishonesty’, asking him if he could possibly name another place where as many political workers had been killed or maimed for life as in Kannur. ‘‘If they say they no longer believe in rigging polls, what are the communists scared of? How can a heavy police presence and stepped-up security impede a fair poll? What is their grouch?’’ he demands to know.

The third man on the dais, BJP district president P Karunakaran, prefers to speak last. He says even if the EC posts a million cops here, the CPI(M) as well as the Muslim League were going to rig the poll as usual. ‘‘There is simply no way out. This is how it has always been here, this is how it will be. So why waste time discussing that?’’ he asks.