Deve Gowda can sleep over this one right through the campaign. He is dreaming nationally; his partymen are rebelling locally. In this reserved constituency they are out to wreck CPI(M),the humble farmers vital Third Front partner. Will humbler farmers play along is the question in this farm belt. Till the other day,the steady junior partner of the Left Democratic Front,Janata Dal(S) at any rate its state leadership was openly rooting for the Congress. The big bitter swing could happen in Alathurs Chittoor Assembly segment. As many as 30,000 portable votes,enough to spoil the Left chances,claims Krishnankutty,the Secretary General of the state JD(S). He has a long-held base here and is a busy man. Shuttling between booth committees,public rallies and media briefings,he even finds time to tutor easygoing Congressmen on farm loan waivers and farmer suicide statistics. The last are issues that resonate here. Out of 951 farmer suicides in the state till 2006,nine happened in this rice bowl and loans remain unwaived despite a Front in power with a welfarist edge. Unsurprisingly,Krishnankutty has only good words for Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan; pure acid is reserved for CPI(M) state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan. The Kozhikode parliamentary seat was denied to JD(S) state president Veerendra Kumar,sitting MP and media baron whose Mathrubhumi daily ran stories targeting Vijayan on the Lavalin scam. Krishnankutty is too seasoned a player to let go of the legendary Marxist turf war between the CM and party chief which he estimates will play out majorly in the poll. If that too happens,the loser will be the bright young face of CPI(M) - a rags-to-success Dalit story. The 34-year- old P K Biju is SFIs all-India president and has much to look forward to. He has just submitted his doctoral thesis on polymer science,is soon to get married and is into his first popular poll. The last could well have been a cakewalk but for the JD(S) factor in this parliamentary seat with clear Left strengths. Much of which is visible when Biju turns up on his whistlestop campaign. In ten minutes flat,a nondescript village road fills up with some 400 men,women and children who listen to the candidate in rapt attention. His down-to-earth two-minute speech is received like a whiff of cool breeze after the hot air from the previous speaker who went non-stop on issues as paramount as the Indo-US nuclear deal and the pro-Israel foreign policy. Speeches apart,the villagers seem keen to get the first glimpse of the candidate who isnt a local. Congress candidate N K Sudheer isnt much of a son of the soil either. As self-made as Biju,this B.Tech graduate in Nautical Engineering from London went where his ship took him. To over 40 countries,he says,before he cut short a lucrative career to join the Dalit wing of the Congress. Unlike his rival,a student leader,he was kept off campus politics by his sensible Pitaji. But I more than made up by doing enough politics on my return to earn unanimous nomination to contest here, he says. If he has to duplicate this singular Congress rarity with an upset win,he needs help from across party lines. A small sign of shifting loyalties was showcased at his roadside campaign in Chelakkara. A firebrand young man was lashing out at the Marxists with a zeal unseen in Congress circles. A known activist of the CPI(M) youth front,he switched sides four months back. A straw in the wind? Even so,the wind has to blow a lot harder on the polling day through this mountain pass.
