Never count him out

A very senior citizen,as the budgets utterly new contribution to the vocabulary of geriatrics goes,has decided to make things a little difficult for the Marxists. V.S. Achuthanandan,the 87-year-old chief minister of Kerala,has declared that hes ready to contest in the assembly elections,before adding the unavoidable clause,if the party CPM wants me to. There is the big bad fight coming up with the Congress and the bigger challenge of anti-incumbency,but,of course,first there has to be the VS vs PV showdown,the inevitable combat between the old-school comrade and the practical communist,as party state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan styles himself to be.

Achuthanandans offer obviously carries a political spin and its likely to hover over CPMs Politburo and the Central Committee meet to decide on the poll strategy in West Bengal and Kerala. What a reversal from the March of 2006 when the party pondered exactly the opposite: the summary removal of Achuthanandan from the front ranks of the poll campaign. What a difference from a couple of years ago,too,when VS lost his Politburo seat briefly and his pride for a much longer time. His fractious relation with Vijayan and his refusal to follow the CPMs top-down approach meant he would be looking to a quiet retirement soon. His own obduracy saw to it that industrialisation didnt pick up pace as it should have in the state. And his projection of self-righteousness took party infighting out into the open,in total disregard to a party that demands both discipline and subservience from its member.

But in this season of scandals in Kerala,which claimed even a victim in Delhi CVC P.J. Thomas and saw the Congress-led UDF slide from its position of invincibility,the CPMs anti-corruption archangel has suggested his new relevance. Especially when there have been enough intimations about the partys mortality,in both Kerala and Bengal.