4 min readThiruvananthapuramJan 27, 2023 10:20 AM IST
First published on: Jan 27, 2023 at 09:55 AM IST
Taking a swipe at Anil K Antony, the son of veteran Congress leader and former Kerala chief minister A K Antony, after he had quit party posts, Jairam Ramesh compared him to another Congress scion, Chandy Oommen.
The communications in-charge of the Congress, Ramesh tweeted: “A tale of two sons of two CMs from the same state. One is a Bharat Yatri and walking tirelessly, mostly barefoot to unite our nation in the #BharatJodoYatra. The other is reveling in his day in the sun today having ignored his duties to the Party and the Yatra.’’
The son of Oommen Chandy, another former Kerala CM, Chandy Oommen is among the yatris who have been walking with Rahul Gandhi since the beginning of the Yatra, large parts of it barefeet. He has missed only a couple of days, when he flew to Germany accompanying his father for treatment.
If that apparently fits Ramesh’s criteria of the ideal Congress leader, Chandy has also been around for a while, making his way in the party – unlike Anil, a virtual outsider.
A law graduate, Chandy has been associated with the Congress since the time father Oommen was the CM from 2011 to 2016.
As Youth Congress state secretary and now chairman of its outreach cell, he has been campaigning at the grass-roots level for the party in the recent elections, including Assembly and local polls. Chandy has also carved out a base for himself in the Puthuppally Assembly segment, which Oommen has been representing uninterrupted for the last 52 years. In the last two Assembly elections, he campaigned actively for his father.
Chandy, 37, has also been a prominent presence at recent conventions of the Congress as well as its allies, particularly the IUML. Congress leaders tell you about a party event in Kollam two years ago where Chandy was present as a participant, dressed in a dhoti, when they received the message about a local court taking up the bail application of some Youth Congress workers arrested in a political protest. A practising lawyer, Chandy immediately borrowed a gown from a colleague and appeared for the workers, they say.
Anil Antony, an engineer with a Master’s degree in science from Stanford University, is a newcomer to politics, having spent most of his professional life in the world of technology and innovations. In 2005, he co-founded a tech firm that provided mobile value-added services. He worked for a while in California and was business development vice-president with a start-up that developed a digital learning platform for children with special needs.
Even after he started working with the Congress digital media cell in 2019, Anil, also 37, continued working with other ventures like PI India (Parliamentarians with Innovators for India), which is said to be an action group of innovators, parliamentarians, and health policy makers working together to identify, develop, and deploy innovative technological solutions and best practices that could assist India’s fight against Covid-19.
While the sons may have taken divergent paths, the fathers were seen as belonging to the same camp in the notoriously faction-ridden Kerala Congress. During his intra-party fight with the late veteran K Karunakaran, Antony had picked Oommen as his second-in-command. Antony’s move to Delhi politics in 2004 allowed Oommen to emerge from his shadow and serve as CM for two terms.
It is the route Antony took then that might also explain where son Anil stands now. Unlike Chandy who has a readymade launchpad in father Oommen’s Puthuppally constituency, Anil has no such base to call his own in Kerala, with Antony out of state politics for nearly two decades.
Even while he was in state politics, Antony had no fixed Assembly constituency. His long stay in Parliament was via the Rajya Sabha.
Anil K Antony, the son of veteran Congress leader and former Kerala chief minister A K Antony. (Facebook: Anil K Antony) 
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