On Monday, a crucial leadership meeting of the Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) reportedly resolved to leverage the heft of two electorally significant backward class communities to aid the United Democratic Front (UDF) Opposition in the upcoming local body polls and the Assembly elections in 2026.
For one, the KPCC has moved to cash in on the purported public disaffection against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for heckling Tushar Gandhi for his supposedly anti-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) speech at Sivagiri Madhom. Mr. Gandhi was Sivagiri at the Madhom’s invitation last week to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s historic meeting with Sree Narayana Guru.
The KPCC will hold mandalam-level meetings to highlight the BJP’s alleged “disdain” for what the Congress termed a “watershed moment” in Kerala’s progressive history. Moreover, the Congress felt the campaign would resonate strongly among the Ezhava community, a portion of which arguably viewed Sivagiri as their ideological lodestar.
Like the CPI(M), the Congress was concerned about a purported rightward drift among a section of Ezhava voters, a change of tack that arguably advantaged the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, chiefly in Alappuzha and Attingal constituencies.
Concurrently, the Congress has scurried to shore up its traditional base among the predominantly Latin Catholic fisherfolk community by seeking to place itself at the vanguard of the fishers’ brewing resistance to the Centre’s move to open the marine-rich sea off the coast of Kerala to seabed mining corporates.
On May 9
On May 9, the KPCC will launch a “kadal ora padayatra” covering nine coastal districts in the State. The KPCC also sought to weaponise the arrest of alleged SFI activists in a narcotic case at a campus in Kochi by organising a 640-km human chain against drugs on August 8 from Kasaragod to Thiruvananthapuram.
According to a party insider, the conference reportedly analysed the UDF’s win in 12 seats in the recently concluded bypolls in 30 local body wards, as against the LDF’s 15, a “mixed bag of gains and missed opportunities”. KPCC president K. Sudhakaran chaired the meeting attended by DCC presidents and other State-level office-bearers.
Published – March 17, 2025 08:43 pm IST