Pinarayi Vijayan’s bag of woes overflows as crisis mounts

The public outcry over the ruckus in an Indigo flight is the latest among the political setbacks faced by Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan, who is in the second year of Left Democratic Front’s second consecutive term at state governance.

Pinarayi’s current streak of woes began with the announcement of Thrikkakkara by-poll result. The constituency in Kochi district lost its MLA in December 2021 when P T Thomas succumbed to cancer. Despite intensive campaign to wrest Congress’s sitting seat—and a stronghold—Thomas’s wife Uma won the by-poll by a major majority.

Subsequently, Pinarayi softened his stand on his ambitious semi-high speed rail project ‘K Rail’ to assuage public resentment of the project—which was considered to be a key reason for the ruling party’s electoral failure in the by-poll.

Another hit came to Pinarayi’s cabinet when minister Saji Cheriyan had to resign because of his anti-Constitutional comment, which also showed how much influence the CPM’s national leadership had on the Kerala unit.

Pinarayi, who wanted supremacy in the party for being the leader of the only state where the communist party still was in power, had to bow down to national leadership, which was evident in the party’s recent national congress. Even as the state leadership tried to delay deciding on Cheriyan’s fate, CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury insisted that appropriate action must be taken soon.

More public outcry happened when senior politician and long-term MLA P C George was ignominiously arrested by the police within hours of a woman filing a rape case against him. The woman was involved in several cheating cases, and the court was sceptical about the charges, and hence granted bail to George.

Many saw George’s arrest as Pinarayi holding a grudge against the former because George had supported the UAE consulate smuggling case accused Swapna Suresh when she implicated the chief minister in the scandal.

People also drew parallel with George’s case when Congress leader and former MLA K S Sabarinadhan was arrested on charges of conspiring to murder the chief minister. The basis for this charge was a message that Sabarinandhan had sent in a Youth Congress group chat about staging a protest inside a flight, as part of Congress’s agitation against the chief minister.

Sabarinandhan, too, was granted bail by the court, which didn’t see merit in the charges.

The court’s directive to register a case against senior CPM leader E P Jayarajan for his role in creating the ruckus in an Indigo aircraft, as well as the airline’s three-week ban on him were also embarrassing for Pinarayi.

The chief minister, however, justified the actions of Jayarajan—who is a close associate of Pinarayi—in the state assembly saying there was no scope for any action because Jayarajan shoved the Youth Congress activists to stop them from hurting the chief minister.

Pinarayi cut a sorry figure when Kerala Assembly speaker M B Rajesh, on Wednesday, called the remarks made by CPM MLA M M Mani against opposition MLA K K Rema “unacceptable”. The chief minister had justified Mani who had said it was Rema’s fate that her husband, dissident CPM leader T P Chandrasekharan, was murdered.

Even as the chief minister tried to downplay the allegations made by Suresh against him in the UAE consulate smuggling case, the Enforcement Directorate’s move to produce before the Supreme Court Suresh’s confession statements could be a cause of concern for him.