The political affairs committee (PAC) of the Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) met here on Saturday amidst concern that the Left Democratic Front (LDF) may be better poised to fight the upcoming local body elections in October.
The meeting felt that the LDF’s current posturing on the handling of the COVID-19 crisis masked the fear that the people would lose patience with the government when they realised that it had failed to live up to the promise to set the State on the fast track to economic recovery.
Advantage
Some attendees held that Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s daily news briefings had accorded the LDF a massive propaganda advantage the Congress appeared ill-prepared to counter.
However, some leaders said the edge was temporary and the government would expend its goodwill when people started grappling with bread and butter issues and found they lacked the promised State support.
The PAC purportedly felt Mr. Vijayan’s daily propaganda blitz had lost some of its sheen after the Opposition “revealed” that the government had allowed a U.S.-based data analytics firm, Sprinklr Inc, to “usurp” the personal health information of Keralites surveyed by State health workers.
Media-savvy MLAs
The forum had also met against the backdrop of unconfirmed reports of the emergence of a new group within the Congress of young social media-savvy legislators eager for radical change to the traditional order. The set had been widely credited with having countered the better entrenched social media legions of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
A “party insider” claimed the coming together of the young legislators did not entail the emergence of a new group. Congress politics in Kerala has traditionally revolved around personality cults and the MLAs were aligned with one group or another.
KPCC president Mullappally Ramachandran avoided any mention about the “new currents” inside the Congress.
He instead trained his guns on Pinarayi Vijayan and his use of the government platform to denigrate the Opposition without according it a right of reply.
