Congress leader K. Padmaja Venugopal’s headline-grabbing political migration to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has arguably been more of a propaganda blow than an organisational setback to the party in Kerala.
The Congress reportedly has no fear that the desertion of the scion of a prominent Congress family that long dominated State politics would precipitate an alarming level of rank-and-file defections from the party to the BJP.
Nevertheless, the Congress reportedly felt that Ms. Venugopal’s somewhat unexpected and radical shifting of political allegiance had transiently obscured the party’s patently secular messaging at the hustings.
It has also given the BJP and Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] a whip to scourge the Congress on the campaign trail.
For one, Ms. Venugopal’s desertion seemed to have played into the CPI(M)‘s Lok Sabha campaign narrative that the Congress and the BJP promoted Hindu majoritarian nationalism in varying degrees and were no refuge for minorities and secularists.
Secondly, Ms. Venugopal’s political flip-flop has dovetailed well with the BJP’s narrative that the Congress would soon implode as more leaders and workers join Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s crowded welfare and development bandwagon.
At an LDF rally in Kannur, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan warned the electorate against voting for “potential Sangh Parivar recruits contesting the LS elections camouflaged as Congress workers”.
The CPI(M) has recurrently portrayed the Congress as “soft Hindutva” to discomfit the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), a critical United Democratic Front (UDF) ally, and undermine the Opposition’s traditional standing among minorities, particularly Muslims.
CPI(M) State secretary M.V. Govindan said the Congress’s ideological guardrail against caving into the BJP’s money power, the Damoclean threat of arrest and incarceration by Central agencies and the disruptive lure of Sangh Parivar’s Hindutva credo seemed increasingly shaky.
On its part, the BJP felt that Congress leader A.K. Antony’s son, Anil K Antony, and Ms. Venugopal’s back-to-back defections had helped it portray the Congress as organisationally frail while simultaneously pushing its claim to be actual political opposition in Kerala a few notches up the scale.
Notably, BJP State President K. Surendran said the Congress was no longer in the reckoning in the Lok Sabha polls. “The real fight is between the CPI(M) and BJP. Congress will merely be an also-ran,” he claimed.
