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Congress facing trouble on all fronts in Kerala

Inner- and intra-party squabbles are dogging the Congress-led United Democratic Front in Kerala.

The division of the 20 Lok Sabha seats has put the Opposition coalition in total disarray on the eve of the election, with constituents who have got a share and those who have not got any being unhappy over the seat division. While the Muslim League, which got two seats, and the Kerala Congress-M with one seat, are angry with the Congress for not giving them one more seat, other UDF partners like the Kerala Congress-Jacob, Communist Marxist Party and the Jandipatya Samrakshana Samiti are in a belligerent mood over their claim for at least one seat each being ignored.

In fact, the Kerala Congress-Jacob, a splinter group of the Kerala Congress, and the CMP headed by former CPI-M rebel M V Raghavan. boycotted the deliberations held on Wednesday for finalising the seat distribution. The JSS led by another CPI-M rebel, K R Gouri, has also expressed strong reservations over the manner in which the seats were shared by the senior partners. Her party had demanded two seats.

But this is the least of the Congress's worries. Even internally, it is in a quandary over the selection of candidates for its 17seats. The party has not been able to reach a consensus on nominees for four seats even after a prolonged session of the state election committee. As more than one claimant has emerged for the Chirayinkil, Ernakulam, Mukundapuram and Vadagara seats, the election committee has left the final choice to the party high command.

While former chief minister K Karunakaran is insisting on his nominee for Ernakulam, Mukundapuram and Vadagara seats, the fight for Chirayinkil is between the supporters of A K Antony and Vayalar Ravi. Karunakaran is totally opposed to giving the Mukundapuram seat to sitting member P C Chacko, who is considered close to strongman Sharad Pawar, although all other sitting members of the dissolved Lok Sabha and even four losers have been accommodated in the list of 13 candidates approved by the election committee.

The losers are led by Karunakaran himself who has replaced Thrissur, where he was defeated by 1,480 votes in 1996, with Thiruvananthapuram, a seat held by the Communist Party of India. His son K Muralidharan, who was defeated at Kozhikode by a convincing margin of 38,703 votes, has moved to Thrissur to take on CPI veteran V V Raghavan.

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