A master tactician

CONGRESS(I) leader and former Chief Minister K. Karunakaran is proving that Kerala politics can still be his playing field, as beleaguered party colleague and Chief Minister A.K. Antony will hesitantly testify.

With single-minded devotion to the theme of "leadership change and revenge", which of late evokes only a now-what curiosity if not derision, this diminutive politician with a trade-mark hump and rasping, staccato sentences has once again pushed the Congress(I)-led government in Kerala to the brink.

Although his critics may whisper that he is turning "senile", at 87, Karunakaran's political manoeuvring is just as dexterous, mental agility just as remarkable, and wit and sarcasm just as biting as ever. In 1994, at the height of his glory as the head of the State government and as the perceived king-maker in New Delhi - a dream double-role which he used well to try and make the State party dance to his tunes - Karunakaran was forced to quit the Chief Minister's post by party rivals and partners in the ruling United Democratic Front (UDF), a coalition he boasts he created.

There has been a discernible change in the public profile of this inscrutable political leader. He has always been a wily political player and, through sheer hard work and lots of luck, has donned a variety of roles - as trade union leader, the Opposition leader or the Chief Minister in Kerala for over two decades, the "Leader", a Congress(I) father figure who "built" the party "from a group of nine MLAs in 1967", through two divisions in 1969 and 1978, "to a strength of 57" in the 1991 Congress(I)-led UDF Ministry. Then his colleagues pushed him out of power. And, that rankles.

The feeling of being dispossessed has led him to seek revenge at every opportunity ever since, and the motley crowd of party opponents are once again baying for his blood, accusing him of trying to wreck the State party because it has, more or less, managed to wriggle out from under his imposing thumb.

KUNNOTH KARUNAKARAN was born the son of a tahsildar in Kannur district and received formal schooling only up to Class VIII, reportedly because of an eye disease. He later won a diploma in design geometry and painting from a technological institute. He was initiated into politics in 1935, at the age of 19, when he became a member of the State Congress led by Muthedathu Narayana Menon. Two years later he had his first taste of leadership as the secretary of the Thrissur town Congress committee. He was elected to the Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee in 1940, in which, to this day, he has not held any official post, despite being a member for 55 years, a Congress Working Committee member for nearly 30 years and a member of the Congress Central Parliamentary Board for over 15 years.

Karunakaran was arrested twice during the Independence struggle, first for a very brief period in 1941 for participating in an agitation by the Praja Mandalam defying the prohibitory orders, and later in August 1942 when he spent nine months in the Viyyoor jail in Kannur, along with many prominent leaders, including the respected former Chief Minister and Communist Party of India leader C. Achutha Menon.

But his rise, however, was through trade unionism. He was the secretary of the Kerala Labour Congress at the time of its formation in 1943-44 and had been the leader of many workers' organisations in the textile, coir and plantation sectors prior to becoming the first secretary of the Indian National Trade Union Congress unit in the State after its formation in 1949.

Karunakaran was initiated into the darker side of political rivalry quite early in his career. In 1964, as a trade unionist, his enemies had once pledged to march him handcuffed down the roads as he went into hiding as an accused in a case of retaliatory murder of a plantation superintendent. After two months of evading arrest and his adversaries, he appeared before a court for bail and was later let off. The court found that prima facie there was no case against him. Only one witness stood against Karunakaran, a woman, who said she heard him tell a meeting of nearly 400 workers to kill the superintendent of the Tattil estate in Thrissur district.

Karunakaran's first electoral victory was in 1945, when he was elected a councillor of the Thrissur Municipality. After Independence, Karunakaran won the election to the Kochi Assembly, held in 1948, and elections to the Travancore-Kochi Assembly held in 1952 and 1954. However, he tasted defeat for the first time at Thrissur in the first Assembly election held in 1957 after the formation of united Kerala, and found himself denied the party ticket in the succeeding elections to the Assembly held in 1960.

After the Mala Assembly constituency in Thrissur district was formed in 1965, Karunakaran represented it continuously for 30 years. The turning point came in 1967, when he became the Congress' choice to lead its nine-member legislature party in the Assembly, following the electoral debacle of many of its prominent leaders.

Karunakaran played a key role in the tumultuous political events in the State in the years that followed. During the Emergency, he was the controversial Home Minister in the CPI-led coalition ministry with Achutha Menon as Chief Minister. He first became the Chief Minister after the UDF's resounding victory in the State at a time when the Congress faced a rout elsewhere in the country in the wake of the withdrawal of the Emergency.

One month later, however, he was forced to step down, when the Kerala High Court passed strictures against him in the `Rajan case', which related to the death in police custody of a student of the Regional Engineering College, Kozhikode during the Emergency. Rajan allegedly had links with the naxalite movement, and Karunakuran, as the then Home Minister, stated before the court that the police had not arrested him. The court found this statement false and ordered the prosecution of Karunakaran for perjury. After the 1980 Assembly elections, Karunakaran remained a pivotal figure on the State's political scene, as either the Chief Minister or the Opposition leader, the most prominent leader of the anti-Left Democratic Front (LDF) forces in Kerala, and, since 1995, the virulently dissident Congressman, Union Industry Minister and member of the Rajya Sabha and now the Lok Sabha.

KERALA, however, never accorded its complete confidence in him. All the four State Ministries under him were tainted with allegations of corruption and the people consistently refused to entrust their destiny with the man and the political front that he led continuously for more than five years. Karunakaran was considered a highly "effective" Congress(I) Chief Minister, though, by no means, the ideal one. His personal arrogance, autocratic, often bruising, style of functioning and odd ideas about loyalty made him more feared and hence respected than loved.

But even his enemies have acknowledged that Karunakaran's strength had been his steadfast devotion - to Krishna, the presiding deity at the famed Guruvayoor temple in spiritual matters and to the Congress(I) high command in political games. Under the leadership of former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, at least initially, this loyalty started paying dividends - and in place of a State leader who often solicited and got help from party presidents and Prime Ministers Indira and Rajiv Gandhi , Karunakaran acquired the image, at least in Kerala, of a kingmaker-Chief Minister, when he became a much sought-after political trouble-shooter at the national level. This role-reversal and new-found image had significant repercussions, and Karunakaran started stoking enmity as he became increasingly impervious to criticism, contemptuous of the path of conciliation and basked in the conquest and decimation of his critics and enemies.

This, the taint of a corruption scandal involving the import of palmolien when he was Chief Minister, and his stubborn refusal to take action - for an inordinately long time - against the then Inspector-General of Police Raman Srivastava, one of his most trusted police officers then accused of involvement in the sensational Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) espionage scandal, added fuel to the party "mutiny" against Karunakaran, which eventually led to the firm demand for his removal from power in 1995, one year before his term was to end. It is a quirk of fate that though the ISRO espionage scandal itself was later scoffed off by the Supreme Court and all the accused were let off, it was Karunakaran, who all along argued that there was no evidence to punish the officer, who had to leave office, never able to come back.

At the end of the rancorous group war, Karunakaran's repeated pleas to the party high command led by Narasimha Rao to let him complete his five-year term were turned down, as it became clear that he no longer enjoyed the support of the party's coalition partners, especially the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML). Antony, who had only then resigned as Union Civil Supplies Minister on the pretext of false aspersions cast on his Ministry in a sugar scandal, flew down to Thiruvananthapuram to take Karunakaran's chair.

Significantly, though Karunakaran was at the height of his glory during his last term in office as Chief Minister (1991-95), it was during the same period that he began to promote his son K. Muraleedharan as his successor in Congress(I) politics. In a sense, from then on, Kerala's artful politician began to falter. "Protg-loyalists" began to desert the Karunakaran camp one by one, as they increasingly realised that Muraleedharan was a bottleneck to their prospects within the Karunakaran faction and therefore in the party. As astute and experienced as he was, Karunakaran failed to gauge correctly (or did not care about) the growing resentment in the State party against him and his son, who is now a Member of Parliament and the Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee (I) president.

On his part, Muraleedharan, then a political tenderfoot, became an MP in 1987 and started his career wielding sinister power under his father's shade, trampling on the ambitions of quite a few young leaders in the State party. It is part of the Karunakaran lore that his son found his way into the Congress(I) candidate list for the 1989 Lok Sabha elections when the father momentarily left the selection committee meeting "to go to the toilet". To this day it remains a mystery why, of all people, the person who suggested the name of Muraleedharan as the party candidate from Kozhikode was Antony, Karunakaran's arch rival in the party. But, though Muraleedharan was initially viewed as an usurper and disliked by the majority in the State Congress (I), his subsequent transformation as a seasoned politician too alarmed many.

But by the time the UDF came back to power in 2001, Karunakaran had also started promoting his homemaker daughter Padmaja Venugopal in State Congress(I) politics. Through a clever manipulation of group equations in the sharing of the spoils and political positioning by Karunakaran, Muraleedharan was already heading the State unit of the party and was well set on the launch pad to be a claimant for the Chief Minister's post the next time an opportunity arose. But, surprisingly, as the father turned his benevolent attention towards Padmaja, by securing the leadership of various Congress(I) trade unions for her, Muraleedharan, who had imagined himself to be the sole inheritor of his father's legacy, too began to feel threatened. The already lacklustre Karunakaran-led `I' group thus became the stage for sibling rivalry, a war within a battle, so to say. Momentarily at least, Muraleedharan showed signs of becoming an "impartial KPCC(I) president" by leaning towards the Antony camp, perhaps in resentment, before an angry Karunakaran deftly pulled him back (Frontline, May 9). The Antony government was completing nearly two and a half years in office and the `Leader' was getting set to make yet another attempt to avenge himself, even if it meant sacrificing his son's position.

The rest of the Karunakaran story is recent history, if not a question mark. It is a last-ditch battle that he appears to have launched in Kerala by openly supporting, and asking his followers to vote for, the Opposition LDF-backed candidate in the Ernakulam Lok Sabha byelection against the party's nominee and taking credit, rightly or wrongly, for the latter's defeat. His detractors say it is a sad commentary on one of the senior-most Congress(I) leaders in the country that he is now blinded by a vaulting, intensely personal hunger for revenge. Karunakaran told Frontline: "I want to continue in the Congress. But if it is a Congress which does not care for the fundamentals of the Congress, then naturally I may search... or go to some other thing... "