In this pastoral rural fringe where the VS Achuthanandan government will face its first Assembly bypoll next week, the Left is riding the substantial Muslim right with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein leading the comrades’ charge—and George Bush and Tony Blair are playing cannon fodder.

Not that voters here have little else to worry about. Thiruvambadi is a contiguous geographical extension of Wayanad, where about 500 poor farmers hit by repeated crop losses, price crashes and in inescapable debt traps had killed themselves over the last five years — no one has kept a precise count of the Thiruvambadi suicides alone.

More than 40 per cent of the voters are Muslims, and another 30 per cent Christians. Three major Muslim right outfits—the Jamaat e Islami, the PDP of Coimbatore serial blasts-accused Abdul Nasser Mahdani, and the powerful Kanthapuram faction of the Sunnis—are openly pushing the hammer-sickle-star bandwagon. The Left, naturally, hopes to keep this traditional Mulsim League constituency, which it had wrested for the first time from the Muslim League in the Congress-led UDF, six months back.

George Bush has been a particularly big help. Even three days to the campaign to end, the pivot for the comrades remains Saddam Hussein and the noose. Pamphlets and notices eulogising the man flutter around in the village streets, and everyone, down from CPM state chief Pinarayi Vijayan, has been leading their speeches with paens to “anti-imperialist’’ hero Saddam, and pointing to the Congress-Muslim League failure to try to get the US to let him off. Saddam is eminently saleable in north Kerala, known for its pan-Islamic passions. Apart from a Saddam beach and street junctions, shops and babies named after the Iraqi dictator, this place had also had even Osama cutouts looking down on the traffic at many places, during the US’s Afghan invasion.

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