It was her first electoral defeat for the minister K R Gowri, who is also the state’s oldest and longest serving MLA and its longest serving woman minister. She lost to a young and little known Left opponent. No better was the plight of K Karunakaran’s DIC(K), which had sidled up to the UDF after the CPM Politburo asked its state apparatchiks to shoo it off—the Left courted it for the local bodies poll last year. Karunakaran had wrangled 18 seats to contest from after the Congress agreed to have him on its side. It lost in all but one, and the losers include K Muralidharan, Karunakaran’s son and the outfit’s president.

Muralidharan had got the Muslim League to give him the League’s secure seat in Koduvally, apprehending being done in by the same Congress men he had once led as KPCC chief. The only seat that the DIC(K) got was Kuttanad, where its NRI businessman-turned-candidate Thomas Chandy, locally known as Kuwait Chandy, won amid allegations that he had liberally used his NRI money to win.

Karunakaran ascribed the rout of his own outfit to his “enemies” in the Congress, who he alleged had worked to defeat his men. He attributed the UDF’s stunning defeat to his bete noire Oommen Chandy’s “misgovernance”, and more particularly to Chandy sidelining him. “He (Oommen) kept me completely out of the poll campaign. He personally made sure that I wouldn’t be allowed to share the dais with Sonia Gandhi, when she addressed campaign rallies in the State,” said a visibly depressed Karunakaran.

... contd.