It was Pinarayi Vijayan, CPM state secretary and VS’s arch party foe who first talked a month ago about the “Media Syndicate”, a supposed bourgeois apparition that he blames directly for news the party leadership could do without. And less directly, for putting VS on a pedestal and pitting him against the state party leadership. He had alleged that this Syndicate was behind the selective hounding of himself and his men like Home Minister Kodiyeri Balakrishnan. He had also not minced no words about the media trying to use VS to spite him and ruin the party.

For good measure, KEN Kunhahmed, a noted theoretician in the Pinarayi camp, had kicked up a row openly alleging that VS was increasingly a creation of the state’s rightist media with a clear agenda; a spectre “dangerously” trying to appropriate the party’s brand equity for himself.

Significantly, the making of VS in the state media has had its many contradictions, even as the man himself had carried a reasonably seamless consistency in approach and postures into the CM’s job, from his rabble rousing days as Opposition leader. Till some nine months ago, VS was the media’s pet neighbourhood pariah waving a hardline sickle at poor farmers who switched from unremunerative paddy to cash crops. He was almost the Red albatross around developing Kerala’s neck, incorrigible Stalinist beyond redemption.

The same VS was soon the antithesis of all that. He was since repackaged with a halo many shades more pristine Red than his rivals, taken around as idealist holding the fort against “invading MNCs”, as an undiluted antidote to “neo-liberal decadence” in the party, and as model for his rivals straddling the much denied Rs 4000 crore worth of prime assets the party famously holds.

... contd.