It's a question that would beg for an answer soon in Kerala: Can this state, which tots up some three per cent of the national income but consumes about five times more that national ratio, finally have firebrand Achuthanandan evolve into Brand Achuthanandan?

That may be the Red Patriarch’s dilemma too, especially when he has a baggage of 4.2 million educated unemployed who are forever asked to keep ears cocked for footfalls of the elusive investors.

The CPM hardliner had spent most of his last 60-odd years raising Cain at the other side of the establishment table, and is only a month now into his first stint at governing, at age 83, as chief minister.

But his first policy uttering, that he intended to both ‘‘govern and agitate’’ as a chief minister, couldn’t be only rhetoric.

Simply put, he doesn’t have a choice.

Before he became chief minister, V S Achuthanandan’s methods may have been unconventional — often anti-diluvian at best and patently outrageous at worst. Like when he got his Red brigade to physically chop down cash crops of debt-heavy farmers who couldn’t afford to grow labour-intensive paddy anymore.

His certitudes too had often taken some pounding, as when he fought and vowed to get Pepsi out of Plaachimada for stealing the village’s drinking water.

It did not matter that four big breweries and another soft drink MNC were doing the same (or worse) and that it was his own comrade Susheela Gopalan who had wooed the offending MNC to Plaachimada, with no one thinking about drinking water then.

... contd.