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.

But Achutanandan did ride that agitation to be an international icon of sorts in Left activist circles, besides considerably adding to his profile at home.

These could be accidental. They obviously went into the making of the wronged VS that Kerala nearly revolted for when it counted, while he had a brief party purge before the last Assembly poll.

That groundswell of pro-VS sentiments was only a culmination, though. While a series of coalition governments in its bipolar polity alternated every five years and many pulled in several directions, VS was methodically building himself up as Kerala’s political antithesis, the Last Big Hope.

The pitch, clearly, was all about a fiercely committed and refreshingly earthy, if ageing, ideological David, whom party Goliaths had conspired to keep confined to the sidelines while they did things they shouldn’t have.

Like building up an assets base worth Rs 4,000 crore in Kerala and running neo-liberal businesses like any bourgeois capitalist outfit, while a lonely VS plunged himself into every conceivable issue touching a local chord, of course carefully nurturing a constant media hype.

He successfully embossed his defining and highly relatable TV images on the Kerala psyche like few could: octogenarian climbing hills and negotiating forests for environmental causes, lone crusader swearing to fight all sorts of mafias, complete communist remaining one with the marginalized man on the street.

But the niche VS has carefully cultivated for himself is probably the only one he could have. In the Left pantheon of CMs, he can’t claim the rarified intellectual heights where EMS Namboodiripad perched, the imperious, if acerbic, charisma of an E K Nayanar, the awesome stature of a C Achutha Menon defying political confines — or even the principled non-controvertibility of a PK Vaudevan Nair, at the other end.

But this is also the catch. In a Red world increasingly hitching itself on to the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee engine, VS would be risking his political raison d’etre if he just gave in and tagged along. And if he didn’t, he would be giving more ammunition to his powerful reformist detractors, led by state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan

VS has little room to try an ideological balancing act, and he has been using that.

A couple of days ago, his government announced it would go for a ‘‘political consensus’’ to ‘‘banish’’ hartals from the state’s IT and tourism spheres — probably Kerala’s best remaining hopes while its manufacturing sector remains in too much a shambles to bank on.

The point was, the Congress-led opposition coalition can’t hope to say no to that after its own earlier government had pushed for an outright ban on strikes and hartals in IT under ESMA, a la Buddhadeb, before Achuthanandan and his comrades had raised a loud enough ruckus to get that shelved.

And while an outright strike ban would have gone directly against the grain of his own USP as the unalloyed fighting communist, banishing strikes is an absolute imperative for VS to rope in prospective investors rattled by the state’s appalling strikes and disruptions record.

But VS would obviously need to do more than bank on such elbow space all the time for zero-damage maneuvers to avoid treading the Buddhadeb path. If Budhadeb’s Bengal’s going to work and VS’s Kerala shutting down during last fortnight during the anti-petrol price hike strike made headlines, the rot behind is all the more of concern.

Consider this: Last year, top teams from German automaker BMW made multiple visits to Kerala wanting to set up the company’s third biggest international plant in Kochi, on land that the Congress-led Government had offered. Their last visit was on a day Kerala had shut down as usual, for a Left hartal— the state goes under an average of more than one such a month— and the Germans narrowly escaped getting hit by stone-throwing comrades.

The BMW plant eventually went to Chingleput, in neighbouring Tamil Nadu. Nokia, the world’s largest phone maker, too, had dropped plans to go to Kerala after some courting, reportedly put off by the labour and political scene. Such wooing and jilting by investors is now too familiar a pattern for Kerala.

Buddadeb, despite his more subdued detractors, has the clout to make his writ run in the Bengal government. VS doesn’t, even if he would like to.

Eight out of the eleven CPM ministers in the cabinet that he leads are acolytes of his reformist foe Pinarayi Vijayan, who wangled Politburo sanction to stuff the cabinet with his men, in return for letting VS be CM — so much so that eight out of the dozen-odd CPM state secretariat members, now double as Left ministers.

Except for IT, VS himself and his three nominees hold hardly any portfolio of great consequence, and the fight for departments between the two CPM factions finally had a red faced Politburo cry a terse halt.

The test for VS would surely start after the honeymoon, and not many answers would appear to be for grabs.