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.

... contd.