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.

... contd.