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.

... contd.