Left or Right, these writers to fight

Madambu, Kadammanitta, Punathil don’t bother to play politicians

Rajeev P I

Kochi, April 30: LANGUAGE may be an index of the mind. But it usually takes crass rhetoric to wins polls. The three wordsmiths at Konni, Kodungalloor and Beypore are trying hard to be themselves, inside their political garb.

Madambu Kunjikuttan — writer, actor, scriptwriter, vedic scholar, CPI activist and, lately, ‘‘Indian communist’’ by his own definition — is not given to flying rhetorical kites. The sixty-year-old author of the powerfully earthy Bhrasht remains decidedly realistic. ‘‘I can only promise to try to bring drinking water to you all,’’ he tells the voters, in each meeting his BJP-sponsors convene for him in Kodungalloor.

He probably means it too. In pastoral Kodungalloor, which has big population of coconut farmers, coir workers and fishermen, issues like lopsided development priorities make excellent poll planks. But Kunjikuttan won’t oblige. ‘‘I honestly don’t think I can do much on these issues,’’ the writer candidly tells the gatherings.

‘‘Transplanted communism failed because it couldn’t adapt to Indian realities. I believe the indigenous BJP offers a path to the truly Indian communism I have in mind,’’ he tells you. And Kunjikuttan swears that his candidature is not a one-off freak, that he intends to stay in politics.

In Konni, Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan doesn’t have the debutante’s advantage. He had played CPM’s David to M.V. Raghavan’s Goliath in Aranmula, last time. His poetry may be known for the fierce energy in them, but his maiden performance in the Assembly could not quite match his felicity with the pen.

The poet had wanted to have a go at the polls from Aranmula again, but the CPI(M) asked him to change places with A. Padmakumar, who had lost from Konni last time. He is also acutely aware that rhyme doesn’t pay in polls. Besides, the local CPI)M) workers had originally clamoured for a full-fledged party worker there.

But Konni had bucked trends often, and the margins have invariably been wafer thin. Rarely had a winner’s margin overshot 2,000 votes.

‘‘I want to retain my political honesty,’’ says the author of Kirathavritham and Kurathi. He is banking on his image there, just 20 kilometres from his native Kadammanitta village.

In Beypore, Dr Punathil Kunhabdulla filed his nomination paper during the propitious minutes between 12 noon and 12.07 pm which an astrologer had calculated for his BJP sponsors.

The small man from Vatakara with the ubiquitous brown briefcase is yet to be familiar to the Beypore voters. Many of them are fishworkers, labourers and farmers, who cannot be expected to have read his Smarakashilakal.

Sixty-one-year-old Kunhabdulla, who kickstarted his campaign from the castle of the Beypore Sultan Vaikom Mohammed Basheer radiates the eagerness of a child: ‘‘I was busy with my son’s marriage, and had to stay away during the last week. But nothing will hold me back.”

He isn’t bothered that fellow writers have chosen to keep off his campaign. ‘‘They don’t oppose my decision. Even pro-CPI(M) writers had rung me up to say they felt bad that they can’t campaign for me. M.T. Vasudevan Nair said he was all for writers getting into politics,’’ he said.

Kunhabdulla faces an obvious double burden: He has to push the BJP concept in this CPI(M) bastion, and put himself up to the speculations and questions a BJP-sponsored Muslim candidate has to invariably face.

(With inputs from N.V. Davis in Kodungalloor, Arun in Konni and Salim Joseph in Beypore)