Related Stories In CituRed faces in Left over Buddha remark on bandhsCPM rebels form new outfitKarunanidhi slams Left, widens DPA riftCarry on commerce

THIRUVAMBADI, November 30 : In this pastoral rural fringe where the VS Achuthanandan government will face its first Assembly bypoll next week, the Left is riding the substantial Muslim right with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein leading the comrades’ charge—and George Bush and Tony Blair are playing cannon fodder.

Not that voters here have little else to worry about. Thiruvambadi is a contiguous geographical extension of Wayanad, where about 500 poor farmers hit by repeated crop losses, price crashes and in inescapable debt traps had killed themselves over the last five years — no one has kept a precise count of the Thiruvambadi suicides alone.

More than 40 per cent of the voters are Muslims, and another 30 per cent Christians. Three major Muslim right outfits—the Jamaat e Islami, the PDP of Coimbatore serial blasts-accused Abdul Nasser Mahdani, and the powerful Kanthapuram faction of the Sunnis—are openly pushing the hammer-sickle-star bandwagon. The Left, naturally, hopes to keep this traditional Mulsim League constituency, which it had wrested for the first time from the Muslim League in the Congress-led UDF, six months back.

George Bush has been a particularly big help. Even three days to the campaign to end, the pivot for the comrades remains Saddam Hussein and the noose. Pamphlets and notices eulogising the man flutter around in the village streets, and everyone, down from CPM state chief Pinarayi Vijayan, has been leading their speeches with paens to “anti-imperialist’’ hero Saddam, and pointing to the Congress-Muslim League failure to try to get the US to let him off. Saddam is eminently saleable in north Kerala, known for its pan-Islamic passions. Apart from a Saddam beach and street junctions, shops and babies named after the Iraqi dictator, this place had also had even Osama cutouts looking down on the traffic at many places, during the US’s Afghan invasion.

With the Saddam campaign turning out to be particularly embarrassing for the Muslim League—the League has its E Ahmed as Minister of State for External Affairs—things are coming to a head. Chandrika, Muslim League’s multi-edition mouthpiece, came out with an editorial two days ago throwing mud at the Left candidate, George M Thomas, a local Christian. “The Left may claim that Thomas is an anti-imperialist. But it really cannot be said that Bush, Blair and George are not the same—not only in the colour of their blood, but in their thoughts and attitudes.’’ After this kicked up a din, Chandrika said today that it actually meant Bush and Blair are products of American imperialism, while George is the product of a party that cannot disown Russian imperialism.

The worried Congress-Muslim League camp is trying to counter the Left’s Saddam card with the “Muslim Hunt’’ card, reeling out a list of Muslims who had been made ‘scapegoats’ by the comrades over the last six months, from Akbar who made “harmless’’ letter bombs to Mohsin who emailed death threats to the PM and the President, to Mohammed Riyazuddeen, the state chief secretary whom Achuthanandan yanked off his job alleging non-performance. For good measure, League campaigners take pains to remind the famished Thiruvambadi farmers dazed by all the rhetoric that the communists can’t be trusted— “the Chinese and Iraqi communist parties had supported Saddam’s death sentence even when they claimed to be anti-imperialist’’ is the refrain.