Kannoth Karunakaran's colourful career has spanned over seven decades, bringing in trouble and change into India's oldest political party
Kannoth Karunakaran, the most colourful politician of Kerala, was the country’s last surviving link between the old and new Indian National Congress. While his followers adored him, Karunakaran was intensely hated by detractors and political opponents.
Politics, more than power, was a passion for him. Nobody in the late 60s could have believed that a legislative party leader of a depleted Indian National Congress, with just eight members in the assembly, could rise to become the King and King maker of Kerala and Indian politics.
He was the founding father of the United Democratic Front, comprising more than a dozen regional parties and caste outfits. Management experts were flabbergasted when Karunakaran cobbled up an alliance which had parties as different as CPI, RSP, the Church, promoted Kerala Congresses, Muslim League, NDP of the Nairs and SRP of Eezhavas.
The UDF pulverized the CPM-led Left Democratic Front in the elections held in 1971 and 1977. Perhaps, the biggest moment in his life was when he led the UDF towards an unprecedented victory in the 1977 General Elections.
Even as the Congress bit the dust every else in the country as a fallout of the Emergency in 1977, the party won 114 seats in the assembly and made a clean sweep by winning all the 20 parliamentary seats. E.M.S Namboodirippadu, the CPM’s chief ministerial candidate, only managed to scraped through at Pattambi with just 2,000 votes in the election and decided not to contest again!
But controversies have always followed Karunakaran like a shadow.
Within weeks of his swearing-in as chief minister of Kerala, he had to resign because of observations by the Kerala High Court in the infamous Rajan case. Rajan, a student of Regional Engineering College, Kozhikode, was arrested by the state Crime Branch which suspected him of having leanings with the Naxalite movement.
Eeachara Warrior, Rajan’s father, approached the High Court with a habeas corpus petition and the Court ruled that Karunakaran, as home minister during the Emergency, suppressed facts about Rajan’s whereabouts though he was aware that the student had died following third-degree measures of the police.
Karunakaran had to wait till the 1982 elections to win back the chief minister’s gaadi. He always cast his lots with the Nehru-Gandhi family, whenever there were splits in the Congress. No wonder then, he was considered Man Friday for both Indira and Rajiv.
And he always made it a point to promote young party workers, much to the chagrin of seniors like A.K. Antony, Vayalar Ravi and Oommen Chandi.
That was the root cause of groupism in Congress in the state. Present day leaders like Ramesh Chennithala, K. Sudhakaran, G. Karthikleyan, M.I. Shanawaz are all protégés promoted by the Leader.
It is an open secret that Karunakaran, popularly known as ‘Leader’ played the crucial role in making P.V. Narasimha Rao the Prime Minister after the 1991 election.
It is another matter that Leader had to quit as chief minister in 1995 following the notorious ISRO spy scandal with Rao washing his hands off his ‘mentor’.
Ideology was never the forte of this modern-day Chanakya, who was just a matriculate with diploma in caricaturing.
For him, all that mattered was power politics. However, people of Kerala remain indebted to this devotee of Lord Guruvayurappa, at least in one aspect.
He gave a ‘blank check’ to the state police to get rid of Maoists and Naxalites and the result is there for all to see. But his nemesis was a failure to see the writing on the wall that the feudal style of politics, which he practiced, had been consigned to history's dust bin
His own protégés turned against him when Karunakaran tried to hardsell his two children to the Kerala electorate.
"You can love or hate Karunakaran. But you can never ignore him,” said P Rajan, veteran journalist, who has followed Karunakaran's political journey for over five decades.
That could, in all probability, be an apt epitaph for the four-time chief minister.