The Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) has pushed its 2024 Lok Sabha campaign preparations into high gear.
The party seems keen to avoid getting caught in the backwash of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s high-profile electoral pitch in Thrissur last week and the ruling Left Democratic Front’s (LDF) 41-day State-wide Navakerala Sadas campaign that ended in January beginning.
Leader of the Opposition V.D. Satheesan got the ball rolling by chairing a district leadership meeting of the party in Kollam on January 8. He will hold similar meetings in all districts as a precursor to a State-wide campaign tour in February headed by Mr. Satheesan and Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee president K. Sudhakaran.
The Congress’s anxiety that the LDF and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) might out-organise it in the Lok Sabha campaign race has put the party leadership on a war footing.
For one, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is reportedly training 30,000 volunteers to spearhead its Lok Sabha campaigning. The BJP is enlisting a broad spectrum of influencers and opinion leaders, including big names from the entertainment industry and Church leadership, to supercharge its “get-out-the-vote for Modi” operation.
The Congress is investing heavily in the catching-up phase of the Lok Sabha poll campaign to scuttle the CPI(M) and the BJP’s attempts to steal a march over it. The party wants to scale up its door-to-door canvassing and make its digital presence more responsive.
The Congress seeks to supercharge its field operations by cobbling together grassroots-level election committees that factor in age, religion, caste, and gender demographics evenly.
It might also replicate or improve on the promises that saw it on the course to victory in Karnataka and Telangana in the Lok Sabha campaign. They include homemaker stipends, free travel for women in RTC buses, higher subsidies for domestic cooking gas, and higher allowances for farmers.
Nevertheless, the Congress in Kerala might remain non-committal about its national leadership’s promise of holding a caste census, given the strong opposition of the Nair Service Society, which wields considerable political heft.
The Congress also has to negotiate the political minefield sowed by the party’s alleged ambivalence about attending the consecration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya.
