At 6 p.m. on Wednesday, the curtains came down on a carnivalesque but deeply polarising public campaigning for the Lok Sabha elections in Kerala.
Opposing campaigns converged on district centres across the State, flaunting their respective party colours and creating competing last-minute made-for-television propaganda circuses.
However, the rackety melee of rival groups of revelling political workers thronging restricted street space in crowded town centres regressed into violence in several places, casting the campaign’s fraught nature into sharp relief.
