The Pioneer 04.10.2010
Kerala civic polls: Nominations close todayVR Jayaraj | Kochi
Filing of nominations for the elections to 1,227 local administration councils in Kerala would come to a close at 3.00 pm Monday but the Congress was struggling to finalize the names of its candidates in several districts even late Sunday evening due to rampant feuds.
As many as 77,905 nominations had been filed till the close of office time on Friday, the last working day last week. Pollsters expect the nominations to cross 125,000 when the process is over on Monday evening. Scrutiny of the papers will be carried out on Tuesday while the last date fixed for withdrawing nominations is Thursday.
Polling to the 21,595 wards in the 997 grama panchayats, 152 block panchayats, 14 district panchayats, 59 municipal councils and five city corporations will be held in two phases – on October 23 and 25. Counting of votes will be done on October 27 and the new governing councils will take charge before November 1, the State Formation Day.
The civic polls in Kerala are being held one month behind schedule due to discrepancies in the ward delimitation process, which had led to the intervention of the Judiciary. This is the first local administration bodies election are held with 50 percent reservation of seats for women. There was a 33-percent reservation for women in the 2005 polls
Till recently, several pollsters and political analysts had predicted a replication of the experience of West Bengal municipal elections in Kerala as far as the CPI(M) was concerned but they have now begun to develop doubts about this seeing the rampant feuds in the Congress party, which is leading the Opposition UDF, and the dissatisfaction among partners of that coalition.
Reports from districts like Thiruvananthapuram, Thrissur and Kozhikode where the Congress is expected to perform well in the polls, said that the party had not even been able even to finalize the list of its candidates by Sunday evening. Ticket-allocation is being delayed due to multifaceted feuds.:
Different groups of the party are expressing dissatisfaction in the process while the Youth Congress is feeling totally betrayed by the leadership despite Rahul Gandhi’s open instruction to State Congress president Ramesh Chennithala that 50 percent of the candidates should be youths. Though women are being fielded in 50 percent of the seats, they are also unhappy because they have no role in the decision-making process.
“The nominations will be filed in time. That is not a problem. But the problem will come after that,” said a senior KPCC member, who was still fighting for seats for his loyalists. “Nobody can guarantee unity in the party with regard to voting. Leg-pulling is likely. Congress is known for that. What will happen is that it would deny us a great opportunity to teach the Marxists a lesson,” he said.
The CPI(M)-led LDF had bagged more than 70 percent of the civic bodies in the State in the 2005 elections, held in the context of a huge pro-Left and anti-Congress wave. However, the civic bodies and Assembly by-polls and the Lok Sabha elections held between 2006 and now had shown a drastic dip in the Left’s popularity graph, emboldening the analysts to predict a Left rout.
The BJP, which had got six panchayats in Kasaragod district in the 2005 elections, has this time adopted a strategy of not contesting in wards where it is not in considerable strength. However, it expects to improve its position in several areas and also to get a chance to rule the Palakkad Municipality where it lost power between the lip and the cup after the last elections.
