From the shambles of his office,
rises global hero Chandy
Joe A Scaria
Thiruvananthapuram, June 27
When a chief minister has to drop two of his
personal assistants from duty for allegedly making hundreds of telephone calls
to the perpetrators of a massive scam, his gunman suspended from police service
and slapped with a vigilance probe for alleged misuse of the CM’s office, and a
staff member of the CM’s 24 X 7 call centre ousted after allegedly seeking
sexual favours from a caller, you get a general image of the CMO.
That, indeed, has been the state of affairs of
Kerala chief minister Oommen Chandy’s office through all of June, but a few
hours ago, Chandy rose, phoenix-like, in Manama, Bahrain to receive the United
Nation’s prestigious public service award for his mass contact programme. He
was chosen from among entries from 50 Asia-Pacific countries.
The allegations against his office came in torrents like
the monsoon rains in Kerala, but unlike the state’s roads that are all but
washed out each rainy season, Chandy has managed to stay high and dry and be
the toast of Bahrain this week, where none less than the crown prince Salman
bin Hamad Al-Khalifa led what would be one of many receptions in that country
for the Kerala CM.
Back in Kerala, typical of the local mindset, there
are already questions about the correctness of the award being given to Chandy.
Some feel that the award is for a public office, and not for an individual, and
that it would be wrong for the CM to take personal credit for it. Some others
are critical, pointing out that the award was for his mass contact programme, though
a majority of those who submitted petitions to him in the programme have still
not got their plaints solved.
What none can contest, though, is that the workaholic
CM toured all 14 districts in the state, personally meeting people and
receiving petitions. Kerala’s acidic satirists on television shows said the
programme led to peanut salesmen being deprived of paper because all paper was
routed to the CM’s office in the form of petitions. But spoof apart, Chandy
received some 5.5 lakh petitions, claimed to have solved over half of them, and
distributed total financial assistance of roughly Rs 23 lakh to the
petitioners.
Back in Kerala, he cannot expect to get the
red-carpet treatment he got in Manama, but with the UN award in hand, it will neither
be easy for the Left to sustain its demand for his resignation in the wake of
allegations against his office staff.
But Chandy himself has much work awaiting him: For
starters, roads from Thiruvananthapuram to Kasaragod are battered in monsoon
rains. Having delighted in the scenes of public fountains in Manama, he will
come back to the realities of water spouts by the roadside in Kerala thanks to
leaky pipes. In Thiruvananthapuram and Kochi, there were major water pipe
bursts today.
But the allegations of sleaze against his staff and
the demand for his resignation? For the CM with a UN halo, dealing with that should
be a breeze.
