When You Can't Eat, Toilet Not Needed: Left's VS Achuthanandan Takes On PM Modi

Thiruvananthapuram: At the age of 93, you could say VS Achuthanandan has some life experience. He presents it bluntly - "If you don't eat, you have no use for a toilet".

The two-step adage from the Left stalwart and contender for next Chief Minister of Kerala is an elbow in the ribs for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Clean India mission which focuses on modernizing station and building much-needed bathrooms. "He keeps singing shauchalayam, shauchalayam, shauchalayam to every Indian. But when there's nothing to eat, how can they use the toilets?" Mr Achuthanandan said to NDTV's Prannoy Roy. (Watch a special Battleground with Prannoy Roy reporting from Kerala tonight at 9.30 pm on NDTV 24x7.)

The PM has been leveraged by his party to headline the BJP campaign in Kerala - though recently, that strategy backfired a little with Mr Modi, a social media whiz, being trolled on Twitter for likening Kerala to Somalia for the infant mortality rate or the number of newborns who do not survive.

The Left's campaign is being led by Mr Achuthanandan and Pinarayi Vijayan, neither of whom has been declared presumptive Chief Minister, though both are in the running.

The incumbent Congress-led coalition, headed by Oommen Chandy, has been battered by corruption scandals and a lengthy line of political murders. The recent rape and murder of a Dalit student in her own home remains unsolved days after the police released a sketch of the main suspect.

The horrific contours of the crime- the student was found with her intestines hanging out- have established it as a campaign issue, with the opposition citing it as a grim example of how the state has corroded its record of respecting women in a firmly matriarchal society.