High-voltage politics hogs Peravoor where it takes 12 yrs to build 6-km elephant wall

Kannur: In 2006, when the CPM fielded K K Shailaja in Kannur’s hill constituency of Peravoor, she was 49 and a rising force within the party. She wrested the seat from the Congress.

Though labelled as a UDF pocket borough, Peravoor back then was never quite like the neighbouring Irikkur, which returned K C Joseph eight times with emphatic margins. Today, with MLA Sajeev Joseph sitting pretty in Irikkur, it's the only true Congress citadel in Kannur.

If Peravoor is added to the list, the Congress owes much to Sunny Joseph, the party's state president. In 2011, he dislodged Shailaja and went on to secure consecutive victories in 2016 and 2021, stitching together a hat-trick that helped recast the constituency as a Congress bastion. Now, after 15 years as MLA, he faces Shailaja again in what is easily one of the most closely watched contests in Kerala.

Shailaja (69) proved her mettle as the Health Minister in Pinarayi Vijayan's first LDF government. The media hailed her as “rockstar” for the way she steered Kerala’s health response during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Nipah outbreak.

But Sunny Joseph (73), too, is not the same candidate she lost to in 2011, said K Velayudhan, a veteran Congress hand from Aralam Farm and former Iritty Block Panchayat president. “Today, he's a bigger political presence, while Shailaja’s image has taken a hit after her Vadakara campaign.”

At least the first part of his assessment finds resonance on the ground. Even the LDF government has, at critical moments, leaned on Sunny Joseph’s credibility to steady tempers in a region where governance runs up against raw public anger over repeated wild animal intrusions and deaths.

In 2023, when Aralam Farm erupted after a wild elephant killed a resident, Forest Minister A K Saseendran had to rely on the MLA to pacify an angry populace. Two years later, in 2025, when an elderly couple were trampled to death, the anger hardened into an indefinite protest.

Each death had been followed by the same promise. This time, A K Saseendran and CPM leader M V Jayarajan were not allowed to get away with it. The anger ran so deep that no minister dared to come and hand over the ₹20 lakh solatium to the family. The government, instead, had to give the cheques to the opposition MLA to be handed over to the couple’s four children.

 The MLA’s elevation as the state Congress president has only raised the stakes further, making the contest steeper for the LDF. Some even said the CPM was sidelining Shailaja, a Central Committee member, by fielding her in Peravoor. The party was facing criticism, particularly because she was shifted from Mattannur, where she had secured a mammoth victory margin of 60,963 votes in 2021, higher even than Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. But CPM state secretary M V Govindan framed the decision differently. “We fielded Shailaja in Peravoor because only she can win it back for the LDF.”

Shailaja, for her part, leans on a sense of belonging. Peravoor, she reminds voters, is where she grew up (in Iritty), before her marriage. She says she will stand up to the responsibility entrusted to her by the party.

History offers her some comfort. Since its formation in 1977, the constituency has rarely been a one-sided affair.

K P Nooruddeen dominated its early decades, winning multiple terms as a Congress candidate, under the INC (U) banner, and even as an Independent, at times contesting against the Congress itself. Several tall leaders, such as Kadannapally Ramachandran, have fallen to Nooruddeen.  In 1991, Nooruddeen's era ended. He was defeated by LDF's Indian Congress (Socialist) leader K T Kunhahmmed by 186 votes.

The Congress reclaimed the seat in 2001 through A D Musthafa, only to lose it to CPM's Shailaja in 2006. Delimitation in 2008 did little to alter its political texture. 

When Shailaja, the only CPM candidate to win in Peravoor, won in 2006, the Congress controlled only Aralam, Ayyankkunnu and Kanichar panchayats. The remaining six were held by the LDF.

In the 2020 local body election, the LDF held sway across most local bodies, with the UDF confined only to Ayyankkunnu. By 2025, the balance had tilted. The UDF captured five key panchayats: Aralam, Ayyankkunnu, Kanichar, Kelakam and Kottiyoor, and made inroads into traditional LDF pockets. Of the 163 wards in the nine local bodies, the UDF now controls 89, up from 58 in 2020, while the LDF has slipped to 63 from 85. In vote terms, the UDF enjoys a lead of around 12,000, nearly four times Sunny Joseph’s 2021 winning margin of 3,172 votes.

That 2021 contest itself was unusually tight. The LDF’s candidate, Sakeer Hussain, managed to strike a chord, pushing the front’s vote share up by 2.55 percentage points to 44.7%. It was also the first time in 15 years that a mainstream party fielded a Muslim candidate in Peravoor. “The Congress would have faced a tougher fight if Sakeer had been fielded again,” Velayudhan said.

Defining issues
The defining issue here is the man-animal conflict. Nowhere is this more stark than in Aralam Farm. Here, the forest does not remain at the edge; it walks into courtyards. Elephants graze where children play. Deaths are not aberrations but recurring ruptures. The proposed 10.5-km elephant wall crawls forward in fragments; in 12 years, only six kilometres have been built, 1.5km in the past three years. Even today, only a handful of workers are seen on site.

The deeper disquiet, however, lies in what residents call a landscape of abandoned buildings. Over the past decade, crores of rupees have been spent on infrastructure meant to transform Aralam Farm: a veterinary hospital, a Krishi Bhavan, community halls across six blocks, four civil supplies depots, a higher secondary complex, two lower primary schools, and healthcare facilities, including an Ayurveda hospital, an in-patient block and staff quarters for a homoeopathy hospital. Most of these were sanctioned around 2014, completed and inaugurated in 2020.

Six years on, almost all buildings stand locked or underused. "People will benefit from this infrastructure only if the government creates posts and fills them," said Shobha V, Aralam Panchayat president.

The two lower primary schools built at Block 13 and Block 9, Valayanchal, have no teachers. So students from these two blocks have to travel 4km to go to school at Odanthode, in block 8. "There will be riots if something happens to children," said Velayudhan.

When Shailaja was the MLA of Peravoor, she inaugurated a dialysis unit at the Keezhpally Community Health Centre, and ₹2 crore was spent. "We were later told that the unit was not sanctioned. The government is only interested in civil constructions," he said.

At the administrative level, the problem deepens. Aralam Farm, home to around 2,000 families and a population of nearly 10,000, lacks a dedicated Tribal Development Officer with financial powers. Instead, a site manager, responsible for the Alakode rehabilitation programme, is given additional responsibility for the Aralam Farm. The site manager does not even have adequate staff. The result is a constituency where high-voltage politics sits uneasily atop unresolved grassroots distress