Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Wednesday lauded the “brave fishermen” who had taken part in the biggest rescue operation the state has ever seen, handing them certificates of acknowledgement at an event organised by his government. “A big salute to the brave fishermen of Kerala,” the CPM leader said at the event in Thiruvananthapuram. “They joined the rescue mission realising that a lot of people were in grave danger and they needed to be rescued.” The felicitation came a day after Congress president Rahul Gandhi promised a separate ministry for fishermen if the party came to power at the Centre. “God’s own army will have its own ministry,” Rahul had said in Alappuzha on Tuesday. Vijayan, widely appreciated for his crisis-management skills, urged residents of the state to maintain the unity they had shown during the deluge, holding up the fishermen as an example. “Our fishermen did not think about their jobs, income or their families,” he said. “They volunteered to make the impossible possible by rescuing thousands.” The chief minister sounded confident that Kerala would recover. “We are living in the most precious land in the world. People the world over are doing their bit to help us in the reconstruction,” he said. He cited the example of two Americans who visited him in the morning to hand over a cheque for Rs 10 crore that they had crowd-funded on Facebook. “There are lots of such people who see this injury to Kerala as their own injury,” he said. State fisheries minister J. Mercykutty Amma said it was around midnight of August 14 that the first call to deploy fishermen came from Pathanamthitta district. “It was difficult to call each of them individually, so we used the public address system to wake them up,” she said. Many fishermen, she said, were called back from the sea. “They sailed back to shore and immediately joined the operation.” Everyone played their part, she said. “We couldn’t have moved the boats and fishermen to the flooded areas without professional loaders and policemen who seized all available trucks to ferry them to districts. What the people of Kerala witnessed were unbelievable scenes of large numbers of fishermen and their boats in the massive rescue operation.” Video clips of long convoys of trucks carrying fishermen and their boats had gone viral even before the saviour army hit the rising waters. Mercykutty Amma said 4,500 fishermen had taken part in the rescue. “We promise to honour each one of you,” she said. Some fishermen injured in the rescue are being treated at private hospitals at government expense.