Por Nitheesh Narayanan and Vijay Prashad
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| Kerala Legislative Assembly, Thiruvananthapuram. Photograph Source: Rajithmohan – CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Every five years, the electorate in Kerala goes to the polls to elect a new state government. One of twenty-eight states in India, Kerala has a population of 35 million and has been governed by the Left Democratic Front (LDF) for the past decade. On 4 May, the Election Commission of India announced that the LDF won only 35 seats of the 140 for the legislature and that the LDF’s historical adversary, the United Democratic Front (UDF) won the election with 102 seats. It would have been a historical victory had the LDF prevailed because no front has won three consecutive elections in Kerala – a state with a highly educated and politically divided population. It was miraculous enough when the LDF won re-election in 2021 with 99 seats, increasing its majority by eight seats over its 91 total in 2016. No front had done that either. Was the defeat in 2026 merely a return to the back-and-forth routine imposed by the electorate on the two fronts or is this a deeper sign of trouble for the Left, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI (M)?
Over the past year, the left government of Kerala announced two major achievements. First, that Kerala has eliminated extreme poverty – making it, after China, the second place to do so. And then, second, that Kerala’s infant mortality rate has dropped below 5 per 1,000 live births, lower than that of the United States. Pinarayi Vijayan, the Chief Minister (2016-2026), was born in 1945; before his birth, his mother buried eleven children (at a time when Kerala’s infant mortality rate was above 100 per 1,000 live births). These achievements, amongst many, came partly because of the advances made by modern science and technology, but mostly because of the pro-people policies emphasised by the Left governments since the formation of the state of Kerala in 1957. It is undeniable that the Communists played a key role in the democratisation of the state institutions and in the shaping of modern Kerala’s society, despite the repression against the Left (between 1957 and 1987, the Left governments could not finish their terms because of central government intervention – in 1959 – and then because of the weakness of their coalition). It was the Left that initiated agrarian reform, laid the foundation for public education and public healthcare, and brought dignity to the lives of workers.
Over all these years, when the Left lost an election, the Left cadre did not fold their flags, thinking that everything was over. They filled the streets with struggles whenever the government attempted to impose anti-people policies, especially during the neo-liberal era, and remained as the most powerful pressure force defending the achievements of Kerala. But they also continued to develop their society in a progressive way: to build cooperatives and public libraries, to open cultural centres and to organise workers into unions. Amongst the achievements was the literacy campaign that eliminate illiteracy and the creation of the cooperative Kudumbashree (one of the largest women’s empowerment programmes in the world with 4.8 million members). The process of building these programmes led to the democratisation of Kerala’s society and the creation of highly capable political cadre for the Left. It is this twin process that strengthened Kerala over the past sixty-nine years.
An Election is Lost but Not the Process
Over the past thirty-eight years, the Left has governed Kerala for twenty-four of them and each time has completed its five-year term in office despite attempts to sabotage the government. Over the past decade, it was the government led by Vijayan – fondly called The Captain – that focused on welfare, infrastructure, healthcare, and social development. The government strengthened public education and healthcare systems through the modernisation of schools and the expansion of public hospitals. It earned praise for its work during the catastrophic floods of 2018 (with smaller floods in later years), the Nipah outbreak of 2018, and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Major infrastructural projects, including highways and bridges transformed connectivity across the state. The government increased welfare pensions, expanded housing schemes, promoted digital governance – much of this through the creative use of the Kerala Infrastructure Investment Fund Board. If elections were fought merely on policy achievements, the LDF would have won a third term.
But that is not how electoral democracy works in a bourgeois system that expresses itself through a range of emotions including the anti-incumbency sentiment, and sentiment of public dissatisfaction with the governance style. These are highly emotive feelings that became amplified on social media and on the corporate media to obscure the actual achievements of the government. The abolition of extreme poverty paled in comparison to anecdotal, but perhaps real, stories of government inaction on various other issues.
An election is lost, but not a process. The Left parties have said that they will closely study the reason why there seemed to be an erosion of their base. Half of the members of the Kerala Communist movement joined the CPIM after 2015, which means that most of its cadre have not grown out of the struggles to establish a more popular democracy. They came to the party during its decade in government. They will now be tested in the fight to preserve and deepen democracy in Kerala. Genuine development of cadre takes place in the heat of the class struggle, to which the communists in Kerala will now return. In 1977, the Left Front won only 29 out of the 140 seats, with the Communists winning only 17 seats. Yet, within three years, in the 1980 election, the Left won 98 seats (CPIM by itself winning 35). What is important about the period between 1977 and 1980 is that the LDF campaigned ceaselessly on the issues of stability for the people, the need to overcome social and economic distress, and the absolute necessity to prevent any religious division in Kerala and in India. These campaigns again strengthen both Kerala and the Left, which is why they came together in 1980 to elect the government of E. K. Nayanar (who led the government from 1980 to 1981, from 1987 to 1991, and then from 1996 to 2001); over the next twenty years, from 1980 to 2000, the Left established the principles of the people’s planning campaign and of the role of cooperatives in society.
The Communist movement is an inseparable part of Kerala. If it can recognise this and regain the confidence of the people, the Communist movement in Kerala will continue to offer powerful lessons to the world.
Nitheesh Narayanan and Vijay Prashad work at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Together they edited 1921 Uprising in Malabar (LeftWord Books, 2022), which has a foreword by Pinarayi Vijayan, former Chief Minister of Kerala.
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