A few months ago, the Election Commission issued me my first voter identity card. I had never voted before. I gave my Thrissur address because in old age I did not think breathing Delhi’s air was sustainable, though I am not at home in Kerala either. That estrangement is my problem alone: I am never at home anywhere.
For the first time, I thought I would honour my political relevance in the local elections whose results were announced Saturday. When the people came for the special intensive revision, I was away. At the village office, I filled out the form, and they told me the SIR slip would reach me through local party workers.
‘The party’ in Kerala usually means the CPI(M). In the last decade, little has moved in the state without the party as a middleman. The idea is to make you feel indebted. To flourish in Kerala, you need to belong to a party or organisation, preferably the CPI(M), which has infiltrated civic structures—exactly the “institutional takeover” Rahul Gandhi recently accused the BJP of at the national level.
On Friday, I went to the booth. Everyone was polite and helpful in telling me I did not exist as a voter—despite the EC-issued card and several other documents. It has always been clear to me that official Indian identity can never be proved categorically. It is because we don’t truly exist that we must hoard PAN, passport, ration card, and Aadhaar to prove that we do. Indian citizenship is an abstract concept.
Though I could not vote, close to three-quarters of Keralites did, and many voted against the CPI(M) in favour of the Congress-led UDF, which did a very good job of presenting itself as a viable alternative, helped among other things by the Sabarimala gold theft under the CPI(M)’s watch. They were likely voting out the middlemen.
At the heart of this churn lies a convergence of leadership style, governance fatigue, and shifting social coalitions—especially among women and historically loyal communities. A hitherto-bipolar politics is now slowly gravitating towards a third alternative, the BJP-led NDA.
Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala’s capital, now has a municipal corporation under BJP’s sway after decades of CPI(M) rule. That the BJP is a rising power in the state is one of the most telling results of this election. Similar gains in other corporations and panchayats underline a new, if still limited, urban foothold.
That space has been created largely by default, by the failure of the Left front, inseparable from Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s persona. His undying love for himself is visible on billboards and at events. The party works as his PR machine, much like Narendra Modi and the BJP. The difference is that Modi is more skilful and his party’s exploitation of identities more systematic and on a far vaster scale. Locally, the effect has been to enable the BJP to pose as an active option.
Ward and municipal elections differ from state and national polls in that they are more intimate expressions of lived experiences. The LDF has been quick to claim credit for everything, but it failed to explain steep rises in water charges, power bills, and property transaction costs, even as it dispensed freebies, cash awards, and food kits from a perpetually bankrupt exchequer.
Local bodies increasingly looked up to the chief minister’s office for direction. The failure of a corporation was read as the failure of the state government.
The LDF’s loss of the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation is the clearest expression of this transference of blame. Chronic waste-management crises, infrastructural stagnation, and administrative drift created conditions under which a once-remote BJP could plausibly position itself as a governance alternative—politically unthinkable not long ago.
Women voters in Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi, and Thrissur prioritised everyday governance: waste disposal, waterlogging, broken footpaths, public transport, lighting, and safety. These failures affect women first and most persistently. The LDF’s earlier advantage among women, built on welfare delivery and Kudumbashree, yielded diminishing returns in cities where its rhetoric became repetitive—a kind of dystopian magical realism born of the gap between life and loudspeakers.
This was not, however, a pro-BJP women’s wave. Many women voted tactically—some towards the UDF, some towards the BJP—primarily to dislodge incumbents rather than to endorse ideology.
Christian voters, especially in Kochi and Thrissur, consolidated quietly behind the UDF, guided by comfort with coalition politics and unease with both CPI(M) ambiguity and the BJP’s long-term intentions. This consolidation proved decisive in central Kerala city corporations.
The BJP in the state, and to a lesser extent the UDF, now paint a rosy picture of ‘viksit Kerala’. They are deluding themselves. Compared to many other states, Kerala is far ahead on crucial human-development indicators. Its work culture, political values, and relatively secular approach to life mean that the model of ‘development’ on offer in, say, Uttar Pradesh or Bihar is not materially attractive here. Half the population is abroad; the young are migrating in large numbers to Europe and Australia. No one is seriously looking to a factory future.
Given Kerala’s uniform urbanisation, high education levels, and environmental awareness, the only realistic development path is in artificial intelligence and knowledge work. This is what the CPI(M), stuck at best on techno-parks, should have pursued with clarity and urgency. Their thinking is clearly outdated. After all, how can you have a revolution without proletarians? And the answer is, there is no revolution. Move on.
C P Surendran | Author whose latest volume of poetry is Window with a Train Attached
(Views are personal)
(cpsurendran@gmail.com)