# Ajayan | From “deals” to waiting to pick political leftovers dropping out from rival camps, this election season may well be remembered as Kerala’s grand descent into the basement of decency. The desperation is almost theatrical; even those perched at the very top of party hierarchies seem to have misplaced the faintest memory of restraint. When power feels just out of reach, it appears dignity is the first casualty.
If former KPCC president K Sudhakaran dulled the UDF’s edge by loudly crying for yet another seat while already sitting pretty as an MP, the ruling LDF briefly seized the moment to trot out its “development” script. After the panchayat drubbing and the Sabarimala gold heist fallout, “development” was less a vision and more a fig leaf for glaring cracks. Now even that prop has collapsed, buried under increasingly loud talk of a CPM-BJP “understanding”. Hardly a whisper anymore, more like a badly kept open secret.
What followed was a barrage of rhetoric that seemed intent on outdoing itself in coarseness and delivered, no less, even by its own supremo Pinarayi Vijayan. Voters can spot desperation when he suddenly rediscovers invective for an ex-comrade, snaps at a questioning citizen and tells him to pose the question at home, or relies on his conveniently attentive police apparatus to tidy up inconvenient narratives on social media.
To crown the spectacle, Kerala High Court very recently quietly drew the curtains on the Sabarimala flagmast gold episode. This was an issue widely seen as a convenient prop to corner the UDF. It was seen to be a political fabrication by the CPM to deflect attention from the far weightier gold heist. The heist probe has instead slipped into a coma, right when expectations peaked and more CPM names were supposedly inching toward arrest. Even casual onlookers can tell the silence is saying far more than the investigation ever did.
After all the sanctimony over gender equality post through women entry through the Sabarimala verdict in 2018, the same LDF has now tiptoed back to the Supreme Court, quietly backtracking, no apology, no accountability, no more reformation or renaissance wall, just selective amnesia.
The whisper of a CPM–BJP understanding has outgrown denial and now lingers in plain sight, leaving the CPM, its allies reduced to spectators, on a sticky wicket. The pattern has been writing itself: from the curious deployment of a Hindu spiritual mediator in Kannur’s clashes to Pinarayi Vijayan digging in his heels to shield an ADGP tied to the Thrissur Pooram mess, an episode that neatly coincided with the BJP’s Lok Sabha breakthrough through Suresh Gopi.
His recent admission of his party being aware of the government deal on PM SHRI and the Union Minister acknowledging a CPM MP acting as the bridge only sharpens the contradiction. What once passed as coincidence now reads like a clumsy, repetitive deal script too deliberate to ignore.
The outline sharpens when the BJP turns oddly generous, stepping aside in turf it has painstakingly built, only to let bit players like Twenty20 play the protagonist. In places like Tripunithura, there is less election, more stage play, real politics politely shown the door.
Then the deafening silence on something as “minor” as the Sabarimala gold heist in Ranni, right in the shrine’s backyard. This says everything by saying nothing. Twenty20, a fringe party confined to some corners in a few panchayats, is suddenly paraded as a statewide force. When some of its candidates surface even when they are not on the electoral rolls, the script stops pretending and graduates into something almost ridiculous.
Add to that the CPM, normally allergic to restraint, going strangely soft in places like Palakkad, and the voter hardly needs a cue. Call it coincidence if one must, but to many watching, it looks like less politics and increasingly choreography.
Another striking symmetry: both the parties, united at least in their shared discomfort with the Congress, fall back on the tired theatre of “development”. Roads, trains, bridges, are paraded as grand achievements, though built with taxpayers’ money and part of routine governance. When politics runs out of ideas, ribbon-cutting becomes ideology. Highways are flaunted by BJP, funded conveniently by fuel cess; the CPM claims credit in the sunshine and vanishes when the asphalt cracks. Ports rise on private investment, yet the applause is carefully appropriated. Flagging off a train or even a local KSRTC bus is now elevated to headline governance, a decade-long inflation of optics over substance. If the campaigns look eerily similar, the fault hardly lies with the voter noticing the script.
When the Pinarayi barbs aimed at Rahul Gandhi, who leads the INDIA bloc, of which the CPM is a partner, start sounding indistinguishable from BJP’s talking points, it doesn’t take a political genius to see where this is headed. Today’s rhetoric is tomorrow’s BJP campaign ammunition, and the CPM risks shrinking itself in the process. Already, the so-called Left citadel isn’t looking very fortified. Cracks are showing, and disquiet is bubbling up even in traditional bastions like Kannur and Alappuzha.
The BJP, with little to lose, plays the long game; small, precise gains that conveniently dovetail with the CPM’s unintended side project of hollowing out the Congress.
And the Congress, right on cue, fumbles the opening, tripping over internal squabbles, recycling political leftovers of dubious credibility after claiming to have stood firm in the Rahul Mangootathil episode, and loudly flaunting backing from outfits that slip all too easily into the “communal” box.
In a contest where subtlety is clearly optional, everyone seems united in one mission: lower the bar until it trips over itself. If the Congress and the UDF it leads does scrape through, it may have less to do with inspiration and more with exhaustion. Not a ringing endorsement, just a collective sigh of exasperation, settling for the least aggravating option.