# Ajayan | What unfolded in the Kerala Assembly elections was less democracy in action and more a masterclass in “selective culling”; that wildlife-management term for eliminating inconvenient specimens that exhibit “undesirable traits”. Only here, the creatures being carefully weeded out were not invasive deer or diseased cattle, but political voices and candidates deemed insufficiently useful to democracy and promoting dangerous mutations requiring immediate containment.
The LDF marched into the election flaunting the smug slogan, “Who else but LDF?” The voters answered with remarkable clarity: literally anyone else. Despite the frantic last-minute PR spectacle, lavishly funded of course with taxpayers’ money, people saw through the performance. The deception became impossible to hide when the leader, instead of listening to his own cadre even when promising to hold them together, arrogantly snapped at a party worker to “ask the question at home”. That single moment captured the regime perfectly: dismissive, insulated and intoxicated with power. The voters responded with fitting irony. If questioning must be done at home, they decided, then perhaps it was the leaders themselves who deserved to stay there.
The message was hardly new. It had already echoed through the Lok Sabha and local body elections: people had decided who needed to be shown the door. Even in Dharmadam, long marketed as Pinarayi Vijayan’s impregnable fortress, the Chief Minister had to sweat for survival. In the end, much of his carefully assembled troupe engaged in political theatrics was unceremoniously rejected by the electorate
Selective culling was hardly confined to one camp. On the other side too, figures like Anwar in Beypore and PK Sasi in Ottappalam discovered that opportunistic side-switching, marketed as political strategy, looked far more like naked power mongering to voters. The fallout of this voter-led purge incidentally handed the BJP a few gains, though certainly not the NDA whose own allies reduced the coalition to something between a sideshow and a political parody. A closer look at the three seats won by the BJP reveals an uncomfortable truth: the electorate was often less interested in choosing who should govern than in deciding who deserved to be defeated.
Another blow to the LDF, particularly the CPM, was the spectacle of community organisations openly rallying behind it, exposing the front’s carefully polished secular credentials as little more than political stage makeup. The more these groups campaigned for the LDF, the more voters began to suspect these secularism credentials.
Ironically, this pushed many voters towards the UDF, creating an entirely different Kerala story - one where secularism appeared less like a slogan manufactured in party offices and more like a public rejection of cynical vote-bank theatrics shown as ideological purity.
Even as the Congress and its UDF allies celebrate with predictable self-congratulation, the verdict was far less a passionate endorsement of them than a pointed rejection of the Pinarayi-led party and more than anti-incumbency, it was public frustration.
That becomes even clearer in the resonance of voices like G Sudhakaran, PV Kunhikkannan and T Govindan, who openly urged the CPM cadre to rescue the party from its leadership’s arrogance, ideological drift and growing disconnect from ordinary people. Their message was simple: abandon the cult of power, rediscover the pro-people politics.
But the party still seems spectacularly unwilling to learn. Leaders continue posting bewildered sermons about how, despite “doing so much for the people,” voters somehow chose to reject them, as though the electorate committed an unforgivable act and the blame subtly shifts from failed leadership to the audacity of the voter.
For the LDF, this was not merely a defeat; it was the collapse of the last surviving fortress. Bengal is long lost beyond redemption, Tripura abandoned even party offices, and now Kerala has effectively told Pinarayi Vijayan, in his own immortal phrase, “Kadakku purathu” (“get out”). The people, evidently, no longer require his peculiar brand of “protection”, theatrically enforced with flower pots, police lathis and an ever-expanding security cocoon.
The irony could hardly be richer: after five decades, India now stands on the verge of having no CPM Chief Minister anywhere in the country.