The suspense has finally ended and Congress has reluctantly discovered what voters had already decided. Internal rebellion should fade soon; in Congress culture, ideology rarely defeats proximity to power. VD Satheesan now has to ignore communal power brokers, clean up a decade of arrogance and spectacle and fill an emptied Treasury, and prove Kerala did not vote merely to replace one ruling circus with another.
Ajayan
After eleven excruciating days of “high command wisdom”, the Congress finally handed the crown to VD Satheesan, despite his leading the UDF to a thumping 100-plus mandate, facing all odds from within and from outside. The delay itself managed to blunt what was clearly a public rejection of Vijayan and his brand of “Pinarayism”. Yet, even after a decade of voter fatigue and fury, his party still clings to the illusion that the mandate was anything but a polite electoral eviction notice to him and his ways. There can be no better explanation to as many as 13 of his Cabinet team having tasted defeat.
While Pinarayi Vijayan quietly walked out of the Trivandrum International Airport after defeat, stripped of the usual circus of sirens, cavalcade of SUVs and security theatrics, a scene many Malayalis had long waited to witness, the Congress high command was busy perfecting the art of indecision. As voters had delivered their verdict loud and clear on April 9 and pronounced officially on May 4, the leadership still needed 11 leisurely days to “interpret” what the public had already underlined in bold.
If KC Venugopal, who did not contest and voters had effectively exiled him to Delhi as a Lok Sabha MP, and Ramesh Chennithala, under whose watch as Opposition Leader during the previous term the LDF not only retained power but returned with an even fatter mandate, had to step aside, then Satheesan had more than earned his moment. He revived a demoralized Congress, stitched together a credible anti-LDF front, boldly predicted a 100-plus sweep, and even offered political sanyas if he failed. Unlike most political vows in Kerala, this one did not age into comedy within a week.
Among the many hurdles stacked against Satheesan were the loud protests from Kerala’s self-appointed community power brokers - the Nair Service Society and the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam. Their leaders cried foul largely because Satheesan committed the unforgivable political sin of not queuing up for blessings or bargaining over “community interests”. Unlike many Congress veterans addicted to ceremonial obedience, he chose not to genuflect.
What followed was predictable: communal dog-whistles, public tantrums and moral lectures masquerading as political wisdom. The NSS general secretary, never shy of lobbying for “key positions” for his pets, kept up the tirade till the very end. The irony, of course, is that voters ignored the noise entirely, delivering a verdict that rose well above the stale arithmetic of communal gatekeeping.
Sadly, within the Congress, hardly anyone had the spine to call out this communal grandstanding. Worse still, when Satheesan took the politically risky and publicly applauded decision to keep Rahul Mamkootathil out of the Congress Legislature Party over sexual abuse allegations, it was his own colleagues who rushed out to attack him.
In a party where “discipline” usually means protecting the politically convenient, Satheesan’s stand briefly looked like accountability, which perhaps explains why it unsettled so many insiders. Some loyalists even crossed over to opposing camps in protest. Ironically, the public largely backed the move, and it left the LDF with little ammunition to strike.
Now that Satheesan has finally been declared Chief Minister, rivals within the Congress have predictably begun sulking in public, reviving the party’s favourite indoor sport - factional warfare. The familiar aroma of groupism is back, thick as ever. But he enters office with one advantage his critics lack: political relevance backed by a massive mandate and visible support from UDF allies. Having led what he repeatedly branded as “Team UDF”, he has enough momentum to survive the usual Congress melodrama. And in a party where ideology often queues obediently behind power, most internal rebellion is likely to dissolve the moment cabinet chairs and influence start getting distributed.
For Satheesan, the real trouble begins now. Winning the election was the easy part; governing a financially battered Kerala will be the actual tightrope walk. He inherits a Treasury that looks less “empty coffers” and more post-apocalyptic accounting exercise. Yet, unlike his predecessors’ favourite hobby of squeezing taxpayers dry while announcing “historic achievements”, he will have to revive finances without further punishing the public.
He is also expected to revisit several much-advertised LDF “model projects,” foremost among them the Kerala Infrastructure Investment Fund Board; sold for years as visionary economics but increasingly viewed as a monument to debt-fuelled spectacle, and made even more awkward now by the exit of its CEO. Beyond finances, there is public expectation for accountability: action against those responsible for excesses, including security personnel accused of assaulting protestors under the protective shadow of Pinarayi Vijayan’s administration and also looting public money. The election victory of one such victim of security excess itself reads like a public indictment of the previous regime.
Given what Satheesan has consistently campaigned for over the past five years, there is at least some room for cautious optimism. At a time when even parties claiming socialist legacies have quietly traded egalitarian ideals for glossy neo-liberal “development” brochures and investor summits, Satheesan remains among the few still invoking a recognisably Nehruvian social-democratic vision.
Whether he can translate those ideals into governance without drowning in Congress factionalism, fiscal ruin and bureaucratic inertia is another matter entirely. Kerala voters, after all, did not just vote for speeches about change; they voted expecting proof that politics can still serve people rather than power centres, contractors and carefully curated spectacles.
Tailpiece: As lobbying peaked for Venugopal, K Muraleedharan, himself immortalised by losing a bypoll as a sitting minister, reportedly quipped that making KC Chief Minister would at least spare him the embarrassment of holding Kerala’s most famous by-election flop record. After all, nothing heals political humiliation like finding someone capable of an even grander one.