#AjayanNever has the CPI(M) in Kerala faced such a humiliating reckoning. Yet, as it heads into its much-touted introspection next week, the party seems to have misplaced the one thing it needs most: a mirror. The Assembly election verdict was brutal; even the party central committee report admits political, organisational and leadership failures. Yet its leaders seem busy perfecting the oldest political reflex, blaming everyone but themselves.
The irony is the party that once claimed to read the pulse of the masses now seems unable to hear what they have shouted through the ballot box. If the extended State committee meeting next week becomes another ritual of blame-shifting, the CPI(M) will have achieved the impossible: turning an electoral catastrophe into a victory for denial.
And if party insiders are to be believed, the mute button is already being pressed. Serious dissent against the State leadership appears unlikely, despite its role in alienating the people. The party’s central committee review, endorsed in the presence of Pinarayi Vijayan and MV Govindan, cited anti-incumbency and leadership ambitions among the causes of defeat. But the message seems to have been promptly shelved, judging by Vijayan’s speeches and Govindan’s increasingly comic rhetoric.
If Vijayan blames “betrayers” TK Govindan and V Kunhikrishnan for the rout, he should explain how a once-formidable CPI(M) was reduced to just 24 MLAs across the State. Nine scraped through with margins below 10,000, while the party lost 15 of the 38 seats won by over 20,000 votes last time.
Except for Vijayan, son-in-law Mohammed Riyas and party's gaffe machine Saji Cheriyan, voters effectively showed the party Ministers the door. Yet the State leadership clings to the most spectacular fiction of all: there was no anti-incumbency.
As State secretary, Vijayan wielded enough power to keep even VS Achuthanandan’s candidature in doubt until the central leadership forced a reversal and was in full command of the VS Government. The party state leadership is believed to have ensured a defeat, though by mere two seats in 2011, denying VS a second term. By 2016, with Vijayan himself in the Chief Minister’s chair, the balance was turned: the party no longer checked the Government; it became its shadow.
The CPI(M), once a collective, increasingly revolved around one political “sun”. And like any sun too powerful to eclipse, anything that came too close risked getting burnt. A second term, secured amid the Covid-era mood, only seemed to make Vijayan more imperious; the new faces around him often looked less like a Cabinet than distorted reflections of the man at the centre. The party did not merely lose its voice; it lost its shadow.
The CPI(M) has been drifting from its own red lines for years, despite VS Achuthanandan’s efforts to pull it back. From the first-term nepotism scandal seeing EP Jayarajan lose his cabinet position to the allegations surrounding Vijayan’s daughter now, the departures have become a depressing procession.
There were Maoist killings, UAPA arrests, the Varapuzha custodial death, corruption allegations swirling around Vijayan's office and the arrest of his former principal secretary. Then came the extraordinary latitude granted to ADGP MR Ajith Kumar amid allegations over the Thrissur Pooram disruption and his meetings with RSS leaders.
The Nava Kerala Yatra added police brutality to the catalogue, even as Vijayan dismissed attacks on protesters as a “rescue mission”; the same officer later faced allegations of influencing the probe. The Asha workers’ agitation exposed another face of the Government’s deafness. The list is long and unending.
The red lines have faded; PM SHRI was the final nail. Now comes the real test: will anyone raise the red flag against the State leadership; and will the central leadership make its own report bite? The party has seen post mortems before, in Bengal and Tripura, with little more than political embalming. Kerala must now decide whether its review becomes a reckoning, or another exercise in burying the evidence.