# Ajayan | Going by the adage “well begun is half done”, the VD Satheesan-led UDF seems to have mastered at least the easier half. After a decade of public endurance masquerading as governance and voters finally choosing escape over loyalty, the new government has made initial moves that meet people’s aspirations.
Three acts of arrogance had particularly invited public fury. The cruelest was not merely the neglect of ASHA workers’ legitimate demands, but the cold contempt with which a self-anointed Left government treated women who stood for months under burning sun and beating rain. The modest hike in honorarium has done more than raise wages; it has bandaged wounded dignity. Ironically, the former Finance Minister dismissed it as “making a mole out of a mountain,” seemingly forgetting that it was his own government that first built the mountain brick by brick with indifference.
Then came the burial of the fantastical K-Rail dream, a project Kerala neither asked for nor could survive. In a State already bruised by floods and climate anxiety, the obsession with driving silver tracks through fragile land felt less like development and more like bureaucratic vanity on wheels. Yet the government marched on, planting yellow boundary stones like colonial flags in people’s courtyards and even kitchens, deaf to protests and blind to public anger. Somewhere along the way, governance became theatre, and the CPM State secretary, sermonising about selling appams on trains, accidentally turned himself into the punchline of Kerala’s political folklore.
The numbers themselves read like a disaster warning, not a development plan: 1,380 hectares swallowed, 85 per cent of it private land, nearly 20,000 families pushed toward uncertainty; all to force a concrete scar through one of the most fragile landscapes. The irony was exquisite. The very CPM that once marched against an Expressway suddenly discovered poetic affection for a “SilverLine” that would slice Kerala like a careless knife. Worse still, the embankment was to crawl across 165 hydrologically sensitive zones in a State still haunted by the floods of 2018 and 2019.
Now, with the Satheesan government finally burying the project and ordering return of the land to rightful owners, CPM leaders shrug that the Centre never sanctioned it anyway. Curious defence. If the project was already lifeless, why did the party spend the election campaign chanting “K-Rail will come” like a devotional hymn? Kerala remembers that too well.
The scars of the so-called Nava Kerala Yatra still linger; less a people’s outreach than a taxpayer-funded travelling spectacle wrapped in arrogance. The unforgivable part was not merely the suppression of dissent, but the brutality reserved for those whose only offence was waving black flags. Flower pots became weapons, canes became arguments, and party muscle marched hand in hand with the police while the government preached “protection” with a straight face.
What shook Kerala most was the savage assault in Alappuzha, where protestors were beaten in full public view by the Chief Minister’s security personnel. One victim, bloodied by power, returned through the ballot box as MLA from what was once considered a Left fortress - democracy’s quiet but devastating revenge. Even after courts ordered reinvestigation, the previous regime perfected its favourite administrative art: sitting on files. Now, with the Satheesan government constituting an SIT and demanding a report within a month, the State waits to see whether justice will finally move faster than political convenience.
Topping these early measures was the government’s rare decision to look beyond elections and towards demographics. While Kerala proudly climbed the ladder of human development, it also quietly walked into the reality of becoming an ageing society, with one in four citizens expected to cross the age of 60 within the next decade. For years, governments celebrated longevity without preparing for its consequences. Now, by creating a separate wing to address the challenges of ageing and geriatric care, the Satheesan government has done something unusual in politics; it chose foresight over slogans and deserves applause.
So far, the opening act has been impressive. But governing Kerala is not theatre after the curtains rise; it is surviving the wreckage left backstage. The economy remains battered despite the glossy sermons once delivered and being repeated by former finance ministers KN Balagopal and Thomas Isaac. Looming over it all is the great financial monument of the previous era, KIIFB, a body that promised infrastructure dreams while quietly feasting on the State’s future revenues.
By siphoning from annual Plan allocations, cornering cess collections and borrowing expensively after ceremonially ringing the London Stock Exchange bell, KIIFB perfected the art of mortgaging tomorrow to advertise today. After all the grand speeches about “New Kerala”, the hard arithmetic remains stubborn: just over Rs 38,600 crore spent, mountains of debt accumulated, and a State still searching for where exactly the miracle was built
A white paper on Kerala’s finances may finally reveal what years of triumphant press conferences carefully concealed. But numbers alone are not enough. If the government truly wants credibility, it must reopen the entire KIIFB model itself, not as sacred doctrine, but as a financial experiment that may have quietly chained the State to debt. A serious audit into the use, misuse, abuse and political packaging of KIIFB funds is no longer optional; it is overdue.
What Kerala needs now is a government with a human touch and the patience to listen. The State is tired, financially strained, emotionally bruised. Its people no longer crave promises poured in concrete, but dignity wrapped in compassion. If the Satheesan government sustains the humility of its first steps, hope, long exiled from public life, may quietly find its way home. Let the Secretariat open its doors to the people, and let the Assembly breathe free again, shedding the restraints that dimmed democracy under the LDF, so the people may once more hear their own voice echo in the House that belongs to them.
