The 2024 Lok Sabha Elections produced the façade of sameness as 2019 was almost re-enacted in Kerala. Yet, the present elections should ring the alarm bells for the Left. Not just because of the fact that the BJP won a historic first seat, but also because of its other electoral advancements: a 3.57% increase in vote share for the NDA (huge for Kerala), to 19.21%; crossing 30% vote share in 3 Lok Sabha constituencies (from 1 in 2019); coming first in 11 Assembly segments (from 1 in 2019), and second in 9 segments (from 7 in 2019). Besides, some of this was at the expense of the Left strongholds.
Nevertheless, this moment is not a mere electoral setback occasioned by anti-incumbency, public finance troubles of the CPI(M)-led government, and allegations of corruption against it (which, too, have undoubtedly played a role). That will misread the nature of a potential crisis faced by the Left, which is far beyond the electoral.
The communist movement in Kerala is one of the most important mobilizations of the peasant and the working classes in the Global South. Yet its success was in in how it tried to address together a variety of exclusions based on class, caste, and linguistic identities. And this was achieved through struggles and entrenchment in the arena outside elections: in civil society and the cultural sphere. This hegemony of the communist “common sense” in Kerala society is what is being challenged with the rise of the Hindu Right.
This rise has been foretold considering the strength of Hindutva in the non-electoral arena, like for example, the fact that Kerala has had among the highest numbers of RSS shakhas in the country. This has only accentuated in the recent years with heightened activities around temples and festivals. Hindu nationalism, has followed, ironically, the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s prescription for Communist revolutionaries in a capitalist society. That is, to be engaged in a “war of position”, a long-drawn-out cultural struggle to counter the dominant ideology and gain spaces of influence for one’s own weaker ideology.
The rightwards shift of the cultural sphere is an outcome. But the Left has been hard pressed to meet these challenges despite winning historically the highest number of seats in the 2021 Assembly Elections. The communist parties have de-radicalized since the achievement of major economic goals like the land reforms and the institution of labour rights. Their conversion into electoral machines means that mass movements and ideological struggles were given the short shrift.
The Sabarimala Temple entry for women issue, which saw an upsurge of patriarchal and savarna caste values, is an example where the Left, after initially seeking to counter the Right, had to soften its stance. More importantly, the contradictions between the cultural realm and the electoral realm can be seen in the fact that even among the people who voted for the Left in 2021, 62% and 38% respectively (Lokniti-CSDS) were those who either somewhat or fully opposed the Supreme Court’s Sabarimala judgement.
Rather than proactively fashion new ideological programmes, the Left has been reacting to the Right’s rise, producing vacillations and contradictions. Thus, it counters the popularity of Sangh Parivar’s celebration of religious festivals like Janmashtami by organizing its own “secular” processions on the same days, in which, on occasion, religious deities have slipped in. In order to offset its potential vote loss among the majority community, it takes up issues like that of Palestine and rightly speaks against Israel’s colonial occupation and catastrophic genocidal actions. However, it fails to call out the terror by Hamas against civilians.
If electoralism has hobbled the Left, presently, it is set back further by the development of authoritarian tendencies, and a personality cult around Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. This is unprecedented in Kerala, and in the communist parties which have generally practiced the principles of collective leadership, and which have the most institutionalized processes for internal democracy. These tendencies have translated into intolerance towards dissent and the targeting of oppositional spaces through police cases against political leaders and media personnels. These have targeted fellow travellers as well. Thus, a Christian priest, a prominent democracy and human rights activist, was recently called an ignoramus by the chief minister for the former’s well-intentioned criticisms of the government.
It would be catastrophic for the Left to believe that it can counter the Right by adopting the latter’s playbook or by electoral engineering. It can only happen through a reinvigorated democracy in which the tasks of class, caste and gender equality are completed. And not just by a symbolic and uncritical affirmation of the 19th-20th century Kerala renaissance (which produced caste and social reform) as the Left did during the Sabarimala agitation. Dalits and Adivasis are still at the bottom of the socio-economic hierarchy of Kerala, belying the promise of communist equality. If the marginalized find the new imaginations offered by the Hindu Right attractive, it is also located in secular disenchantments. In the present elections, amongst the OBC Ezhavas/Thiyyas—the backbone of the communist movement—32% voted for the NDA, up 11% from 2019 (Lokniti-CSDS).
In 1996, the Left government had initiated the People’s Plan, participatory planning from the bottom-up, one of the most extensive democratic decentralisation programmes globally. Since then, the local governments have lost some of their critical powers. A reimagination of Kerala’s welfare state requires a strengthening of its local democracy against destructive top-down development projects (like high-speed rail/ corporate capital-led ports) or economic populism, which again mirror the Right.
The Left might very well recoup some of its lost votes in the next Assembly Elections, like in 2021. Yet, it can only ignore the tectonic cultural shifts at its own peril. There can be debates amongst the Left about the best counter to rising Hindu nationalism. But it can be said unequivocally that the path to a socialist democracy for the 21st century has to base itself on imaginations that go beyond the electoral and beyond old shibboleths.
Nissim Mannathukkaren is an associate professor in Dalhousie University’s Department of International Development Studies in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He is the author of ‘Communism, Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Theory: The Left in South India’.
An edited version of this article was first published in The Hindu.