What the winner must learn from the loser in Kerala: No leader is inevitable

The victory of the Congress-led United Democratic Front is matched in intensity and depth by the defeat of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Democratic Front in Kerala. The winners have an immediate lesson to draw from the loser: that Kerala is characteristically disapproving of an über-leader who outshines his own party and keeps the spotlight firmly on himself. The outgoing Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan had made this election all about himself. The tagline of the LDF campaign was “Who Else, but LDF,” with Mr. Vijayan as its sole face, looming in imposingly large hoardings across the State. The UDF campaign, by contrast, was a teamwork of unprecedented synergy among its leaders — a fact that all of them underscored after the victory. The UDF and its supporters must now resist the temptation to imitate the Pinarayi model of leadership.

Strikingly at odds with Left tradition, its campaign — much like its government over the last 10 years — revolved around Mr. Vijayan’s personality, leaving little room for the CPI(M)’s own long-held internal processes of collective decision-making. No further evidence is required than the fact that at least six senior party leaders left the CPI(M) and contested with the UDF’s support in this election; three of them won. It is also evident that CPI(M) workers switched sides and voted for the UDF in large numbers, as the outcomes in party strongholds — including some in Kannur district — make clear. Mr. Vijayan himself trailed in the early rounds of counting in his own constituency, a party bastion. The degeneration setting into the LDF so unsettled its own sympathisers that Malayalam writer K. Satchidanandan — a lifelong fellow-traveller of the Left — said publicly that he wished the LDF to lose power this time. In the end, the claim of inevitability around Mr. Vijayan is the single most important factor that did the LDF in. A defining feature of LDF rule historically has been the party’s control over the government. The centralisation of power in the Chief Minister over the last 10 years weakened the party’s mediatory role in politics and governance.