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Kerala will elect its sixteenth legislative assembly on 9 April, with the ruling Left Democratic Front seeking an unprecedented third consecutive term in office. Pinarayi Vijayan is a year short of overtaking his Communist Party of India (Marxist) predecessor EK Nayanar as Kerala’s longest-reigning chief minister. But he has to grapple with a decade’s worth of anti-incumbency and a resurgent Congress-led United Democratic Front, which swept the 2019 and 2024 general elections in the state, as well as recent local body polls. He also has to deal with the Bharatiya Janata Party’s efforts to make a breakthrough in Kerala, which have not yet shown electoral results but have destabilised the state’s politics over the past decade.
Most constituent parties of the LDF and the UDF are part of the Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance, and on the same side in the concurrent assembly election in neighbouring Tamil Nadu, but you would not be able to tell from the rhetoric that has characterised the campaign. Each alliance has accused the other of colluding with the BJP and, therefore, compromising on the state’s secular ideals that they claim to embody. Vijayan’s critics in the state have often referred to him as “mundu udatha Modi”—Modi in a mundu, a garment worn around the waist in Kerala—and have drawn parallels with the authoritarian style of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Meanwhile, when Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha, delivered his first major speech of the campaign at Thiruvananthapuram on 7 March, three separate ministers in the LDF government made public statements criticising his promises and Congress governments in other states. P Rajeev, the law minister, referred to Rahul as a “feckless” and “truant” leader of the opposition and argued that, by calling for Vijayan’s arrest, he had exhibited the political mannerisms of a Sangh Parivar stooge.
The recriminations reflect a certain desperation that currently characterises both alliances, for whom this election appears to have existential connotations. The Congress has never before been out of power for more than five years in the state since 1977, while the LDF suffered its worst drubbings of the past four decades in the 2019 and 2024 general elections. The BJP, which, in recent years, has won its first ever assembly and Lok Sabha seats in Kerala, has succeeded in making the state’s elections a tripolar contest.
Demographics
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