“BJP’s growth in Kerala isn’t unpreventable”: CPI Kerala secretary Binoy Viswam

Binoy Viswam, the state secretary of the Kerala unit of the Communist Party of India, leads the party into a challenging assembly election this month. The Left Democratic Front alliance, under the Communist Party of India (Marxist)’s Pinarayi Vijayan, already won an unprecedented second term in the state five years ago. With four ministers and a voteshare stable between seven and nine percent in assembly elections, the CPI has been the younger brother of the alliance since the communist party split in 1964. As the smaller, but usually more ideologically driven partner, the CPI has had to face public anger because of Vijayan’s growing distance from communist ideology.

Nileena MS, a senior staff writer at The Caravan, interviewed Viswam days after the alliance met a drubbing at local body polls, to ask about what the party could learn from its loss. Viswam argued that Kerala was in no way immune to the growth of the Bharatiya Janata Party and that the alliance needed to do some serious soul-searching if it was to prevent a rightward shift in the state. This interview was part of Nileena’s reporting for the April 2026 cover story of The Caravan, which examined the ideological dilutions of the CPI(M) over its last decade of power in Kerala.

How do you look at the debates about the “Kerala Model” of development today, after ten years of LDF rule?

That coinage came during the period of the Achutha Menon government in the 1970s. In such an economy, where the GDP is not so big, per capita income is not so high, and the production sectors are not very robust, but generally the people are living a good life here. So, how is it possible? That was the question the world asked in those days. What was the magic in Kerala? Then came this terminology.