Kerala: Vijayan’s manoeuvres, beyond handshakes and partnerships

Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan is waiting to make history with a third time-in-a-row win for the Left Democratic Front (LDF) in the assembly election due next year. In a recent interview, the 80-year-old leader sounded confident of winning and said, “We are confident of a handsome victory. We have been able to reach out to the masses in every possible way, and their response is overwhelming.”

The masses will make up their mind and deliver their assessment of Vijayan’s performance in 2026 when assembly elections are due in Kerala as well as Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Assam.

Easy as he makes another victory sound, the fact of the matter is he is battling anti-incumbency, spiralling exposures of corruption within his office and his government, and pushback from the non-party media angry over the detention of a journalist in an alleged shoe-throwing incident that was interpreted as a security breach. Some of the mud slung in his direction has stuck in public perception as well as within the CPI(M), a historically faction-ridden and fractious party organisation with powerful mass organisations that are crucial to delivering the votes that Vijayan needs to win a third term.

The ageing leader knows this full well. Even as he is doing his utmost to project himself as the man in charge and the man who is steering Kerala into the future, with loads of foreign direct investments in the IT sector, a Rs 30,000 crore sea port and transhipment terminal at Vizhinjam, he has had to announce major policy detours — both political and ideological — to endear himself to private investors. Private investments are now in Vijayan’s playbook, partners in his dreams for development of Kerala as an important West Coast destination.

The showpiece of this transformational plan is the sea port project of India’s first transhipment terminal in which the Adani Group is the principal investor in partnership with the Kerala government. The project measures the distance Vijayan has travelled ideologically and politically to make his place in the party’s annals as a successful chief minister.

Vizhinjam is a state-owned sea port that Vijayan had declared was a manifestation of “our collective willpower and dedication which are beyond their designs”, while referring to local and international “lobbies” that put up resistance to his dream project.

To bypass the lobbies, Vijayan has moderated the CPI(M)’s famously squeamish attitude to hobnobbing with 'neo-imperialists' and the adamant opposition to liberalisation and economic reforms, to the point that in the past one year he has made time by absenting himself from party events, including West Bengal’s ex-chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s memorial meeting, to spend it with Narendra Modi.

Last week, the CPI(M) hardliner engaged in breakfast parleys with Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman at New Delhi’s Kerala Bhavan in order to persuade her to release urgently needed funds promised to Kerala for various development projects, including the sea port.

The tactical shifts that Vijayan has chosen are an indication that politics in Kerala is poised for change. Ideological enmity between the CPI(M) and the BJP has been set aside to enable Vijayan to do business with the Modi regime. The adjustments and negotiations on the surface are all about development; below the surface is a politically significant accommodation by the Vijayan government that could open the door to the BJP’s advance in a state that has till now resisted the seduction of Hindutva and divisive identity based majoritarian politics.

Post-Sitaram Yechury’s demise, the CPI(M) and party coordinator Prakash Karat may declare over and over that “our political goal still remains how to isolate and defeat the BJP and the Modi government”, but by adopting a tactic of doing business with the enemy, the Vijayan government has sent out a clear and unequivocal message that isolationism is a bad idea.

How the party and Vijayan juggle with this new set of objects is the question that will be answered in the 2026 state assembly election. Will the rank and file of the CPI(M) and its front organisations endorse Vijayan’s new-found cordiality with the Centre, and by extension the BJP? The fact of the matter is that the CPI(M) is not the dominant party in Kerala any longer. It shares the top spot with the Congress.

In 2021, the difference in vote share between the CPI(M), which won and the Congress, which lost, was just about five per cent. By 2024, the CPI(M) was seriously down, winning one out of 20 parliamentary seats, while the Congress won 18 seats and the BJP opened its account by winning from Thrissur. The Lok Sabha result reflected as much a decline of Vijayan’s stewardship of the party as it showed a significant upswing of approval for the Congress, buoyed by Rahul Gandhi’s candidature from Wayanad.

Wooing the Centre to make a common cause for Kerala’s development is a compromise that Vijayan has made to get debt-strapped Kerala on the road to economic health.

His compulsions are obvious. The state needs money and the chief minister is prepared to grasp at any straws he can find, including the Modi regime, to get investments flowing into the state. By making it kosher to do business with the BJP, the Vijayan government has signalled that pragmatism must be prioritised.

It overturns the “line” laid down by Karat that “the Left’s alternative politics of policies to be projected as a rallying point for the fight against various policies of the Modi government”. In doing so, it has made the BJP a partner in Kerala’s development which the party hopes to exploit to the fullest to get re-elected to the state assembly. The cost of this manoeuvre will be borne by the Congress in 2026, it hopes.

The BJP is obviously willing to facilitate this. It may also cost the CPI(M) in terms of votes in the 2026 election. So, how will the CPI(M) rank and file and its core voters, finding it difficult to digest Vijayan’s new game, express their choice?

In Kerala’s competitive and bipolar politics, the choice until now has always been between the Congress-led UDF and the CPI(M)-led LDF. The advent of a third party may create the space for disgruntled voters from both fronts to seek an alternative. How Vijayan handles the problem, albeit of his own creation, will be revealed in 2026 and it will have long-term consequences for politics in Kerala.