Seven reasons that led to Left’s downfall in Kerala

In April 1957, Kerala swore in what is widely remembered as the world’s first democratically elected communist government — though purists will, correctly, point to San Marino, the landlocked microstate surrounded by Italy, where a Communist–Socialist coalition came to power through the ballot in 1945 and governed until 1957. Giving San Marino its due, Kerala’s experiment under E M S Namboodiripad remains the larger, more consequential one: a communist ministry voted into office in a vast, newly independent democracy of stark inequalities, dismissed two years later by Jawaharlal Nehru’s government after it dared to legislate land and education reform.

Sixty-nine years later, on May 4, 2026, the wheel turned. Kerala voted out the Left Democratic Front, and with that verdict, the last Left-led state government anywhere in India fell.

The LDF did not lose Kerala because the Congress-led United Democratic Front fought a brilliant campaign, or because the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) finally cracked the southern wall. It lost because, over a decade in power, it stopped being the Left.

The arithmetic is brutal. The UDF crossed 100 seats in a 140-member House. The BJP won three: Nemom, Kazhakkoottam, and Chathannoor. Most of Pinarayi Vijayan’s Cabinet ministers lost. The party that built itself on the backs of Punnapra-Vayalar martyrs is now an opposition footnote.

Contempt for workers

Let’s begin with the longest indefinite day-and-night strike in the history of independent India, led by women. For 266 days, ASHA workers — the foot-soldiers of the very public-health system the LDF boasts about at international forums — sat outside the State Secretariat asking for a living wage. They had asked for ₹21,000 a month; they were drawing ₹7,000. After 10 months of protest, the government raised it to ₹8,000. The party that calls itself the workers’ party met them with stonewalling and read each strike — Anganwadi workers, private-hospital nurses — as a Congress conspiracy rather than a wage demand. ASHA workers ran Kerala’s COVID-19 response. The voters remembered.

Farmers betrayed

Paddy farmers waited months for procurement payments while banks called in loans. In Central Travancore’s rubber belt, once the LDF's safest constituency, families spent the campaign telling reporters that their children had migrated to the Gulf and elsewhere. The 2021 manifesto promised a minimum support price of ₹250 per kilogramme for natural rubber; on poll day, it stood at around ₹200, with production costs eating most of the margin. Wild boars destroyed pepper vines in Wayanad while the government argued jurisdiction with the Centre.

Exodus of the young

Kerala remains India’s most literate state. It has also become, by its own data, a state that exports its students. Youth unemployment stands at 29.9% — among young women, 47.1%, nearly three times the national average. The Kerala Knowledge Economy Mission promised 20 lakh jobs in five years. Voters were entitled to ask: Where are these jobs?

The ‘model’ strained

The ‘Kerala model’ of public health was carried out in real time by the same ASHA cadre on hunger strike. The roof of a building at Kottayam Medical College collapsed in July, killing a patient, and exposed the rot beneath the model’s reputation. Health Minister Veena George, who initially claimed the building was not in use, contested from Aranmula and lost.

Investments that never came

Glossy investor summits replaced industrial policy. Public debt crossed ₹4.82 lakh-crore; the CAG flagged ₹32,942 crore in undisclosed off-budget borrowings through KIIFB. The fiscal hole was filled with Masala Bonds — now under ED scrutiny — and centrally devolved funds the LDF then accused the Centre of withholding.

The family question

The CMRL-Exalogic affair did what no Opposition could. The SFIO’s chargesheet alleged ₹2.7 crore in fraudulent payments from a listed mining firm to the Chief Minister’s daughter Veena Vijayan’s now-defunct IT company between 2017 and 2020 — for no demonstrable services. The Kerala High Court stayed proceedings; the case crawls. Add the Sabarimala gold-theft scandal that sent a senior CPI(M) leader behind bars, and the moral capital was gone.

Compromise with fascism

This is the deepest betrayal. After the 2024 Lok Sabha results, when Hindu votes drifted toward the BJP, the CPI(M) did not double down on its anti-communal politics. It pivoted — wooing the Nair Service Society, signalling a revised Sabarimala affidavit and, hosting a Global Ayyappa Conclave on the eve of the local body polls. Meanwhile, on Munambam, where 600 mostly Christian fishing families faced a Waqf Board claim on 404 acres, the LDF mumbled. The strategy was to split the UDF’s minority bloc and peel Hindu votes from the BJP. In 2026, having vilified Muslims to court Hindus and failed to protect Christians at Munambam, the LDF was abandoned by all three. The BJP did not need to win many seats; it only needed the Left to do its work.

Kerala in 1957 voted Communist because the Left spoke for the labourer, the tenant, the Dalit, the fisherman, the woman in the kitchen and the field. Kerala in 2026 voted the Left out because, somewhere along the road from Alappuzha to the Loka Kerala Sabha, it began speaking only for itself.

The red flag did not fall. It was lowered, slowly, by the hands that claimed to hold it highest.

Rejimon Kuttappan is a migrant rights activist, and author of Undocumented

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)