He portrayed this election as an existential struggle against the pandemic and to protect Kerala’s secular and plural character, a battle between Left and Right, and where the centre (read Congress) cannot hold or, if it did, only as a stand-in for BJP.
He portrayed this election as an existential struggle against the pandemic and to protect Kerala’s secular and plural character, a battle between Left and Right, and where the centre (read Congress) cannot hold or, if it did, only as a stand-in for BJP.
The secret meeting, set up to end serial political killings, was a classic Nazi-Soviet style non-aggression pact between sworn rivals, neither of them with any illusion about the nature of the truce. Having built his entire career as a die-hard opponent of the Sangh Parivar, a ‘deal’ with RSS was a huge risk for Pinarayi to take ed the art of simultaneously appearing holier-than-thou and hard-nosed.
From Sabarimala women’s entry and CAA to masala bonds and #FreeVaccines, his aggression always softened to something ambivalent and retreat was seen as the way forward.
This late-career flexibility transformed him from a seemingly dour, uncompromising Stalinist to a middle-class messiah. As CPM state secretary for 17 years, Pinarayi erased whatever little family resemblance his party bore to Marxism, shifting its focus from proletariat to proprietorial class, from anti-tech to embracing the IT sector and from ‘people’s panchayats’ to professional governance. His administrative acumen was on display during the floods in August 2018 and 2019 and has continued through the pandemic.
But the fight against Covid has been much more than that: thousands of young men and women volunteered precisely because Pinarayi evoked community fantasies of a second coming, of a renewed collectivity. It changed Pinarayi from just another comrade to ‘Captain’, one who transcended his party and its partisan politics. Marxism’s loss has been Kerala’s gain.
