What's next for Pinarayi Vijayan?

File image of Kerala Chief Minister and CPI(M) leader Pinarayi Vijayan

Soon after the Left Democratic Front suffered a huge setback in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls in Kerala, Pinarayi Vijayan was in an informal meeting with some of his close confidants.

Since the Sabarimala agitations were supposed to have played a role in the election results, a person in the room politely reminded the Kerala Chief Minister to go soft on the agitation to avoid future poll debacles.

Vijayan dramatically stood up from his chair, replied: “Not even if the sky fell over my head.”

Back then, the person said, requesting not to be named, he had wondered if Vijayan would drive the party to another big debacle in the assembly elections two years away.

A few other decisions taken by Vijayan added to these doubts.

Close on the heels of the announcement of Kerala’s assembly polls in April, Vijayan concurred with another risky decision to bench 33 senior leaders of his Communist Party of India (Marxist) party, or CPM, from the electoral contest. This meant keeping away five sitting ministers who had done decent work, and some popular regional leaders who were seen as the best hands to win again.

Protests erupted within the ranks. But Vijayan was largely unmoved. Within party fora, he defended this move by saying it was needed to bring about a leadership change. From local party workers to top leaders, many privately said that it would affect the electoral fortunes of the Left.

In another instance, party leaders had advised Vijayan that his idea to field a Muslim candidate in a seat that is dominantly populated by Hindus in central Kerala would go horribly wrong. Vijayan did not care and H Salam was fielded in Ambalappuzha.

The Chief Minister’s mulishness in some of these decisions only added to apprehensions within and outside the party about deifying Vijayan as the all-powerful ‘Captain’ during the campaign.

Also Read: What explains Trinamool’s spectacular victory?

The right moves

Vijayan himself set some ambitious goals. When he said in a press meet a week before the polls that the BJP’s lone account in Kerala, the Nemom seat in Thiruvananthapuram, will be closed in this election, he was greeted with suspicion by the mainstream press. After the polls commenced, the CPM-state secretariat that was attended by Vijayan said the party-led coalition will win 80-100 seats. Except for one, other exit polls painted this as an unlikely scenario, even though they predicted a decent victory for the communists.

Now, as the results are in, it turns out that every calculation by the ‘Captain’ was right all along and everybody else was wrong.

There is now only a thin line which will distinguish between the party and Vijayan's personality – Political Analyst and head of think tank Lokniti Network

CPM candidates won all five seats in Pathanamthitta, the town that saw most of the Sabarimala protests. Vijayan’s calculations of Sabarimala having little impact on the elections proved correct. This is clearly seen from the drubbing that K Surendran, the face of the protests, and the Kerala chief of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), received in the town’s Konni seta. He came third.

Vijayan was also right about the generational change. The replacement candidates have won with decent margins in most seats where the party benched senior leaders. The Muslim candidate mentioned earlier – Salam -- won by more than 10,000 votes. The BJP drew a blank, losing even its lone seat in Nemom.

The CPM's seat prediction was right on the mark. The LDF in Kerala has won in 99 of the 140 assembly seats and the opposition Congress-headed United Democratic Front (UDF) in 41 seats.

Also Read: Factors that aided the Left’s historic win in Kerala

Sunday was a historic day for the Left. The CPM has never been in such a strong position in its electoral history in Kerala. Not only has it broken the jinx of an incumbent chief minister not getting re-elected ever, but the party alone also has 67 seats—just four seats shy of simple majority.

Opportunity in adversity

It is easy to forget how the unlikely Vijayan metamorphosed into not only the tallest leader within the state but even with the CPM politburo. From a long-time party secretary to a first-time chief in 2016, his ascent was improvised and born of adversities.

Five years ago, the son of a toddy-tapper turned communist was remarked as the least-loved politician in a poll by a national daily. His term coincided with some of the biggest disasters that ever struck Kerala— be it the historic floods of 2018 and 2019, the attack of the Nipah virus, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

To get to this point, Vijayan took steep political risks. He was at times seen defying popular opinion as in the case of Sabarimala. At other times, he was seen as willing to settle for something less than desirable – for example in the case of sacking one of his favourite bureaucrats, M Shivashankar, during a smuggling scandal that hit the government last year.

But what never changed was his style, marked with a no-nonsense attitude and a business-like manner. Some say it is his arrogance. Some say it is his confidence. For him, if his first term is any indicator, it is the only way.

The way forward for the Left

Most analysts agree that Vijayan 2.0 is bound to be more confident, given the scale of the victory. Not only has the LDF scattered the vote base of the opposition Congress and BJP, but some of the most glamorous opposition leaders stand defeated or are staring at a slump in the majority, weakening the morale of the opposition.

Within CPM, the victory is bound to create a churn. The party drew a blank in West Bengal on Sunday, a spectacular collapse in a state it had ruled for 34 years until 2011. Since it is not in power anywhere else in India, the CPM politburo is now effectively dependent on Vijayan to maintain its national party status, rather than the other way around. He is, in other words, the prima donna of Indian communism now.

"There is now only a thin line which will distinguish between the party and Vijayan's personality," said Sandeep Shastri, Bengaluru-based political analyst and head of the think tank, Lokniti Network. "It has happened even in the past, with its share of frictions. Jyoti Basu ruled for three decades in West Bengal, he combined elements of ideology and personality. Kerala has its own experiences with Nayanar and VS Achuthanandan's personality cults."

"There is no denying that Vijayan's leadership and style of governance were critical in getting this mandate. But the Left has always emphasized that no individual is higher than the party. So it will have to tweak its ideology to the party program of Vijayan that has always had an element of pragmatism," he added.

In Kerala, the results would make Vijayan bold enough to take tougher decisions— starting with a free hand in choosing ministers, say analysts. He might go for a generational change in the new government, say analysts, with many of the key portfolios handed to first-timers in the assembly who are closer to him such as KN Balagopal, P Rajeev and MB Rajesh.

“The verdict reflects that he is viewed as an able manager of crises. It shows all his experiments, from expanding welfare measures to going for big projects using hefty loans, have succeeded. The welfare and development works were a key to his success. With that, the people did not care for scams going by the results,” said J Prabhash, a former pro-Vice Chancellor of Kerala University, who has studied Kerala politics for decades.

“The CPM also expanded its alliance power under Vijayan. (LDF) is now a Goliath that has 11 parties, all having substantial ballot power. In comparison, the Congress has just eight parties where except for itself and the Indian Union Muslim League, others are mere splinter groups. The alliance power is instructive of how the Left made a huge haul of seats in central and southern Kerala where the support of Christian churches and Hindu caste organisations are influential,” he said.

“In the long run, he is likely to become more authoritarian, calling the shots in both within the government and the party... The Captain indeed, it seems,” said Prabhash.