The stern and unsmiling Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan revealed an unusually candid – and at moments, even emotional – side in a recent televised conversation with Malayalam cinema superstar Mohanlal, organised by the state Public Relations Department.
“I was quite fond of reading epics like the Mahabharata and devotional stories from childhood. Even while I was terrified of ghosts and demons, I was deeply drawn to the ascetics in these epics. That stayed with me—and perhaps explains why I am not enamoured of positions or anxious about losing them,” said the Marxist supremo.
Known primarily as a man of action, Vijayan also confessed to being a diehard fan of Tamil superstar Rajinikanth’s action films. “I love your action films too,” he told Mohanlal, in a rare moment of warmth.
Yet, whatever his professed detachment from power, the stakes could scarcely be higher. If the Left Democratic Front (LDF) he leads loses the upcoming Assembly election, it would be a severe blow—not just to Kerala, but to the entire Indian Left. Kerala, which stunned the world in 1957 by electing India’s first Communist government, now remains the last major bastion of Left power. Significantly, this moment coincides with the centenary of the Communist movement in India—adding historical weight to an already crucial contest.
For Vijayan personally, the election is no less consequential. Born into an impoverished, backward caste Thiyya family in Pinarayi, six years after the village saw the birth of Kerala's Communist movement in 1939, Vijayan now, at 81, presides over India’s only Communist-ruled state. He has held the red flag aloft through two decades that saw the erosion of Left power elsewhere. He is Kerala’s longest-serving Chief Minister and the only Communist leader to have secured two consecutive terms. A third would be historic—a hat-trick unprecedented in the state’s fiercely competitive politics. No mean achievement for a working-class comrade in a movement committed to the oppressed but led for long by leaders with upper-class and caste backgrounds.
This election may well be the most formidable test of Vijayan’s long political life. It will determine whether he can extend his legacy—or whether the last red frontier will fall. The stakes extend beyond Kerala. A movement once rich in towering figures – from EMS Namboodiripad to Jyoti Basu – now finds itself heavily reliant on Vijayan. The CPI(M), which relaxed its own age bar of 75 in 2021 to accommodate him, has done so again. Even the party’s Politburo – once unflinching in disciplining its tallest leaders – now appears to defer to him as the last red sentinel.
The odds, however, are far from favourable. Anti-incumbency after a decade in power, the consolidation of minority votes including groups like the Jamaat-e-Islami behind the United Democratic Front (UDF), and the erosion of traditional Left votes which drifted towards the BJP-led NDA have all complicated the landscape.
The LDF’s drubbing in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and subsequent local body polls has been widely read as a sign of voter fatigue. While Kerala has historically voted differently in national and state elections – as seen in 2019 and 2021 – the scale of the LDF’s losses in local bodies was unusual, given its traditionally strong grassroots machinery.
Internal dissent has added to its troubles. Ticket denials triggered rare open revolts within both the CPI(M) and CPI. As many as half a dozen senior Left leaders, including a former minister, are contesting the coming Assembly polls as rebels with the support of Congress or the BJP.
The public intervention by prominent pro-Left cultural figures like poet K Satchidanandan – who argued that a spell in the Opposition might help cleanse the Left of the stagnation that accompanies prolonged power – has only deepened the unease.
The LDF appears increasingly rattled by a shifting social coalition: Muslims and Christians – together accounting for nearly half the state’s population – seem to be consolidating more behind the UDF, especially after Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi's embrace of Kerala as their favourite election turf. Sections of Hindus, including segments of its traditional support base, are drifting towards the NDA. Confronted with this squeeze, the CPI(M) has, in what many see as a desperate recalibration, begun reaching out to Hindu community organisations—even those that were once among its most persistent critics. Initiatives such as the Global Ayyappa Conference have, for the first time, lent the Left a perceptible “soft-Hindu” image.
Equally significant has been the party’s quiet retreat from its earlier unequivocal support for women’s entry into the Sabarimala Temple—a position that had triggered a massive backlash among Hindu devotees. This recalibration, however, has not been without complications. The sensational allegations of gold theft from the shrine has upended the LDF’s attempts to strike a delicate social balance.
The Left responds to the soft-Hindu charge by pointing to the continuing flow from the Congress camp towards the saffron side. Following the son and daughter of former Chief ministers AK Antony and K Karunakaran, the son-in-law of former Chief Minister Oommen Chandy and the brother of present KPCC Chief Sunny Joseph have now joined the BJP.
What has truly altered Kerala’s familiar bipolar contest is the rise of the NDA as a third force. Its vote share has surged from around five per cent a decade ago to nearly 20 per cent in the last Lok Sabha election, even topping the poll in about ten Assembly segments, including some traditional Left strongholds. Though its seat tally remains modest and its votes dipped in the local bodies poll, the NDA’s real impact lies in who it hurts more. Earlier, the division of anti-Left votes benefited the LDF. But as the NDA’s vote share crosses a critical threshold, it appears increasingly to be eating into the Left’s base—particularly among sections of the Ezhava community, long considered the CPI(M)’s backbone.
Yet, writing off the LDF would be premature. Most surveys predict a close contest, with only a marginal edge for the UDF. The LDF continues to foreground its record in infrastructure, welfare expansion, and cleaner governance. Vijayan’s image as a decisive – if authoritarian – leader still commands significant support, even beyond party lines, in an era marked by a global fascination with strong and populist “supreme leaders”.
The Opposition, meanwhile, is hardly united. Leadership ambitions within the Congress – from VD Satheesan to Ramesh Chennithala – have triggered factional tensions. Others like Shashi Tharoor and KC Venugopal have publicly distanced themselves from the race, but discontent simmers. The rare cohesion and unity seen in Congress during the polls to the Lok Sabha and Local bodies, gave way to open schism and squabbles which prolonged the finalisation of assembly candidates.
The NDA too faces serious troubles like internal dissent, its failure to woo Christians and the Union government's neglect of Kerala’s development needs.
In the end, all eyes remain on Vijayan—a man whose life story reads like a parable of survival. The youngest of three surviving children in a toddy-tapper’s family that lost eleven siblings in infancy, he dropped out of school in Class V to work as a beedi roller. A chance intervention by his employer and the insistence of a teacher sent him back to school, eventually making him the first graduate in his locality. He told Mohanlal how his pet dog once saved him from a highly venomous snake during his childhood.
Vijayan came of age amid the violent political and communal clashes of Kannur in the 1960s, leading CPI(M) cadres in defence of Muslim communities during one of Kerala's rare Hindu-Musilm riots in Thalassery in 1971. He was an accused in one of the earliest political assassination cases in Kannur, which later came to be known as Kerala's “killing fields”, but acquitted subsequently for want of evidence. The youngest legislator at 25, he was arrested during the Emergency and brutally tortured. But having won again in 1977, he returned to the Assembly to hold up his blood-stained shirt in defiance of the regime led by Congress’s K Karunakaran, the feared Home Minister during the Emergency.
From there, his ascent was steady: six-time legislator, minister, longest-serving party secretary, and eventually Chief Minister—after decisively outmanoeuvring his rival VS Achuthanandan in a bitter factional struggle. In the process, Vijayan also became the first Communist leader to be accused of serious graft and nepotism, although nothing has been proved to date. Though he was acquitted by the courts in the corruption case related to the award of a multi-crore contract to the Canadian company SNC Lavalin while he was the state Power Minister in 1996, the case continues to linger in the Supreme Court.
“I have been targeted only because I hold an important position in my party. It doesn't have a personal angle, and I don't have any personal grudge against them. I am fully convinced that I have never done anything wrong in life,” Vijayan told Mohanlal. He also revealed that, except for his party to which he completely submitted himself, he feared nothing in the world.
So will he be the Chief Minister for the third time? “That is my party alone to decide”, insists Vijayan. Today, even within the Left, some argue that KK Shailaja – former Health Minister celebrated as the “Corona slayer” – should become Kerala’s first woman Chief Minister if the LDF wins. But such a transition seems unlikely unless Vijayan himself wills it. And he is not known to yield power easily.
Yet, as Mohanlal discovered at the end of their conversation, Vijayan can still surprise. Asked, almost playfully, to sing a song for him, the avowed atheist instead recited from memory a Sanskrit verse from the Upanishads—on the futility of searching for God outside when He resides within.
The coming election is not just about power in Kerala, but about the survival and reinvention of the Indian Left through Pinarayi Vijayan.
The author is former Editor, Asianet News. Views expressed are the author’s own