“Step aside, please, for the sake of change”: this is the call of the liberal intelligentsia in Kerala to the ruling CPI(M) on the eve of the state legislature elections expected this April. It is a strange chargesheet of liberal opinion because there are no real charges in it, except an invocation of mattam, or the principle of ‘change’ that a third term of the Left Democratic Front, it is argued, will surely violate.
Five years ago, similar sentiments were expressed by critics regarding the unprecedented re-election of the Left Front in Kerala, which we have previously discussed through the conceptual lens of ‘alternation and alternative’ in democratic politics. But this time around, it is not just the critics of the Left who, for obvious reasons, are cautioning against the corrosive effects of too long a possession of power. Now, they are joined by voices that belong, broadly, to the Left itself. This includes stalwarts of Malayalam literature like poet K Sachidanandan, who has brought to the table western thinkers like French political philosopher Jacques Rancière to make the case for change.
And, once again, in order to evaluate the merit of this aversion to governmental continuity in Kerala, we must ask whether this is more than an abstract commitment to the principle of alternation. Do these alternations actually help anyone? Does the principle of alternation by itself offer any way out of the crisis of liberal democracy unfolding not just in India but across the world? Or is it primarily a moral call for eschewing arrogance, with a smattering of Western political theory?
For the Indian Left, the biggest cautionary tale is the West Bengal experience where local party elite, especially in rural Bengal, turned into para-State figures exerting dominance over the very peasantry that once formed its bedrock of support. Land reforms and the panchayat system had functioned as catalysts of democratic empowerment for Bengal’s rural population for a considerable time since the Left Front was voted to power in 1977, but over time, unhindered power had led to the entrenchment of a ‘party-society’ that increasingly became less about reflecting the aspirations of the people and more about maintaining control over local institutions and society. The Left Front has been thrown out of power in Bengal, but the ‘party-society’ endures, except it is now helmed by the local elites of the ruling Trinamool Congress Party.
But a mechanical reading of this experience as the fate of Left politics everywhere runs the risk of being ahistorical. It ignores the fundamental differences in the structures of social life that sets these two states apart. For instance, the rapidly urbanising Kerala countryside has very little in common with rural West Bengal, not to speak of the significant differences in class structure and agrarian political economy. But from the perspective of an idealistic, and perhaps even moralistic, view of politics, these differences of history, political economy, and cultural life can all be set aside, and the Kerala Left may be asked to step aside for its own good regardless of whether they have attempted to learn lessons from their Bengali comrades’ errors.
It is also instructive to make the concrete implications of this abstraction clear by both widening our analysis and introducing a comparative dimension, as it were, from the other side of the political spectrum. Let us ask whether the Conservative Party in the UK would wistfully reflect on their 18 years of rule (1979–97) as regretfully short of alternations. Without that period of uninterrupted rule, would it have been possible for the conservative Tories to defeat the unions, deindustrialise vast swathes of the north, and bring about sweeping changes in the UK’s cultural, social, and political life, in what Stuart Hall called “the great right moving show”? Remember, when she was asked what she regarded as her crowning achievement, former British PM Margaret Thatcher responded: Tony Blair and New Labour. Why? Because the man and the party exemplified the fact the Tories had “forced their opponents to change their minds”. Closer to home, does the BJP’s Hindutva politics strike anyone as any the less successful for having dominated contemporary Indian politics in recent years? If politics revolves, in some important way, around advancing one’s own ends at the expense of the goals and aims of one’s opponents, alternation is prima facie a thing to regret.
Remarkable in the Kerala context, if we take this longer view, are the Left’s enormous accomplishments since 1957, despite its short stints in power, facing down hostile national and international polity, including a CIA coup, the Emergency, and a traditional media landscape largely hostile to the Left.
Evaluating just the last 10 years of left rule, Kerala has made large strides in social welfare and public infrastructure possible. This is not in contention, certainly not by the cultural and literary icons raising the alarm against retention of power.
Unlike in many other parts of the country, sending your child to a public school or seeking treatment in a government hospital in Kerala is not seen as the lot of the poor who cannot afford good education and healthcare. Not so long ago, the terms of the debate surrounding public education in Kerala was framed, almost exclusively, by a wider public austerity debate during the reign of previous Congress governments—the discussions festered around the issue of shutting down government schools that were declared ‘not-profitable’.
Therefore, before we are able to evaluate these particular achievements, we need some sense of what forces generated them. After all, they are unlikely to be accidents and so there is probably something distinctive to the Kerala context not being replicated elsewhere. If then, the argument is that these Kerala successes are the result of some agonistic give and take with an opposition broadly committed to the same goals and processes as the Left, then that is the argument to make. If, on inspection, these achievements are, to some significant degree, the result of specific policies and programmes, creatively and patiently executed by a Left making full use of the institutions of the state, in the teeth of both an opposition coalition that is hostile to those aspirations and a Union government systematically withholding the rightful fiscal resources of the state, then that is the case to be answered.
It is important not to mistake productive give and take for ground that is won and then lost through alternation, for successes compromised rather than advanced when power changes hands. In any event, this concrete evaluation of the Left’s battles with Congress are what is at stake, especially with respect to how either party positions itself towards the neo-liberal ‘common sense’ that denies any role for the State in ensuring public goods for the people. Relatedly, it is important not to be scared of the H-word: hegemony as a political goal to which the possession of State power contributes in important, indeed, essential, ways.
KM Seethi is absolutely right when he defines the role of intellectuals in times of crisis as being able to “read the direction of power” rather than “provide embellished impartiality”. One does not have to be an economic determinist to acknowledge the connections between, on the one hand, decades of neo-liberal hegemony, ordinary people’s disaffections with liberal democratic institutions and their personnel and, on the other, the rise of right-wing populist and authoritarian regimes across the world.
With this in mind, and to assess the concrete, real-world value of alternation, any assessment of Kerala’s current trajectory must turn on what it was that advanced public goods in one direction rather than another — a Left in power or alternation with the UDF ?
To fetishise democratic alternation as itself a generative force, as a disciplinary mechanism through which political actors can be taught humility with respect to ends they wish to advance, is to not just abandon this kind of concrete analysis for abstraction, but forestalls the very possibility that a new hegemonic project is what our present moment requires.
Evidence of this fetish for alternation, and the neglect of the hegemonic dimensions of politics, is apparent in Satchidanandan’s invocation of Jacques Ranciere’s post-Marxist political philosophy. Ranciere’s vision of politics is, among other things, concerned with the disruptive potential of political activity, i.e. that which “makes visible what had no business being seen”. In his view, activity counts as properly political only when it disturbs what he calls the ‘police order,’ i.e. that which is “visible and sayable”. To be sure, politics can be disruptive. To its credit, Ranciere’s formulation draws attention to the constructed and contingent quality of what we take to be the normal order of things, and the possibility that improving that order will require robust forms of challenge.
But this remains an abstract mode of analysis, privileging spontaneity and the spectacular over the patient work of organisation and legislation. The ‘police order’, though not political in Ranciere's views, is also that set of practices, structures, roles, and institutions that frame the lives of ordinary people. To commit to never-ending disruption as the modus operandi is, at best, infantile, and at worst, nonsensical.
And so, once again, the correction is to offer up a more concrete analysis of reality. One must ask what kind of politics can most effectively resist authoritarian populists’ methodical capture of the Indian State and society. Does this call for a mode of resistance that is reliant on the spontaneous making visible of social heterogeneity? Is it a project that can be effectively countered by alternations at the state levels of government? Or, is it at least possible that the Left should take a leaf out of the other side’s playbook, orienting themselves to the tasks of a more patient hegemonic politics, in which the improvements of these much maligned, so-called ‘police orders’, is the order of the day?
From the CPIM’s beginnings in Kerala, through the dismissal of the first ministry to their radical commitment to decentralised, local democracy as evidenced by the People’s Planning Campaign in 1996, and their world-leading response to COVID-19 pandemic, the Left’s approach has been characterised, above all, by patience and a sensible adjudication of the limits and restrictions of parliamentary politics to advance their ends. There may be any number of criticisms that can be levelled against specific Left governments, including the current one led by Pinarayi Vijayan, but a simple attribution of arrogance does not cut it.
Moreover, Ranciere himself (in 2005) later argued that it is the “social power of wealth [that] no longer tolerates any limits on its growth” – especially such limits as are generated by a popular will – that is the most dangerous enemy of democracy. This is the dominant logic of the neo-liberal age — the totalising reduction of the domains of public life to terrains for expert intervention and technocratic logic and the elimination of the corrupting forces of democratic pressure.
For all we know, Kerala may return to its default mode of electing the opposition to power, turning back to its famed anti-incumbent propensity that was broken with the re-election of the Left Democratic Front in 2020. The Kerala electorate is defined by a certain mercurial character that makes predictions impossible — the Left was roundly defeated in the 2024 parliamentary elections, and the Congress-led United Democratic Front won decisively in the recently concluded Kerala local body elections.
But whether the Left returns to power or not in the upcoming assembly elections, how we evaluate either outcome will have to be grounded in an analysis that goes deeper than idealistic allusions to the benefits of ‘change’.
Lipin Ram works at the intersections of social-anthropology and political theory. He researches the everyday meanings of democratic politics, the linkages between demography and democracy, and the uses of memory for political life.
David Jenkins is a British political theorist and lecturer currently based in New Zealand. He has published work on populism, housing, urban political theory, and the end of the world.
Views expressed are the authors' own.