Tinkering is not enough— the Left in Kerala may have to do something close to reinventing itself, to survive its near-decimation this Lok Sabha poll. It is no longer just its interminable inner contradictions, or its warlords locked in turf battles, that it needs to deal with. The Left’s very fundamentals were on the dissection table this poll.

It is no coincidence that this followed an inevitable corrosion, eating through almost the entire Left edifice in the state for sometime now. Never before was the Kerala CPM and the Left Front jolted so hard by inner dissent, never had it suffered a crippling credibility crisis of the kind it now faces. The CPI, which was blanked out this poll, is in immediate danger of ceasing to be a national party; the Janata Dal (U) has withdrawn its lone minister from the Left cabinet and technically walked out of the Left camp. The miffed RSP had famously used its clout this poll to get back at Big Brother — and the ragtag bunch at the rump are also far from amused.

The Left had seldom balked at adroit political-ideological somersaults that the CPM prescribed from time to time, right from when politics in Kerala came to be irreversibly divided between the two coalitions; one it led and the other, the Congress. Only, this time it went overboard.

The comic relief it offered apart, the spectacle of the secular Left wagon being pulled this poll by the likes of terror-accused Abdul Nasser Madhani (who is still being probed for other terror links even after his acquittal from the Coimbatore serial blasts case) and his radical PDP, renegade BJP leader Raman Pillai and his Janapaksham and an assortment of radical-conservative outfits, was enough to drive still deeper fissures in the traditional Left fortresses.

... contd.