The first two, in particular: the CPM riding with Madhani while its embarrassed partners vocally disowned him, and General Secretary Prakash Karat struggling to deny any truck with him while his state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan openly shared campaign stage with the same man, backfired badly. A substantial chunk of agonised VS Achuthanandan loyalists and hardliners apart, it also substantially eroded a big traditional Left bank: Lower middle class Hindus, chiefly the Ezhavas and  Nairs, who had stood by the Left in too many parts. Steamrolling over anxieties even among the core cadre over open dalliance with a senior saffron leader who showed no signs of gravitating from Right to Left, was no solution, either.

All of it had further catalysed the barely covert inner polarisation that the Pinarayi Vijayan-VS Achuthanandan turf war in the CPM, into near-open dissidence. Even in Kannur, the CPM’s best fortress where the party itself was born; in Vatakara, its bastion; in Kozhikode, Palakkad and elsewhere. The Left rout in all these constituencies this poll, (it barely scraped through in Palakkad) were no big surprise.

If the Left could carry a good chunk of the fragmented Christian and Muslim sections in the last Lok sabha and Assembly polls, it largely failed this time. Christian sections, egged on by an unceasing barrage of pastoral letters read out in churches all over after the Left Government moves on every issue that could pinch it from running of self-financing colleges to “subverting of church bodies”,  moved perceptibly to the Congress-led camp. Similarly, too many Muslim bodies, especially in north Kerala, had enough peeves of their own to move away too, and Madhani’s image and his rabble-rousing for the Left only made them drift farther.

... contd.