“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........

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