The left approach to social diversity: How the Communist Party interacted with Kerala’s social landscape?

Abstract

This article attempts to explain how the parliamentary left interacted with the social terrain of Kerala, which has a strong presence of organized social pressure groups. Kerala has a unique political landscape where radical left politics coexist with reactionary community forces. The early twentieth-century social reform movement has the credit of producing two parallel but antagonistic traditions that influenced modern Kerala politics more or less equally. The scholars have been polarised into two groups to explain what dominates Kerala politics, class, or caste. This work explicates these complexities by analyzing how the Communist Party engaged with the communities with the help of the literature on the democratic approach to social diversity. It tracks the evolution of the communist movement in Kerala in establishing and broadening its social base. It employs primary and secondary resources to examine the subject in question thoroughly. The primary resources used in the article are interviews with significant party leaders and ideologues. In doing so, this work argues that the Communist Party carefully balanced the ideological commitment to an integrationist approach to diversity on the one hand and a practical requirement for social accommodation and recognition on the other hand.

Keywords:

• Communist Party
• Community
• Kerala
• Caste
• Integration
• Accommodation

1. Introduction

In a recent report, the Washington Post called Kerala “One of the few places where a communist can still dream” (Noack, 2017, October 27). The communism has a significant presence in Kerala’s social and political landscape. The Party has been routinely voted to power and has led many historic popular mobilizations. A question that hunts the research community is what contributes to the persistence of the left power in Kerala society and politics. This article hints at one of the significant causes of the sustained political salience of the left in Kerala by dealing with a crucial factor, the party’s engagement with the social milieu. Kerala has a severely fragmented social structure with multiple divisions based on religion, caste, sub-caste, and region. Significantly, the caste/community establishments were able to provide substantial organizational envelopments to social identities and form political parties. In the words of a Communist Party leader, two streams of political traditions are active in Kerala politics: radical left politics and reactionary community forces (Vijayaraghavan, 2021). The parliamentary left could not ignore the other strand for electoral reasons. This work analyzes the left’s engagement with the reactionary social terrain of Kerala by tracking the two stages of the evolution of the Communist Party: the development of the social base and party expansion to new groups. It primarily focuses on how the Communist Party negotiated the class ideology for the practical requirement of alliance building. It uses the literature on democratic engagement with diversity to comprehend how the integrationist class ideology engaged with political accommodation. For primary data, this work has complemented the interviews with party leaders and experts in the field carried out by the author and available online.

2. Approaches to diversity, Kerala politics, and Communist Party

This work focuses on how the Communist Party interacted with the fragmented social structure of Kerala. In order to put a rationale for the current exercise, it is highly imperative to link the political experiments of the left in Kerala with the larger literature on the democratic approach to social diversity. Democratic societies generally deal with diversity in two forms: integration or accommodation. The integration advocates give primacy to the principles of single citizenship and equality before the law to ensure the working of society without discrimination between different sections of the people. The classic examples of integrationists are republicans, liberals, and socialists (McGarry et al., 2008, p. 41). The proponents of integrationism recognize social identities only in the private realm, not in public. On the other, accommodation is a political idea that stands for the equal recognition of all social identities in the public and private world. Accommodationism leaves a more prominent public space for ethnic communities to express their culture and identity and protects against majoritarian interventions. The leading theories of accommodation are consociationalism, centripetalism, and multiculturalism. The left parties are generally the bandwagon of an integrational approach to social diversity for their ideological commitment to class politics. The left intelligentsia perceives reference to identities other than the class as perforating the development of a proper class struggle. However, electoral politics has forced left parties to borrow accommodation practices and recognition of social identities. The Communist Party in Kerala has been integrationist in ideology but imbibed some accommodation strategies for practical reasons.

Kerala has an idiosyncratic tradition of co-existence among the world’s three largest religions, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, with peace and tranquillity (Anderson, 2013; Horowitz, 1993; Meyer & Brysac, 2011; Wilkinson, 2000). In the ELF Index for religion, the most divisive identity in the subcontinent, Kerala secured the highest score among Indian states (Wilkinson, 2008, p. 284). The caste system further divides the Hindus into numerous communities (Nair, 1976). The caste structure in Kerala is significantly deviant from the general Indian system: among the four Varna categories, “Kshatriyas were rare and Vaisyas non-existent.” After the Namboodiris (the Brahmins) in the caste hierarchy, the Nairs occupied the second position filling the vacuum of the Kshatriyas. The Ezhavas are below the Nairs, and slave castes are at the bottom. The practices of untouchability and unapproachability make Kerala’s caste hierarchy one of the most oppressive social systems on the planet (Kurien, 1994, p. 392). Remarkably, the cleavages in the social structure have tremendously impacted the parties and the party system.

In 1957, Kerala became the second democratic polity on the earth to elect a Communist Party to power after the San Marino Island of Italy; unlike other Indian states with communist influences, West Bengal (Bhattacharyya, 2010) and Tripura (Bijukumar, 2019), the power sustained here for an extended time. The extraordinary electoral success of the Communist Party and the popularity of communism attracted international scholars to study Kerala, primarily to understand the “peaceful transition to communism” in an Indian state. They widely discussed the topics that include, but are not limited to, the influence of social reform movements, the factionalism in the Indian National Congress (INC alternatively, Congress Party) and its decline, anti-caste and agrarian movements, the influence of communalism in state politics, and the electoral success of the left (Chakrabarty, 2014; Fic, 1970; Franke & Chasin, 1994, Hardgrave, 1970; Jeffrey, 1992; Nossiter, 1982; Pulickaparampil, 1963; Sandbrook et al., 2007; Singh, 2011; Williams, 2008).

The early literature on the rise of the Communist Party in Kerala politics gave two contradictory perspectives. First, a group of literature emphasized how a vibrant communist movement based in the lower class and agrarian struggles dismissed the moribund Congress Party in the very first election in Kerala, unimaginable in any Indian state then. In subsequent years, a line of scholarships thronged up to support the argument highlighting how the left movement encouraged participatory democracy, women empowerment, and literacy movement (Harriss & Törnquist, 2015; Heller & Isaac, 2005; Tharakan, 1998). The second strand of scholarship de-emphasized the class interpretation of the rise of communism in Kerala to highlight the congruence of caste/community sentiments and the party politics in the state (Fic, 1970; Kumar, 1984). The American political scientist Victor M Fic, a critic of the left, ferociously termed the rise of communism in Kerala as the outcome of manipulation done by the party in the community arithmetic of the state (Fic, 1970, pp. 5–7). Notably, these stands did not wholly eclipse the other: they recognize the other side of the argument even as they strenuously establish their point. For instance, Nossiter, who correlated the rise of Marxism with class politics, accepted the other side, the influence of the caste and community in state politics (Gough, 1965). A perplexing issue for a student of Kerala politics is that class here is often manifested in the caste form, and there is much convergence between the caste and class hierarchies. The engagement of the Communist Party with social groups also confuses observers between political accommodation and brazen communalism. It is to explicate these contradictions that this work tries.

3. The social base of the Communist Party

The growth of the Communist Party from a trifling caucus of radicals within the nationalist movement to the leadership role of the left coalition governments in post-independent Kerala underscores the evolution of left politics in the state. A path-breaking development in Kerala’s left history was the formation of the Left Democratic Front (LDF) close to 1980, a pre-electoral alliance of left and democratic parties under the leadership of the CPM and CPI, who reconciled after their decade-old political rivalry. During the same period, Congress machinated an alliance opposite to the left called the United Democratic Front (UDF). The LDF ruled the state for 20 years in a span period between 1980 and 2021 and played the role of active opposition as a shadow cabinet when not in power. The two communist parties were central to the running of the LDF. In contrast, other parties, including socialist offshoots, remained at the edge, only to switch between the two political alliances according to the political opportunity structure. Apart from the two communist parties, no political party has been uninterruptedly glued with the LDF since 1980. Even as the two communist parties parted to choose divergent political paths in 1964, partly due to ideological reasons and mainly for practical purposes, their ideological manoeuvring contributed to the development of left rationality to a political alliance from 1980, when both formally resumed their bonhomie. Thus, this part relooks to the development of the Communist Party from the vantage point of forming the social base and negotiating with socio-ethnic identities to track the development of the left alliance.

The trajectory of the Kerala branch of the Communist Party in the colonial period was unique within the Indian left because its leadership nurtured a systemic plan to broaden the party’s social base with a distinct approach. Realizing the administrative hostility to a communist bloc in British India, the left radicals in the state formed part of the Congress Socialist Party (CSP), the official unit of socialist reformers within the INC. When five radical left leaders met in 1937 at Calicut to form the Communist Party, they decided to keep their ideological identity secret to win a base inside the socialist group of the INC (Damodaran, 1977, p. 36). Whereas the CSP and CPI propounded similar ideological positions on feudalism and capitalism, the former had the advantage of legality from the British Government as an internal organization of the INC, which has been a legal organization in British India except for a few times. While the communist organizations outside the mainstream political party faced repression for their militant stands, the CSP had working immunity of associating with the INC, with which the British government negotiated constitutional reforms (Desai, 2007, p. 80). Finally, in 1939, a CSP meeting held at Malabar resolved to convert it into a unit of the Communist Party of India (CPI) as a visible organization (Isaac, 1986, p. 60). The strategy helped the Kerala unit of the Communist Party gain a solid base of trade unions, agrarians, and social reformers.

The mobilizations of the communists in the 1930s roughly comprise three categories of activities. First, it organized the subaltern classes through trade unions and peasant movements against capitalists and landlords who had closer affinities with the ruling dispensations.¹ To a great extent, class mobilization is a helping factor in arresting the social polarization intensified by the activities of ethnic organizations that emphasize caste/religious exclusivity (Andeweg, 2000, p. 509). Second, the CSP leaders were proactively involved in general political movements like anti-colonial struggles and the united Kerala movement, which helped them build a large mass base for the party (Isaac & Tharakan, 1986). Under the communist-CSP leadership, social equality became an integral goal of anti-colonial movements in Kerala, unlike in other places in India. Third, propelling the reformist legacy of the social reform movements of the first half of the twentieth century in Kerala, the communist leaders adopted a radical approach to social questions by publicly renouncing the obscurantist cultural practices and nourishing the anti-caste spirit in political activities (Jeffrey, 1992; Menon, 1994). Anti-caste morale was instrumental in the class struggle that the upper caste-dominated CSP leadership required to eradicate the caste barriers to communicate with their fellow lower caste followers (Desai, 2007, p. 84). When the caste reform movements and took a conservative turn after a saturation point, the Communist Party undertook the task of reform as part of the party program.

The social base of communism in Kerala owes much to its social origin. The social reform movements of the early twentieth century provided fertile ground for radical reformers to organize the Communist Party around workers, peasants, and students into one coherent movement. The left parties carried forward the progressive elements of reform movements which had degenerated into conservative communal brigades by the last parts of colonial Kerala (Isaac & Kumar, 1991, p. 2693). The radical current was uneven among different religious groups: while the reform movements in Hindu caste groups challenged the social institutions of caste and religion, those trends among Muslims and Christians were relatively weak (ibid, p. 2695). Incidentally, the Hindu caste organizations which served exclusively for their fellow brethren were the working platforms of the early communist leaders, including E. M. S. Namboodiripad, M. N. Govindan Nair, and K.R. Gouri, in the absence of secular organizations in Travancore (Harriss & Törnquist, 2015, p. 10). As the radical bands of caste reform movements formed the crux of post-independent progressive politics, the Communist Party unsurprisingly became a Hindu-dominated political party with minimal presence of people from religious minorities. Hindus constitute around 90% of the party membership and office bearers of different wings affiliated to it, even as minorities have a population share of around 45% of the state population (Bidwai, 2015, p. 254).

A survey of early communist leaders’ social profiles indicates that the upper caste Hindus had an advantage in the party leadership and representations over the lower castes, which constituted the majority of the rank and file. In addition, a slew of lower classes in higher castes were glued to the Marxist ideology as their economic interests were incongruent with the party program. One explanation for the over-representation of Hindus in the party is the catastrophic impact of the early twentieth-century reform movements on the social institutions of caste and religion that persuaded the upper caste and the lower caste Hindus to embrace a radical idea like Marxism for two different reasons: the destruction of matrilineal system among upper castes and de-legitimization of caste system among lower castes (Jeffrey, 1978). In Malabar, centuries-old caste ritualistic associations controlled by the dominant families helped develop political organizations in the region. When the Communist Party was formed, most members joined it (Kurup, 1988, p. 38). The upper-caste Hindus who had the social and economic privileges to acquire modern education had the upper hand over the lower-caste comrades in providing leadership to the vanguard party, which otherwise stood for the abolition of capital and landlordism. The upper caste CSP leaders used their privileged caste/class positions to fight against the institutions of caste/class structure (Devika, 2010, p. 806).

The lower castes – the Ezhavas and Scheduled Castes (SC) – constituted the core social base of the Communist Party since the early phases, ostensibly because this segment accounted for the significant portion of the working class in the state, placed at the receiving end of the caste and class hierarchy. The social reform organizations, particularly in lower castes, created two diametrically opposite traditions: a stream that radically interpreted the reformist values of Sree Narayana Guru and others to connect the anti-caste movement with the more extensive political mobilization; and the other stream subscribing to a conservative interpretation to end up in community exclusivism (Isaac & Tharakan, 1986). Influenced by the radical stream, the Ezhava lower class, which constituted the best part of the working population, was actively involved in the anti-caste movements bridging the caste and class mobilizations (Isaac, 1985). Jeffrey quotes the slogans of a strike in Alleppy in 1933- “Destroy the Nayar rule” and “Destroy capitalism,” suggesting the complex understanding of the people about the struggle against caste and class (Jeffrey, 1978, p. 84). Unlike the Communist Party branches in the rest of India, the Kerala unit vigorously mobilized the people against untouchability and caste discrimination by leading numerous campaigns and strikes in various parts of the state. Consequently, since the Communist Party contested elections, the lower caste Ezhavas and SC communities have been the party’s core vote base.

The Communist Party’s failure to make inroads among Muslims and Christians is evident. The post-election sample surveys held by the Centre for the Study of the Developing Societies (CSDS)-New Delhi in the 2011 and 2016 Assembly Elections illustrate that the left alliance commanded only 25% to 35% votes of both religious minorities even after forming electoral alliances with parties based on minority groups (Prabhash & Ibrahim, 2017). E. M. S. Namboodiripad stated in the 1990s, “Looking back, I feel one of our key failures has been in understanding issues connected with religious minorities in Kerala … Muslims and Christians are under the predominant influence of religion-based leaders, that is, of the Muslim League and the Church.”² One explanation is that the impacts of social reform were relatively weak among minorities compared with the Hindu castes in which the reform movements generated a radical generation that eventually associated with the left politics (Isaac & Kumar, 1991, p. 2695). As communities outside the Hindu four-fold of chaturvarnya, the religious minorities had a different social environment that primarily demanded an external reform to rework the relationship with the state than internal reform. In addition, both Semitic religions had the advantage of a pre-existing network of faith-based networks that helped develop a modern community. Consequently, the traditional leadership had an unwavering role over the community organizations and political decisions of the minority religious groups, and the dominant minority establishments have been antagonistic to the communist parties.

On objective accounts, Mappila Muslims of Malabar, predominantly agricultural laborers in the colonial period, should have chosen communism or left politics. The ransacked Mappilas, who organized a systemic armed rebellion against the Hindu landlords and the British state, had every reason to be part of a working-class movement but became the social base of the Muslim League, which was a party led by feudal Muslims. The left parties had made strenuous efforts to draw Mappilas to their fold which included the endorsement of Mohammed Abdur Rahiman to the Madras legislative assembly in 1937, interpretation of the Mappila Rebellion of 1921 as anti-colonial Malabar Revolt, and recognition of Mappilas as “backward class” further giving 10% reservations in government jobs (Jeffrey, 1992, pp. 112–16). The communist governments in post-independence Kerala took policy measures to protect the interest of Muslim minorities, including creating a Muslim-majority district of Malappuram amid protests from the right-wing Hindus and establishing the Calicut University in the Malabar region. Similarly, the Communist Party supported the cause of Christian establishments on various occasions, like support to the 1930s “abstention movement” that sought the proportional distribution of government offices; and the cause of Christian churches against Travancore Dewan’s move to take over the Church-run schools (Ouwekerk, 1994, p. 233). The party extended support to the anti-eviction movement of the Christian community in the 1960s against the governmental decision to evict migrant farmers in hill areas (Devika & Varghese, 2011, p. 123). However, both minority religious groups provided flesh and blood to the UDF against the Communist Party.

In the assembly elections of 1957 and 1960, in which the CPI contested without allying with any parties, the following patterns emerged: the party performed well in Hindu majority districts; it did poorly in districts of Kottayam, Ernakulam, and Kozhikode, where the religious minorities have decisive influence; and the party got better results in places where the SC and the lower caste Ezhavas had a high presence in contrast with places of the upper caste Nair domination, where the INC made prominently (Nossiter, 1982, pp. 123–128). However, it does not lead us to conclude that there was a clear caste/community polarization in the voting pattern. Even though more than 90% of successful candidates in the CPI panel were Hindus, the party’s vote share between 38 and 40 indicates that a considerable portion of minorities may also have voted for the party. Ground observation made by a scholar in the 1960s reveals a similar story: a section of property-less Muslims and Christians has also joined the rank of the Communist Party, discarding the ultimatum of religious heads (Gough, 1965). Nevertheless, the Muslim and Christian psyche has been against the left politics to throwing their weight behind the INC-led alliances.

The post-1980 elections, when the communist parties fought the race in collaboration with numerous political parties, including the confessional parties based on minority groups, followed a trend similar to the forgone one. The social base of the front remained relatively the same from the early times, albeit it has made some inroads into communities that were not traditionally its support base. For instance, a post-poll sample survey held in Kerala after the 2011 Assembly Election, in which the LDF narrowly lost to the UDF, shows the following patterns: the lower castes, the Ezhavas, and the Hindu backward castes constitute more than 50% of the total votes polled to the LDF; Nair votes are almost equally distributed between both fronts, and more than 60% of the Muslims and Christians preferred the UDF over the LDF, clearly signaling the weakened position of the Left among minorities (Prabhash & Ibrahim, 2017). However, a noteworthy point from the recent electoral analysis sheds light on the improved account of the left front among upper-caste Hindus and minorities, perhaps as a reflection of the electoral arrangement the party has made with minor political parties.

4. Expansion and accommodation

The first two elections, held after the formation of united Kerala in 1956, highlighted the strength and the weakness of the Communist Party in electoral politics: in terms of strength, against all predictions, the party, with the support of a few independent candidates wrested power in 1957, marking it the first electoral set back to the grand old Congress Party in an assembly election in post-independent India; and on the weakness side, the subsequent election proved that own vote base of the party that constituted a percentage share between 35 and 40 is not sufficient to grab majority seats to form the government, particularly after all non-communist parties, and established interests wowed to dethrone the left. Two more political developments in the 1960s compounded the left vulnerability. First, the bitter enemy Congress Party, which had a credible record of keeping communal forces at bay, pacified the ideological position to make electoral understandings with two communal parties – the Muslim League and Kerala Congress. Second, the fissure in the Communist Party in 1964 over ideological questions exasperated the crisis by disintegrating the electoral base of the left, necessitating an urgent political makeover. After the split, the significant Communist Party, CPM, commanded a vote percentage below 30,³ suggesting a desperate need for alignment with other parties to impact elections.

The first set of expansion strategies focused on uniting all forces based on the left-liberal ideology and popularizing the theme of class struggle and agrarian questions to the masses to smoothen the transition to socialism. The early Marxist ideologues conceived the communist governments in Kerala and West Bengal as instruments of struggle at the hands of the people rather than a government with the power to transform the people’s material life. The CPM Central Committee observed in 1967, ”Our Party’s participation in such Governments is one specific form of struggle to win more and more people and more and more allies … in the struggle for the cause of People’s Democracy and at a later stage for socialism.”⁴ In this context, analyzing two internal debates within the Communist Party on allying with others is highly relevant precisely, because they help us understand the gravity of the issue to the cadre-based party ideologically and tactically when constructing political friendships with other parties. These debates, incidentally, escalated to make deep ruptures within the party, causing two severe splits. First, in 1964, the party leadership polarized on a tactical line in parliamentary politics visa-a-vies the Indian bourgeois party-Congress, tearing the party into two camps. The official line argued for having an electoral understanding with the progressive elements of the bourgeois party against the reactionaries. In contrast, the rebel camp, which constituted the majority of the party members, voiced for alignment with smaller parties against Congress. The debate resulted in the formation of the CPM as a rebel party from the CPI, taking away the majority of the party support base in party strongholds. Interestingly, the poor peasantry and agricultural laborers went with the CPM, while the trade union and intellectual class supported the CPI (Rodrigues, 2006, p. 214).

The second primary debate on alliance formation happened in the 1980s when an influential group within the party introduced an ’alternative political line’ proposing to ally with the Muslim League and Kerala Congress, two parties catering to the Muslims and Christians exclusively, to defeat the Congress. M. V. Raghavan explains, “The context of the Alternative line is this: we said that the Muslim League and Kerala Congress parties need not be stamped as communal and isolated like the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). They are parties trying for minority rights. Therefore, they need not be isolated. We can collaborate with them to strengthen the alliance (Raghavan, 2014).” Eminent party leaders of the time included Puthalath Narayan, Shivadasa Menon, Dakshinamoorty, Chakrapani, Vaikom Viswan, Moosankutty, and P.V. Kunhikannan signed the document along with M. V. Raghavan, who crafted and maneuvered the idea. However, the central committee rejected the proposal leading to a split in the party again on an ideological ground to create the Communist Marxist Party (CMP), which later became part of the UDF.

Forming the Left Democratic Front (LDF) in 1980 was a pivotal step in uniting the left-leaning parties under a common political platform based on a minimum program. In 1979, the iconic communist leaders from both communist parties, CPM and CPI, crafted a formula of reconciliation to work together against the bête noire Congress Party, setting aside their years-old bitter enmity and open confrontation. They adopted a realistic approach by uniting maximum parties with a minimum program to capture power. Matters related to admitting political parties with non-sectarian ideology only justified the communist stand of accommodating the maximum number of people and parties towards the movement for socialism. Political parties who trace their origin to the socialist block in the nationalist movement and later in the Congress Party were welcome to the left block, as they shared the common vision of establishing a socialist democracy through peaceful means. They include the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), the Congress Socialist (ICS), the Janata Dal, the Congress (Secular), and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). Nonetheless, these parties never locked in the LDF but oscillated between the two alliances on political advantages.

The second expansion category was relatively tedious as it involved reaching out to sections beyond the left circle but qualified ”democratic force” without open allegiance to anti-secular politics (Communist Party of India (Marxist), 2002). The left leadership gave broader meaning to the “democratic” to include all those parties willing to cooperate with the front on a minimum program following a basic set of disciplines. A comment by A. Vijayaraghavan, the former convenor of the LDF and a CPM Politburo member, is noteworthy, ‘Communists intend to unite all forces except the extreme right. A society like ours, the uniqueness of which is those common factors controlling it, in communist language, is a bourgeois society. There the opponent will try to isolate communism. Rather than self-isolate, the left tries to prevent all forms of isolation. The left democratic front includes both the left and non-left democratic forces: a democratic aspect and a left aspect. That does not mean the left has no democratic value. Generally, the left approach cooperates with all democratic forces outside the left circle against the right’ (Vijayaraghavan, 2021). The mood of the left since the 1960s has been that anyone is welcome to the front as long as agreeing to follow the basic secular principles and liberal politics. Parties of all hues, from left radicals to right communitarians, used the option to join the LDF under the pretext of joining the democratic coalition against the Congress-led ”evil alliance.”

As centripetal scholars advocate, the optimal electoral strategy for parties under political uncertainties is to reach out to parties and sections of people beyond their base by moderating policies and ideologies (Reilly, 2018). There are, thus, two primary situational incentives for the Communist Party to weld solidarity beyond the traditional base: the ideology of class struggle and ambitions of winning power. After forming left alliances, particularly after 1982, one could see the moderation of left political appeals, which often drew flak as the de-radicalization of left politics (Josukutty, 2019).

The decision to extend tie-ups with the confessionalparties based on minorities was strategically vital and ideologically more complex for communist parties.⁵Both the communist parties had a clear position concerning the Muslim League and the Kerala Congress, representing sectarian interests. All India Congress of the CPI held in Bombay in 1964 declared, ”The Kerala Congress and theMuslim League … had always been very reactionary … That is why the Kerala state council of the party will have no truck with reactionary communal groups such as the Muslim League and the Kerala Congress.” The CPM’s official voice repeatedly stated that these two parties represent particular interests and are thus bound to be communal (Baby, 2015). From the practical point of view, electoral understanding with these political parties is the easy access to the untapped minority vote base, which constituted around 45% of the total votes. Thus, the left pacified the stand on the Muslim League and the Kerala Congress later. See a statement by a CPM leader.

Kerala Congress and League are community parties and not communal parties. In the Kerala Congress, the church has a direct influence. The Muslim League follows secular policies in their general political activities but does not hesitate to use religious symbols for electoral purposes. We do not hesitate to ally with any of them if they are ready to change their approaches. We are not aligning with the ML at this point because our country’s unique political scenario is that aligning with a party with explicit reference to religion would be a weapon in the hands of the Hindu nationalists. We do not have any distance from the Kerala Congress and have aligned with them on many occasions.

The relationship between the left front and the Muslim League has been ambiguous. There are two sides to the story: one, the ideologically driven Communist Party had limitations to comb friendship with an explicit communal party, and on the other side of the spectrum, the adversary politics of the state forced the party to elope with the League that commands a solid support base among Muslims. In 1967, the CPM legitimized the political identity of the League, which was hitherto an untouchable communal to secular parties, by giving a ministerial berth in the Seven-Party Government (1967–69). The League exuberantly utilized the government offices to weigh its demands, like forming a Muslim-majority district of Malappuram and establishing a university in Malabar, which helped it expand its clout over the Muslims beyondMalabar. The second hangout happened in 1980 when the left front blissfully welcomed the All India Muslim League (AIML), a party formed after splitting the Muslim League without fundamentally changing the ideology. [4] The bondage continued till 1985 when a severe ideological confrontation erupted between the communists and the AIML over the Shah Bano case court rule. After this repercussion, the CPM reiterated that there would be no more stop-over with communal outfits and that communalism of all hues is dangerous.

The year 1995 further exposed the ideological imbroglio of the Communist Party when it chose to weld an off-the-front relationship with the Indian National League (INL), a breakaway faction of the League under its leadership by the national president Ebrahim Suleman Sait. Ironically, the INL flunked out of the League over the latter’s moderate political response to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Uttar Pradesh and the continuation of its relationship with the Congress Party, which arguably abdicated the responsibility to protect the Masjid.⁶ In 2000, before the assembly election, the party leadership further hinted at the willingness to form an electoral tie-up with the League under the smock screen of preventing potential Congress-BJP amity (Prabhash, 2000). However, the proposal did not materialize as the League stuck by the UDF camp, and an influential section of the Communist Party vociferously opposed the move.

The association between the left and the Kerala Congress has been uncut. The left has been shouldering one or the other form of Kerala Congress splinters in elections since 1982, except in the 1987 Assembly Election. The Kerala Congress’s exclusive access to religious heads of the Syrian Catholics and the rich Christian peasantries of central Kerala fetched a modicum of votes to the left in areas where it is traditionally weak. The left dilemma is exposed: when the party ideologues repeatedly stated the party's view on the Kerala Congress as catering exclusively to the Christians, the electoral reality forced the party to ally with it.

The alliance formation of the left is the epitome of what Horowitz, (1985) called the ”vote-pooling”: a mechanism by which the power-seeking political elites enhance their probability of success by clustering votes across party/community lines by making adequate changes in their positions on policy issues. The vote-pooling, an integral component of centripetalism prescribed by scholars to defuse the influence of ethnicity in politics, preconditions inter-community cooperation and ideological moderation. The collaboration of the class-driven Communist Party and the communitarian confessional parties on a minimum program unpretentiously demands both parties to glue to the centre of the table. The policy direction of the left governments since the 1980s marked a rupture from the early left governments: the contentious class issues championed by the left parties, like land reform and the abolition of landlordism, have been institutionalized (Heller, 2000), whereas the left policies do not move against the interest of private managements in educations or the vested community interest (Sunilraj and Heath, 2017, p. 3). On the other end, the communal parties also pacified their appeals and became open to alliances with any parties.⁷  

5. Conclusion

Left parties have an ideological commitment to promote an integrationist approach to diversity. The working-class party cannot condone a situation wherein a comrade represents a particular social group. However, the salience of social identities in politics has forced integrationist parties to rethink their stand to recognize the presence of social groups in the private and public worlds. This article examined how the radical left interacted with Kerala's reactionary social terrain, where the caste/religious communities are organized pressure groups. The social origin of the mainstream politics of Kerala is the early twentieth-century caste/community reform movements which produced two equally significant but diametrically opposite political traditions, radical politics and reactionary community forces. Against this backdrop, the Communist Party mobilized the people through trade unions, peasant organizations, and student unions. The left drew a proportionately higher number of people from Hindus, ostensibly because the social reform movements had a long-lasting impact on Hindus compared to Muslims and Christians. The left’s strategies to reach out to the sections outside its social base, like the religious minorities, did not pay off. The party continues to be dominated by the Hindus.

The left reluctantly recognized the particular demands of community-centric parties like the Muslim League and Kerala Congress to build a broader alliance against the Congress. The party developed an all-encompassing coalition of democratic forces that included parties committed to democratic secular principles to fight against the bourgeois Congress Party. The Communist Party’s ideological orientation to class politics did not impede it from collaborating with parties of established communities based on particular interests. The survival of the left in Kerala greatly owes to how it maneuvered a political strategy to deal with community establishments. What is striking in the left strategy is a constant commitment to an integrational approach to the diversity of establishing a classless society bereft of social divisions and practical compromises to social accommodation.

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Notes

1. For details on the class mobilizations of the Communist Party in Kerala, see (Jeffrey, 1981).

2. EMS Namboodiripad remarked in the Presidential Address, AKG Centre for Research and Studies, International Congress on Kerala Studies (quoted from Prabhash, 2000).

3. In the 1960 assembly election, the united Communist Party (CPI) grabbed 39.14% of the vote share, while the CPM got only 19.87% of polled votes in 1965, after the split.

4. Quote from (Hardgrave, 1970).

5. Confessional parties in Kerala were primarily from the two minority-religious groups. Although Nairs and Ezhavas, two Hindu castes, formed their parties in the 1970s, they did not survive long and hardly considered joining the LDF.

6. E. T. Mohammed Basheer, a former League minister and a mastermind behind the AIML, says that there was no specific condition from the LDF on joining the front. He felt the experience on both fronts was similar (E. T. Mohammed Basheer, interviewed by the author).

7. Paloli Mohammed Kutty, the former LDF convenor, says that Sait met CPIM national secretary Harkishan Singh Surjit and EMS Namboodiripad before forming the INL. The duo agreed with his demand to admit the new party to the LDF. It is said that Surjeet gave the name INL (interview with the author).