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UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 CHENNAI 000066 
 
SIPDIS 
 
SENSITIVE 
 
E.O.  12958: N/A 
TAGS: PGOV PTER PHUM IN
SUBJECT: BHARAT BALLOT 09: KERALA CPM STILL FLOUNDERING 
 
REF: A) CHENNAI 037 B) 2008 CHENNAI 32 
 
¶1. (SBU) Summary: Voters in Kerala are increasingly dissatisfied 
with the state's ruling Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) in 
the run-up to the national election.  The Kerala CPM has been 
gripped by a personal dispute between its two senior-most members, 
the Chief Minister and the party chief in the state, devastating the 
party's monolithic image of discipline and unanimity.  Equally 
damaging, the party's attempts to form a "third front" at the 
national level have not resonated with the voters of Kerala.  Our 
contacts concur that the Congress party and its allies stand to 
benefit significantly from CPM's troubles in the state.  End 
Summary. 
 
Election overview 
---------- 
 
¶2. (SBU) Two competing coalitions -- the ruling Left Democratic 
Front (LDF), dominated by the Communist Party of India-Marxist 
(CPM), and the United Democratic Front (UDF), led by the Congress 
party -- rule Kerala's political scene.  The state is an exemplar of 
India's anti-incumbency trend; it has changed hands in almost all 
thirteen state elections in its history.  Most recently the LDF 
ousted the UDF from power in Kerala's 2006 state assembly election; 
the Kerala assembly is not due for another election until 2011. 
 
¶3. (SBU) The state's national representation is historically less 
prone to dramatic power shifts than the state assembly; its Members 
of Parliament have most often been majority UDF.   Nonetheless, in 
the 2004 national election the LDF trounced the Congress party, 
winning 18 of Kerala's 20 parliamentary seats -- a shift owed 
largely to prolonged Congress infighting that voters felt had 
paralyzed the government.  The CPM's prospects for 2009 are, 
however, grim; our contacts all expect the Congress-led UDF to snare 
at least 12 to 15 seats in the upcoming parliamentary elections. 
One of our interlocutors even projected that it will secure 18 
seats. 
 
¶4. (SBU) The dominance of the CPM and Congress in the state is due 
to the broad representation of the state's major castes and 
religious minorities by their two well-entrenched coalitions, which 
provides very little space for new single parties to grow. 
Additionally, the exceptionally high percentage of minorities -- 24 
percent Muslim and 19 percent Christian -- has prevented the Hindu 
nationalist BJP from gaining a foothold. The BJP's greatest success 
in the state was the election of a candidate running as an 
independent; it has never elected even a single BJP representative 
at the national or state level in Kerala. 
 
CPM feud exposes party factions 
---------- 
 
¶5. (SBU) A long-running feud between the CPM's two most senior 
leaders in Kerala, Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan and Secretary 
of the Kerala State Committee Pinarayi Vijayan, reignited in late 
January, exposing a major rift in the party's state leadership.  On 
January 21, India's Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) requested 
permission from the Governor of Kerala to prosecute Vijayan and 
others for alleged corruption in a 1997 deal with the Canadian 
construction firm SNC Lavalin.  Achuthanandan quickly and publicly 
demanded legal action against Vijayan, breaking with the party 
leadership's declaration that the charges were "politically 
motivated" (ref A).  This is not the first quarrel between the two; 
in May 2007 they were both temporarily suspended from the Politburo 
-- the party's highest decision-making body -- for a public war of 
words that "violated the norms of the party." 
 
¶6. (SBU) Achuthanandan's attendance at a CPM rally for Vijayan on 
February 25 was considered by some local media to be an indication 
that the party had brought him into line.  At that rally, however, 
Achuthanandan failed to publicly state his support of Vijayan, 
suggesting that the rivalry between the two is far from over. 
 
¶7. (SBU) Our contacts are convinced that the dispute is hurting the 
CPM with the voters.  Gowridasan Nair, Special Correspondent for The 
Hindu and a close follower of the CPM, opined that while the 
emergence of the CBI probe before the national election was 
unsurprising -- "such things are often brought out in election 
 
CHENNAI 00000066  002 OF 003 
 
 
season" -- the publicity of the dispute between the chief minister 
and Vijayan was unusual.  Nair said strong party discipline and a 
singular collective message are central CPM values and that such an 
extended public row within the party's leadership could only 
disillusion its supporters.  With roughly two months until the 
national election, the CPM in Kerala will try to move beyond the 
dispute, though the Congress party is unlikely to let the CPM forget 
the SNC Lavalin case. 
 
Weak "Third Front" further harms flailing CPM's prospects 
---------- 
 
¶8. (SBU) The CPM has had a tough year beyond the 
Vijayan-Achuthanandan corruption fight.  The party failed in its 
attempt to topple the UPA over the U.S. India Civil Nuclear 
Cooperation Initiative.  It expelled party stalwart Somnath 
Chatterjee for his failure to toe the party line during debate over 
the nuclear deal; Chatterjee has returned the favor by vociferously 
criticizing the party since his expulsion.  In a further sign of its 
malaise on the eve of India's parliamentary elections, the CPM has 
been unable to cobble together a credible alternative to the 
Congress and BJP-led coalitions on the national level.  After 
exercising unprecedented influence in New Delhi during the four and 
a half years it supported the UPA, CPM General Secretary Prakash 
Karat tried to pull together disparate regional parties into a 
non-Congress, non-BJP alternative known as the "Third Front." 
Kerala observers see Karat's efforts as a failure.  They believe 
this failure will seriously damage the CPM in the upcoming 
parliament-only elections, where the "winnability" of the major 
coalitions will loom large in the minds of persuadable Kerala 
voters.  John Mundakkayam, Trivandrum bureau chief of Malayala 
Manorama, Kerala's most important Malayalam-language news group, 
told us bluntly that the CPM had "no chance" to form a viable 
national government without Congress or the BJP.  Gopa Kumar, the 
head of the political science department at the University of Kerala 
said that all Indians, especially Keralites, differentiate between 
state and national elections and believe that a third front is 
highly unlikely to succeed.  The Hindu's Nair told us that 
"Keralites do not want to vote for a party that had rejected tie-ups 
with both Congress and the BJP and so would not be part of the next 
coalition government." 
 
State underdevelopment remains an issue 
---------- 
 
¶9. (SBU) Kerala continues to be commercially underdeveloped relative 
to its South Indian neighbors.  The state lacks a technological hub 
of international standards such as Bangalore in Karnataka or 
Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh, and its road and electrical 
infrastructure remain far behind that of Tamil Nadu.  The Communist 
government is unsure how to attract and integrate foreign capital 
(ref B); a contact at Kerala's Center for Development Studies said 
"remittances from abroad carry the whole Kerala economy." 
 
¶10. (SBU) Joe Scariah, Special Correspondent with The Economic 
Times, told us that development promises from all political parties 
were expected features of campaign season in Kerala.  Failure of the 
parties to live up to these promises after the election is equally 
expected.  He half-jokingly offered an example: proposals for the 
construction of a deep-water port at Vizhinjam have been discussed 
and promised for over one hundred years, but thus far no government 
has acted on these plans. 
 
¶11. (SBU) The repeated failure to develop the state is a major 
component of the state's powerful anti-incumbency trend, according 
to Scariah.  It is likely that it will influence this election as 
well, to the detriment of the CPM. 
 
Congress winning by default 
---------- 
 
¶12. (SBU) The Congress party has remained remarkably quiet during 
the Achuthanandan-Vijayan row; a local Congress leader, when asked 
how the dispute would affect the election, simply shrugged his 
shoulders and said he was unsure.  Congress probably assesses that 
the CPM would reunite if its rival began taking political potshots 
and seeks only to keep the focus on its rival's internal divisions 
and the SNC Lavalin case.  Kumar at the University of Kerala told us 
 
CHENNAI 00000066  003.2 OF 003 
 
 
that Congress is seen as strong on the terrorism issue and local 
economic issues, further bolstering its prospects of picking up 
parliamentary seats in the election. 
 
¶13. (SBU) Congress appears to have overcome its own pervasive 
infighting problems in the state, to which the party's resounding 
2004 defeat in Kerala is attributed.  Then-Chief Minister A.K. 
Antony (now national Defense Minister) in 2004 had been effectively 
rendered powerless by opposition from within his own party. 
Congress has already resolved its seat-sharing arrangement with its 
UDF allies and on Thursday February 26 formally launched its state 
campaign.  Its current state leadership, however, is drawn 
exclusively from southern Kerala, meaning that Congress will depend 
on its UDF allies to win constituencies in the Communist-dominated 
north. 
 
¶14. (SBU) Our Congress contact volunteered that the BJP could be a 
spoiler for Congress in a few constituencies in the state.  That the 
BJP, which has long been a non-entity in Kerala politics, should 
even enter into Congress's electoral considerations bears further 
watching, though it will almost certainly not be enough to prevent a 
significant Congress victory in Kerala. 
 
Comment: Left's civ-nuke gambit did not pay off 
---------- 
 
¶15. (SBU) Comment: It is significant that in all of our meetings 
with politicians, academics, and journalists, the U.S.-India Civil 
Nuclear Cooperation Initiative never once came up in conversation. 
The CPM gambled its national influence on the nuclear deal, 
assessing that Congress's passage of the deal and CPM's staunch 
opposition would be a potent election issue, especially in Kerala. 
This has not happened.  Instead, Kerala's political dialogue has 
moved on, and the CPM and its allies are left with few issues on 
which to campaign and a party divided over charges of corruption and 
confusion over its future direction.  As a consequence, the Congress 
Party stands to pick up a significant number of parliamentary seats 
in Kerala.  End Comment. 
 
SIMKIN