So Suresh Gopi, persistent in his effort to ‘take Thrissur’ (his own words), has finally managed to win the Thrissur seat in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. I have been deluged with messages and queries from friends outside expressing shock and surprise.

Which, in turn surprises me, because I was under the impression that they took seriously what I have been warning of all the time – of how Hindutva forces, armed with their own brand of extremely feudal social engagement and support (akin to the ‘socialism’ in National Socialism of the Nazis), would happily fill in the vacuum left by the Left among the poor and vulnerable groups in Kerala.

True, this alone does not explain the decimation of the Left and the defeat of the Congress, but surely was the foundation on which Gopi could build his triumph. The real threat to the Left comes not from the victory per se, but from the fact that a winning strategy replicable elsewhere in Kerala has been revealed through it.

Suresh Gopi clearly took advantage of the fact that the Left has more or less forgotten its old style of political functioning which was eminently social – in which activists interacted with people, especially people in need, helped them to negotiate the bureaucratic machinery of the developmentalist state, deal with quotidian troubles, settle disputes, and so on. Not all of this has perished perhaps. But there is certain shrinkage and importantly, the focus seems to be on mass events, like intervening in temple festivals, and on charity, like delivering food packets to needy patients in government hospitals. None of this can be a substitute for the sustained work of building a ‘public community’ cutting across religion and to some extent, caste – work that was rendered all the more important since public education and healthcare, which were spaces in which such a community was sustained in the mid- and late 20th century decades, have been increasingly privatised since the 1980s at least. Indeed, the Left and its ‘Supreme Leader’ who seems to arrogate to himself nothing less that sovereign status within the party and even in the State, seem far more ready to sustain and foster technocratic arrogance, expense, and outright incompetence – as evident in several instances, but notable the K-Rail fiasco. And it is the Supreme Leader’s time which saw the arrival of accumulation by dispossession with considerable success and full force in the form of Adani Ports and the continuing slow ruin of coastal communities in the Thiruvananthapuram coast.

It is true that Gopi did not simply step into the roles and spaces evacuated by the Left. Gopi’s theatrics around faith pulled towards him the savarna Hindus who are an important presence around the major temples in Thrissur. Thrissur is known for the spectacular Pooram festival which always drew large crowds but now it also attracts Hindutva-inspired tourists from elsewhere. In other words, the temple worship there is now steadily Hindutva-ised as it is commercialised. Gopi, in fact, managed to represent himself as combining in himself these two distinct strands. On the one hand, he upped his savarna mannerisms, language, articulated savarna elitism often in feudal-benevolent terms and presented himself as an avid devotee of the temple deities. On the other hand, his lifestyle as a movie star to point to a modern, high-consuming, high-flying find of bhaktha-hood. On top of these rode his lurid declarations and poses of allegiance to national Hindutva. The highly-watched wedding of his daughter attended by film stars and high-flying politicians including the PM was another event where such a combination could be displayed highly effectively.

Secondly, he took good advantage of the kind of family rhetoric that appealed to conservative –savarna and neo-savarna — women. He made special appeals to them, got Modi to address them directly in a huge public event at Thrissur – that is, he made use of BJP’s successfully-tested mode of mobilising such women during the Sabarimala controversy of 2018. Family rhetoric, in itself, is definitely no invention of the Hindutva right wing; in fact, it was quite central to Kerala’s 20th century style of social democracy. However, Gopi’s highly feudal and patriarchal version of it was one that had been creeping all over Kerala since the 1980s, through the neo-savarna Guru-worshipper networks, for example, the one that grew around Amrithanandamayi. In this version, women are bound by ties of loyalty and dependence, and importantly, of shared affect, to male relatives, especially to Gopi as the ‘older brother’ beyond the ties of blood. No wonder then, that the Left’s effort to project Gopi’s condescending behaviour towards a woman journalist as ‘sexual harassment at workplace’ (because he tried to touch her despite her resistance) and target him with a police case seems to have backfired very badly. For such behaviour and even such touch, would not be deemed wrong within the family-rhetoric that he propagates – it would merely be an affectionate and avuncular hug. The incident evoked tremendous sympathy for the man both in and outside Thrissur, even among Left-supporters.

But besides these, the Left’s poor governance and the corruption that infests the communist parties at all levels gave him golden opportunities. He directly engaged with workers and small traders in market places, and promised to contribute a crore of rupees to improving conditions in the Sakthan Market after his earlier experience of defeat; he was also closely involved in securing funding for the BJP-ruled Avinissery panchayat in Thrissur. Importantly, Gopi was able to capitalise well the massive discontent around the infamous Karuvannur bank scam, in which the local CPM leadership was deeply involved. In a state where economic growth has rested on uncertainty – on migrant incomes that remain unsure always even if high – the loss of savings is a terrible calamity. This gave Gopi a chance to step past communal considerations and project himself as the saviour of all the aggrieved, and not just of the Hindus.

It was widely believed that the BJP’s undeniable muddling up of the Manipur issue that left Christians there completely vulnerable would make Christians in Thrissur highly wary of the BJP. There were rumours of back-door deals between the upper echelons of the Catholic Church and the BJP over real estate scandals and other issues, but even without these, the fact that Kerala Syrian Christians are deeply entrenched in caste elitism and hence would not be moved significantly by the Christians of Manipur should have been taken seriously by the BJP’s rivals. This is also why he seemed to have gained a sizeable share of the Christian votes despite the comical climax of his attempt to declare his amity towards the Catholics through the gift of a ‘crown of gold’ to the Mother Mary of the Lourdes Metropolitan Cathedral. This is in sharp contrast with the BJP’s inability to win in Thiruvananthapuram despite the fact that this district shares many features favourable to the BJP with Thrissur. Here, the decisive group of voters is the coastal communities, the non-elite Latin Catholics, who, unlike the Syrian Christians know and are wary of the Hindutva agenda.

The first responses from the left on social media to actor Suresh Gopi’s credible victory at Thrissur ranged from disappointment to horror and then these emotions were expressed in a series of angry condemnations of the people of Thrissur in general, as betrayers to the Kerala. Thrissur, known as Kerala’s ‘cultural capital’, was instantly stripped of that status. Perhaps it will take more time, but the Left needs to realize that its implicit vindication of neo-savarna culture as the ‘core’ of ‘Kerala culture’ despite the stringent and incisive critiques of it from feminist, dalit, and savarna perspectives, has extracted a huge cost politically.

But then, besides promoting savarna culture as ‘neutral’ subnational culture, the Left-controlled state in Kerala, for reasons best known to itself, has been extremely soft on Hindutva propaganda and breach of laws, even Hindutva violence – and keen on punishing everyone on the Left of the political spectrum who appears to differ with it Left on social justice. The instances are many and they range from the Hadiya case to penalising individuals for supporting anti-CAA protests called by Muslim organisations. And even though it claimed to have withdrawn these cases before the Lok Sabha elections this year, the punishment continues through endless bureaucratic and other delays. This has grown to such an extent that the suspicion that the Kerala Police might be harbouring BJP supporters who act at decisive moments, such as by causing delays the Pooram festival this year at Thrissur, causing widespread anger, is being voiced even by the CPM.

Thirdly, the Left’s wishy-washy state feminism has barely even dented gender conservatism in Kerala. The Left and its women’s front seems to have no clue at all about the kinds of (limited but still significant) agency being opened up to women, especially savarna and neosavarna women in Hindutva formations even after witnessing their crucial and active presence in the Sabarimala agitation. Worse, they seem to be largely aping feudal female subservience, sometimes rewriting it in the language of shameless sycophancy to the Supreme Leader or simply obeying orders from the patriarchs above, as during the Women’s Wall-building during the Sabarimala agitation. Neither the Left parties’ women’s fronts nor mainstream feminists in Kerala have even considered seriously the need to forge gender politics adequate to counter neosavarna gender conservatism; They have neither tried to prevent nor spoken up against the vicious and unethical use of gender justice laws exclusively against political opponents by the CPM.

As for the Congress, its organisational ineptitude and general cluelessness continues – there can be little doubt that the big wins it enjoyed in the state had nothing to do with its own efforts. Its efficacy as political opposition in Kerala has been disappointing, especially because of its social conservatism. Only the incompetence, clumsiness, arrogance, and utter depravity of the Left allows it to win – a possibility that will end if the BJP decides to replicate the Gopi strategy elsewhere in the state.

Crying over spilt milk is useless. It is up to the dominant Left to make amends soonest if it wants to survive at all. Over the past thirty years or so, individualised neoliberal welfare at the local level couched in the moral language of social democracy has not produced an active citizenry in Kerala; rather, we have welfare-seekers who are strategic agents who will readily move to claim the best deal. That means that the Left might not be able to carry out the public politics necessary for its survival. That will fall on the shoulders of the oppositional civil society here which has been persistently attacked by the Left from its inception in the 1970s and 80s onward. Parts of this civil society have long since capitulated to the Left, drawn to the many favours it offered. In a way, it is fortunate that the breach happened in a district ‘central’ to Kerala in all ways; a breach in Kasaragod might have been attributed to its location near South Canara; in Malappuram, ‘muslim extremists’ would have been blamed. None of those excuses work here.

The smugness with which both the Left and the Congress dismissed Gopi’s chances of winning appears pathetic in hindsight. Kerala’s prominent writers aligned against Hindutva did not launch ground-level campaigns. Independent civil society barely exists in Kerala.

A conversation that takes up the challenge of imagining and building inclusive, anti-majoritarian politics from the scratch cannot be postponed anymore.