6 min readThrissurMay 6, 2026 03:58 AM IST
First published on: May 5, 2026 at 03:04 PM IST
Thomas Isaac, CPM veteran and Kerala’s former Finance Minister, had agreed to speak on the day the assembly election results came in, and that turned out to be quite a day. “Even giving you this interview is going out, don’t embarrass me further,” he said with a smile, asking not to be pushed hard on difficult questions.
The results had shocked the Left. The LDF had been reduced to 35 seats. The UDF score had crossed a hundred. Thirteen sitting ministers lost their seats. The scale of it was, as Isaac put it, without a parallel. “This is the heaviest defeat the Left Democratic Front has ever suffered. There are no comparisons anywhere in Kerala’s history,” the 73-year-old said.
Why Progress Did Not Count
Isaac did not try the usual escape hatches such as blaming a political conspiracy. What he kept returning to was a more uncomfortable argument: that the Pinarayi Vijayan government had performed exceptionally and that ruling party failed to make that performance count electorally.
“The assumption was that people would vote on the basis of this progress. But whether the politics of this progress was taught adequately, I don’t know.” The problem, as he saw it, was that by the 10th year in power, the “extraordinary had become ordinary”. Monthly pensions, welfare schemes – all of it had settled into the furniture of daily life. “People were taking it for granted. This pension, isn’t it something that comes every month? It had become a routine thing. Very few people remembered it wasn’t like this before.”
A ‘style’ problem
The word that kept appearing in Isaac’s answers was “style”. In many constituencies, he said, a significant portion of the LDF’s confirmed voter base either voted against them or simply did not go out to vote. “This is not about them going over to the UDF or joining them. This is a disagreement about style. That is what they were saying. And it needs to be corrected. Without correcting this, we cannot move forward.”
When the question of leadership came up, Isaac closed that door with practised firmness. He would not discuss individuals. He would not comment on Pinarayi Vijayan trailing in Dharmadam in the early rounds, though he won later. “I don’t want to enter into any personality discussion,” he said. Isaac said that the ten years of governance under the LDF are something Kerala won’t easily get back. “This kind of era will be very difficult for Kerala to recreate. There will be a great loss.”
Why Left lost Alappuzha
Isaac had no answer to why the LDF lost Alappuzha, a constituency he represented for twenty years. He visited the constituency during the campaign and said he got no indication of a shift. “The feeling I got was that we would win. Because people were responding the same way they always did. But the result was different.”
He paused and then said, “So that is nostalgia. We were only seeing what was in our echo chamber.”
The BJP question
On the BJP winning three seats in Kerala and state party chief Rajeev Chandrasekhar defeating sitting minister Sivankutty in Nemom, Isaac said the party’s vote share had not increased. The BJP recorded an 11.4 per cent vote share in Kerala yesterday. “They have been contained throughout this period. They have not grown. Even in this election, they could not achieve a breakthrough.” The larger point was one the Left had always made about itself. “Containing the BJP and not giving them space is also a question of the Left’s own survival. We see it that way.”
A board, reading ‘Bye Bye Pinarayi’, after the LDF’s defeat, in Thiruvananthapuram Tuesday. PTI
A Bengal Comparison
The CPM had a disappointing day in Bengal, too, so a related question came up. Asked if this is the “beginning of the end”, Isaac pushed back. “Kerala has changed back and forth so many times. Ten years of continuous power was the miracle. That was the thing without precedent.” He pointed to 1977, asked where the CPM was after that election, and let the implication carry the answer. In the 1977 general election in Kerala, the CPI and the CPM contested separately, and the latter could not even open its account.
“Just Wait Six Months”
Isaac gave the UDF’s ‘honeymoon’ a year at the most. The welfare architecture LDF had built, he said, could not simply be dismantled. The UDF had attacked KIIFB — an out-of-budget escrow mechanism that the outgoing government built to bypass the Centre’s restrictions on borrowing and funding capital infrastructure— for years.
Now, Isaac said, the UDF would have to govern with it, defend Kerala’s fiscal rights and deliver on the welfare expectations they raised during the campaign. “Pension has to be raised to Rs 3,000 now, free bus travel for women, and Rs 1,000 a month for every girl in college. How are they going to do all this? Just wait six months. That is all I am saying,” he said.
‘Voters have not left Left’
Isaac was not willing to speak publicly about the course correction Left needed in Kerala. That was for the party to decide collectively, he said. What he was willing to say was that the votes had not “permanently left”, that what had happened was a “protest against a style of functioning” that the party was capable of changing. “Those votes and those people have not left the Left. Once we correct this and make it clear to them that the correction has happened, they will come back. And then the UDF will not last long,” Isaac said.
