BHARAT BALLOT 09: KERALA CPM STILL FLOUNDERING

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