BHARAT BALLOT 09: KERALA CPM STILL FLOUNDERING

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 CHENNAI 000066

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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

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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

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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