Comrade Vijayan Is Captain & Now Doubly Certified CM

In Kerala, a political front has had a successive rerun in office only twice, the first time after the Emergency, and this time in anticipation of one. In 1977, the United Front merely benefited from hindsight but in 2021 Pinarayi Vijayan’s masterstroke was to conjure what lay ahead — an ‘undeclared emergency’ created by the coronavirus and fear of virulent Hindutva politics — to the voters.

- Anil Nair

He portrayed this election as an existential struggle against the pandemic and to protect Kerala’s secular and plural character, a battle between Left and Right, and where the centre (read Congress) cannot hold or, if it did, only as a stand-in for BJP.

Of course, that hadn’t stopped the pragmatist in Pinarayi from cutting a deal with the saffronites. In 2016, just months after he became chief minister for the first time, he arrived at a 5-star in Thiruvananthapuram in the dead of night, unescorted and in a private vehicle, to meet five or six top Sangh Parivar leaders.