On March 23, at a United Democratic Front (UDF) election convention in Kochi, Kerala’s leader of opposition, V.D. Satheesan, took a swipe at “vote bank” politics. “Those who claim to have a vote bank can keep it in their hands,” he said. The remarks were widely seen as atypical for a Congress leader ahead of the assembly polls. He was campaigning for his confidant and Ernakulam district Congress president, Mohammed Shiyas, the party’s candidate in Kochi.
Kochi, reshaped by the 2007 delimitation, is widely viewed as a constituency where the Latin Catholic community is the most dominant voting bloc. Since then, only Latin Catholic candidates have won the seat. There have also been rumours that the church lobbied for the Congress to field a candidate of its preference. The Congress’s final call, seen as one of its toughest, ultimately went in favour of Shiyas.
The Congress has faced pressure from other community leaders and organisations, too, in different seats. The head of a sanyasi mutt, for instance, publicly admitted to submitting a list of preferred Hindu Ezhava candidates for 18 constituencies, including sitting MPs. Yet, in several constituencies, the Congress appears to have departed from the scripts favoured by community organisations.
This pattern extends beyond the UDF. The Left Democratic Front and the National Democratic Alliance, too, have calibrated appeals to identities and micro-identities across constituencies, without fully complying with the diktats of community leaders.
Kerala has a long history of community organisations attempting to influence political parties. In 1959, when the first elected government in the state was dismissed by the Centre, it came in the aftermath of the Vimochana Samaram, the anti-communist movement spearheaded by organisations such as the Nair Service Society (NSS) and the church. Times, however, are changing, and social observers note a glaring paradox.
As Amruth J. Kumar, professor at the Central University of Kerala, says identity and sub-identity sentiments are strengthening across religious communities, yet people are not consolidating tightly as vote banks under community organisational umbrellas. Kumar observes that political parties in the state now operate on the premise that voting behaviour is increasingly shaped by community identities, but with less overt appeasement of community organisations, even as they remain careful not to antagonise them. The operative logic, it seems, is one of managed proximity: stay close enough to community sentiment to benefit from it, but keep enough distance from organisational leadership.
Nowhere is this more visible than in the final-phase manoeuvres of the second Pinarayi Vijayan government, which has rolled out a series of targeted measures designed to appeal to sub-identities within religious communities. In February, the government added 28 Hindu OBC communities, including some groups within the Ezhavas, to the list of socially and educationally backward classes, enabling greater educational benefits.
On February 1, Industries Minister P. Rajeev visited the St Bridget’s Convent in his constituency, Kalamassery, to personally convey the government’s decision to extend pensions to elderly Christian nuns, adding that the decision had followed a request by Sister Ann, 78, one of the convent’s senior members. The minister’s visit was widely publicised, reinforcing a narrative already in circulation: that the government had introduced a special pension scheme for Christian nuns. The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with this framing. Kerala already has a pension scheme for unmarried women over 50. However, women leading monastic lives in institutional settings had been excluded based on the premise that care is available in such establishments, and that at least some members typically receive government salaries.
“What the government did instead was remove these barriers, enabling eligible women, including nuns, residing in monasteries, convents, ashrams and other religious institutions to access existing social security benefits,” said Father Thomas Tharayil, spokesperson for the Kerala Catholic Bishops’ Council. “It was not just about Christian nuns specifically.” The move was a targeted welfare announcement for a specific section, but many believe it was primarily designed to appeal to broader Christian identity sentiment. A more significant step, taken days before the election announcement, was the release of Justice J.B. Koshy Commission report, which examined educational and economic backwardness, as well as welfare concerns, within Christian communities that constitute over 18 per cent of Kerala’s population.
The commission, appointed during the first Pinarayi Vijayan government in November 2020, submitted its report in May 2023 after reviewing more than 4.8 lakh representations from stakeholders across Christian denominations. The report contains 284 main recommendations and 45 sub-recommendations spanning education, employment, reservation policy and welfare measures. Despite repeated demands from church bodies, the government did not release the report until February this year.
In January, the chief minister said action had already been taken on 220 of the commission’s recommendations, an assertion the KCBC questioned. A leading Catholic daily carried an editorial accusing Vijayan of treating Christians as “gullible” by claiming implementation without making the report public. According to author and academic Vinil Paul, the government appears to have waited until the last moment to deploy it as a political tool.
Alongside its release, the government initiated measures based on its recommendations, including easing conditions for members of the Latin Catholic community to obtain community certificates. Earlier, eligibility had been restricted to those who had joined the community before 1947 and their descendants. These steps have not satisfied the KCBC.
“The recommendations need to be studied and implemented through concrete government action, something that has not happened,” said Fr Tharayil. “Since the report is now an official document, any incoming government will be expected to carry forward its implementation. That is the only positive aspect we see.”
The report draws detailed comparisons between Christian and Muslim minorities in the state, and some believe the timing of its release was intended to capitalise on growing tensions between these communities. Ahead of the election announcement, both the CPI(M) and the BJP advanced the narrative that, if the Congress-led UDF comes to power, governance would effectively be shaped by the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), its largest ally, and the Jamaat-e-Islami, which has backed the front. Many interpreted this as an attempt to stoke anxieties among Hindus and Christians. As the campaign began, however, the CPI(M) initiated damage-control measures to avoid alienating the broader Muslim community, including allegations that the opposition leader had accepted favours from the RSS in the past.
Meanwhile, the BJP, which has long grappled with the gap between a hindutva identity and Hindu sub-identities in Kerala, continues its efforts to bridge it. Guruvayoor candidate B. Gopalakrishnan sparked controversy by stating that Guruvayoor, a constituency with a Hindu majority, should have a Hindu MLA. BJP state president Rajeev Chandrashekar backed him, noting that minority communities assert their identity in areas where they hold significant strength.
Sabarimala-related controversies have been invoked by both the UDF and the NDA to appeal to the faithful. The CPI(M), too, has found utility in the shrine. Last September, when the government and the Travancore Devaswom Board jointly conducted the Global Ayyappa Sangamam, which featured a message from Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, it drew accusations that the government was courting Hindu identity sentiment ahead of elections. “Was the Global Ayyappa Sangamam at Sabarimala about the NSS or the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam? No, it was about identity,” says Kumar. “Similarly, when the J.B. Koshy Commission comes in, it is an appeal to Christian identity.”
Meanwhile, the government also granted official recognition to Pentecostalism as a Christian denomination, after which some Pentecostal groups signalled support for the LDF. Daniel Konnanilkunnathil, joint secretary of the Indian Pentecostal Church of God, the state’s largest Pentecostal movement with over two lakh believers, told THE WEEK that they had not endorsed any political party. “We appreciate the recognition, but key demands, especially those concerning converted Christians from scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, remain unresolved,” he said. Gestures, the remark implied, are not enough. In Kerala’s finely calibrated electoral season, neither are they ever quite sufficient to close the deal.