A running joke among Malayalis during the election campaign in Kerala was that you couldn’t walk a kilometre anywhere in the state without a giant flex of the ‘Great Leader’—the now-deposed chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan—peering down at you. In hindsight, perhaps not the best move for a party of the proletariat carrying the anti-incumbency baggage of a decade in power. At one of the post-victory press conferences, the Congress taunted that this personality cult and the “hubris” in the CPI(M) campaign slogan, ‘Mattaarundu LDF allaathe (If not the Left, who else?)’ had done enough to convince voters that a change was needed.
