Local body elections rarely announce the fall of empires. They Whisper. They murmur. They leak truths that the grand stages try to conceal. What we are witnessing now is not a sudden collapse but a slow, audible cracking – the sound of a party that mistook fear for consent, obedience for belief and silence for approval.

The wall writing is not innocent. They are not spontaneous graffiti of enthusiasm. This is advance warning, a rough draft of a verdict that will be written more clearly in the 2026 Assembly elections. Then signal a revenge that does not shout, because it no longer needs to. The common people have learned a quieter language of refusal.

For nearly a decade, the CPM under Pinarayi Vijayan replaced politics with command. Cadres became enforcers, party offices turned into unofficial police stations and courts and dissent was treated not as disagreement but as treason. What was once called a mass movement of workers and peasants hardened into a mafia – style organisational apparatus, where loyalty flowed upward, and fear flowed downward. The party stopped listening long ago; it only counts.

The blood stains did not disappear. They were covered with red flag. The arrogance did not soften. It was repackaged as determination. Intolerance was renamed discipline. Violence was justified as retaliation. And slowly, imperceptibly at first, the people began to withdraw not dramatically, not heroically, but inwardly. Withdrawal is always the first sign of disillusionment.

The CPM’s great self-myth that it represents the poor collapsed under the weight of its statistics. The declaration of “eradication of extreme poverty” was not merely false; it was obscene. It was spoken in air-conditioned rooms while hunger continued to scream, not in slogans but in bodies. Hunger does not attend press briefings. It crouches in kitchens, ration shops, migrant camps, and indebted households. It does not vanish because a government announces its disappearance.

Pensions, Welfare Schemes, and Subsidies were paraded like trophies. But votes are not purchased by circulars. Welfare without dignity feels like managed dependence, not justice. People accepted the money because survival demands pragmatism – but acceptance is not belief. The CPM mistook necessity for gratitude, and gratitude for loyalty. That arrogant ignorance is now costing them dearly.

LDF’s second term in 2021 was not a renewal of faith. It was a panic decision. COVID created a theatre of fear and anxiety, and Pinarayi stepped into it like a stern patriarch, presenting himself as the sole bulwark against chaos. The performance worked once. Crisis rewards authority. But crisis-charisma is a borrowed currency-it expires the moment normal life returns.

And when the fog lifted, people saw what had not changed. The arrogance remained intact, the intolerance remained institutional. The party remained deaf. There was no moral reckoning after 2016. No correction. No introspection. The CPM behaved as though power itself was proof of righteousness. But power, when unexamined, rots faster than ideology. What is happening now is the verdict of anti-arrogant sentiment. The people are not rejecting equality or welfare; they are rejecting a party that speaks about them while governing over them. The CPM forgot a basic truth of democratic life: fear can mobilise once, but only dignity sustains loyalty. The party miserably failed to grasp a deeper shift. Kerala has changed. Authority is no longer romantic. Discipline no longer inspires awe. Young voters, workers, women and even long-time sympathisers have grown allergic to sermons delivered with clenched fists. They do not want saviours. They want accountability.

The CPM still speaks the languages of class-struggle, imperialism, while people now speak the language of lived experience, price rise, joblessness, everyday humiliation, sand hrinking freedom. When these two languages fail to meet, elections become translations of anger.

The impending rout in 2026, therefore, will not be an accident. It will be the logical consequence of a party that replaced ethics with muscle power, solidarity with surveillance and politics with paid PR agencies, struggle with bureaucratic managements, and mass contact with curated optics. The CPM no longer persuades; it manages perception. Decisions are outsourced to consultants, slogans are tested like products, and governance is reduced to brand maintenance.

The CPM will be swept away, for a party, emptied of morality and politics, replaced by management, which cannot remember the reason for its own existence.

More alarming than the shameful rout of the CPM is the disturbing surge of the BJP that accompanies it. The pattern is now unmistakable: wherever the CPM loses ground, the BJP gains proportionately. Under Pinarayi Vijayan’s captainship, the Red has not merely waned; it has been saffronised. As the red turns saffronised, is Kerala slipping into the hands of a far more dangerous force? The democratic Kerala watches this with growing anxiety, because what is unfolding is not simply the decline of the left but a political mutation in which fascist politics reproduces itself in new colours. The waning of red and the waxing of the saffron haunt like a gathering dusk. They are not parallel, unconnected events; they are structurally linked. When a left party adopts the language, posture, and intolerance of power without justice, it prepares the ground on which the Right advances.

The CPM’s arrogant confidence of a third term in Kerala arrived not as hope but as hubris – an assumption that power, once tasted long enough, ripens into destiny. It dreamed of stretching a mandate into a season without dawn, of converting Kerala into a West Bengal, a prolonged night where questions would no longer need to be faced, and opposition is buried under the slow, suffocating weight of unbroken power. In that reverie, Pinarayi Vijayan dreamt himself of a Southern Jyoti Basu. But history is not benign to such illusions; it does not reward those who confuse duration with legitimacy. What was imagined as permanence now reveals itself as a mirage. Authority, staring into the mirror of its own haughtiness, failing to notice that the night was already thinning and that dawn does not ask permission to arrive.