The day the cadres rebelled

The flex board erected at Chengottamukku at Erayikkolli in Kolayad, Kannur, bore a familiar Communist red—the colour that has defined the district’s emotional landscape for decades. It carried photographs of Pinarayi Vijayan and party state secretary M V Govindan. But across their faces was stamped an unmistakable red X— an image that was once unthinkable in Kannur’s political culture. Beneath it ran a line: “It is the party which is big, not the leaders.”

The same board called for senior leaders P Jayarajan and M Swaraj to take over the party’s organisational reins—a sentiment echoed in the days that followed through several other posters and flex boards across CPM strongholds in Kannur, and across social media. CPM officially attributed the campaign to political opponents posing as sympathizers, while conceding that some genuine party supporters had knowingly or unknowingly joined it.

In many political cultures, a poster questioning senior leaders would be unremarkable. In Kannur, it signals something closer to a rupture in faith.

In this election, what has unfolded in Kannur—CPM’s ideological heartland and the land of martyr villages, and a district that shares almost umbilical bonds with the communist movement—was something the region had rarely witnessed before.

Pinarayi Vijayan trailing for six rounds in Dharmadam, a constituency he had won last time by over 50,000 votes, was one such moment. So too was the sight of rebel CPM leaders turned UDF-supported independent candidates V Kunhikrishnan and T K Govindan storming to victory from the red citadels of Payyannur and Taliparamba — constituencies that had not elected a non-communist MLA for more than half a century.

Yet the real story of Kannur lies not in the numbers, but in the rebellion beneath them. What unravelled in Kannur was not the rise of a conventional anti-Left wave; the revolt came from within the very emotional universe the communist movement had built over generations.

In Kannur, politics was never merely about elections. Communism here became culture, memory, and social grammar. The red flags fluttering above junctions at Anthur, Payyannur, and Eramam Kuttur were not party symbols alone—they were declarations of belonging. Villages acquired identities by the intensity of their political colour. Libraries, arts clubs, trade unions, cooperative banks, tea shops, even temple grounds—all carried the imprint of a movement that had shaped the district’s imagination for generations. Local memory from the Kurumbakkavu temple festival in Muzhappilangad recalls processions in which the party symbol was carried ceremonially in place of conventional religious motifs. No political statistic captures Kannur as precisely as that detail—a place where ideology had seeped into ritual itself.

For decades, Kannur occupied an almost mythical place in Kerala’s communist imagination. The district housed over 65,000 party cadres, two politburo members, and a disproportionate share of state leadership positions — giving rise to what critics and admirers alike called the power of the Kannur lobby.

The party village was not a metaphor here. It was a lived social arrangement in which the party mediated everyday existence: Family disputes, neighbourhood conflicts, bank loans, labour grievances. Political loyalty was inherited like family memory. There have even been instances of die-hard cadres coming forward to be arraigned as accused in political killings they had not committed, on the promise that the party would fight their legal battles and care for their families. Such was the depth of faith the movement commanded. And for decades, this ecosystem produced one reliable political certainty, Kannur would always remain red.
This election shattered that certainty. But what makes the current crisis distinctive is the nature of the revolt. Kunhikrishnan and Govindan did not reject communism — they accused the leadership of abandoning communist ethics. Their dissent spoke not in the language of ideological departure, but of ideological correction. That distinction separates this rebellion from earlier ones, such as M V Raghavan’s in the 1980s, which the party met with violent reprisal. The current dissent is subtler, deeper, and in many ways more unsettling, because it spoke in the idiom of loyalty rather than betrayal.

The party tried to respond with intimidation: Vehicles of supporters were burned, wreaths were placed before the homes of those backing the rebels, and 22 FIRs were filed against them. The rebels stood their ground with the confidence that the silent moral core of the cadre base stood with them. The depth of that undercurrent was evident in booths recording polling percentages as high as around 95%, where, despite alleged bogus voting by the party machinery, CPM candidates still failed to scrape through.

“There is little doubt that many who voted for me against the official party candidate were core CPM cadres themselves. They did so to provide a shock treatment to the party,” said expelled CPM leader and Payyannur MLA-elect V Kunhikrishnan. Writer and cultural critic V S Anil Kumar said what has happened in the party fortresses was a genuine uprising from within the cadre base. “One will have to infer that even those sent to cast bogus votes may have cast both their own and the impersonated vote for the rebel candidates.”
Kannur has also undergone profound social change over the past two decades. The district that once revolved around beedi cooperatives, trade unions, and tightly bound political communities has been reshaped by expanded higher education, migration, and social media—forces that have steadily weakened the party’s traditional information monopolies and ideological grip.

Veteran journalist N P Chekutty believes the present crisis is more serious than previous rebellions because it involves a breakdown of trust between the leadership and the party’s most emotionally committed cadres.

He said allegations surrounding the Dhanraj martyr fund created anger at the grassroots because in Kannur’s communist culture, martyrdom and sacrifice occupy sacred space. When cadres felt that the party’s moral foundations themselves were being compromised, the unspoken compact broke. “Cadres might tolerate many things, but not the feeling that the party’s moral foundations are being compromised,” Chekutty said.

Political observer Damodar Prasad summed up the verdict’s deeper significance: For the first time, he said, communist cadres in Kannur may have exercised a genuinely free democratic choice, independent of party diktat. “Now that they have tasted the true power of democracy,” he said, “silencing dissent will not be easy in the future.”

Writing off the CPM in Kannur would be premature. The party retains Kerala’s most formidable grassroots network, and its emotional memory remains deeply woven into the district’s social history. What has eroded is the unquestioned moral authority the party once exercised over its own people.

The red citadel may not have fallen for good. But for the first time in decades, it is no longer unquestioningly obedient. In Kannur, that perhaps is the most dramatic political shift in recent memory.

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