The Debate That Shouldn’t Exist

By: Sridhar Radhakrishnan

Kerala just delivered the UDF its biggest mandate in a generation—102 seats, 13 LDF ministers defeated, CPM strongholds breached by the party’s own rebel veterans, and a seven-point swing in vote share. And yet the party that led this turnaround is publicly deliberating over whether the man who made it happen should lead the govt it produced.

This is not a small irony. It is a test of whether Congress has genuinely transformed, or whether the old instincts of faction, seniority and high-command management will reassert themselves the morning after a historic victory. How else do we understand the delay to state the obvious plainly? Let it be stated plainly now: V D Satheesan is not merely the obvious choice for chief minister. He is the only choice that is defensible, logically and morally, in light of what this election was about and what Kerala now needs.

Anti-incumbency is as much a campaign as it is a condition. The LDF’s failures were plainly visible. What Satheesan and Team UDF did was build momentum over five years and convert those conditions into a landslide. That is a different achievement.

Satheesan is the architect of this victory, but architect is perhaps the wrong word if it implies one person designing and others following. What he actually built was something only the best leaders do: A functioning collective. As leader of the opposition in 2021, he inherited a fractured organization where factions operated independently and coalition partners kept their own counsel. He built genuine coordination, inside Congress and across the UDF’s partners, into a functioning collective with shared positions and shared accountability.

The sequential evidence is undeniable: Thrikkakara, Puthuppally, and Nilambur by-elections, all won; 18 of 20 Lok Sabha seats won in 2024; a near-comprehensive local body sweep in 2025. Team UDF was not a slogan. It was a tested, working reality.

The Puthu Yuga Yatra reflected the same method—30 days, 14 districts, with three-quarters of the engagement devoted to Kerala’s future rather than the outgoing govt’s past. Satheesan led a team that consulted endosulfan victims, agricultural workers, unemployed youth, and families devastated by wildlife attacks, feeding what he heard into policy documents prepared with expert input. He engaged stakeholders across development, governance, and production sectors. Even long-time CPM voters crossed over. That is not anti-incumbency. That is a leader making his alliance a credible destination for voters whose own front had abandoned the values it claimed to stand for.

May 4th carried multiple verdicts. It rejected political violence and fortress politics— Kannur’s party-villages fell to CPM’s own rebel veterans, proving no constituency is anyone’s permanent property. It rewarded genuine secularism—the UDF fielded a Muslim candidate in Kochi against church preference and won, because Satheesan held his position when community organisations demanded compliance and he refused to yield. It repudiated centralised authority—a decade of governance organised around one commanding figure, which steadily weakened institutional accountability, was rejected comprehensively.

The moral dimension is equally clear. Satheesan acted against his own MLA on harassment allegations before an FIR was even filed, ensuring a reluctant party understood and endorsed this standard. He drew political legitimacy from people’s movements—receiving nomination support from the Plachimada Protest Committee, a community still awaiting justice after 22 years. He supported the anti-SilverLine agitation when the project was a state flagship, recognising both the public protests and the technical fallacies, and leading the party alongside affected communities. He applied to his own side the standards he demanded of the govt he sought to replace.

What the mandate asks for in return is equally specific: Collective governance, decentralised authority, and a listening, responsive govt that holds itself to the same moral standard in power that it demanded from the opposition benches. That is precisely the method Satheesan brought to the opposition, and has committed to carry into govt.

Here is the question that cuts through all of it: Give us one credible reason why it should not be Satheesan. Not a procedural reason, not a factional preference—a reason that can be stated publicly, defended on its merits, and squared with the mandate just delivered. That question has no satisfactory answer. A party that cannot answer it, but proceeds to bypass him anyway, will carry that choice as a weight from day one through every year of the govt that follows.

Ramesh Chennithala is a senior leader whose record deserves respect. He is also the leader under whom the UDF lost comprehensively in 2021—so comprehensively that the party replaced him as opposition leader. That replacement was Satheesan. Reversing that judgment now, after Satheesan has delivered what Chennithala could not, is an institutional incoherence that Kerala’s voters will read exactly as it is: Seniority over merit, faction over performance, the old system reasserting itself over the new one.

K C Venugopal is not a member of the assembly. Installing him requires an MLA to vacate a seat, a by-election to be fought, and a Lok Sabha seat to fall vacant—all while a new govt must be sworn in and start governing. Beginning with that institutional contortion tells Kerala on day one that internal arithmetic matters more than the mandate it delivered.

The people of Kerala have made their choice. They do not need a chief minister illogically thrust upon them against the mandate they delivered. They do not need a compromise candidate produced by backroom arithmetic. They need one who arrives as a consequence—of a clear mandate, a coherent political method, and five years of relentless work that earned this moment.

Congress knows which name fits that description. Every passing day of this unnecessary debate is an insult to the mandate Kerala has placed in their hands.

(The writer is an environmentalist and comments on issues related to ecology, democracy, climate and growth)