If at all the CPM has come out of the Nilambur by-election loss with any new insights, it is to double down on the electoral strategy that it had aggressively implemented in Nilambur and failed.

After the three-day CPM State Committee meeting that concluded in Thiruvananthapuram on Friday, the party has decided to press ahead with the double-barreled campaign it had explored in Nilambur. One, it will continue to project the UDF-Jamaat-e-Islami electoral arrangement as an apocalyptic event. And two, it will spread the development message.

"People just cannot be oblivious to the comprehensive infrastructure development in Kerala. Just because we lost Nilambur does not mean that we should stop talking about it," a top CPM leader told Onmanorama.

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CPM state secretary M V Govindan openly conceded that the development message had not travelled enough. "It is important to take the development gains to the people. This is one lesson we take from the byelection result," Govindan said after the State Committee meeting. There was a general consensus at the State Committee deliberations that the development message would have worked had it not been for the collapse of the NH 66 at Kooriyad. "The problems detected at various NH stretches did muddle our message in Nilambur," the CPM leader said.

The other strategy is to appropriate secularism for itself and position the CPM as the only bulwark against the invading Sangh Parivar. And for this, the party has decided to persist with its scheme of denigrating the UDF for its electoral understanding with Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (JIH).

On Friday, Govindan called JIH a votary of "religious nationalism", just like the RSS. "Now the Muslim League has not just aligned with religious nationalists, but it has also adopted their slogans and thinking," Govindan said. He said that by doing so, the League was trying to hand over even secular-minded people to the hands of religious nationalists. "This is a serious threat to the secular fabric of Kerala," Govindan said. "The faithful themselves should realise the danger and rise against this brand of religious nationalism," he said.

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This strategy of demonising the Jamaat-e-Islami was widely seen as a sly attempt by the CPM to lure anti-Muslim Hindu votes. There was no proof that it had worked in Nilambur, though the probability that it had backfired is high.

Still, the CPM will stick to this anti-JIH plan. "It is important for the party to be seen as against both majority and minority communalism," the CPM source said. "We strongly believe that the Jamaat is the Muslim version of the RSS. Just because the Jamaat-e-Islami is a fringe group does not mean that the toxicity of its ideology will not permeate the UDF. We want to draw the attention of voters to that reality," he added.

Nonetheless, the State Committee grudgingly conceded the influence of P V Anvar, who rebelled against the CPM and resigned his MLA post. Before the election, the CPM stand was that Anvar would not hurt the CPM a bit. "He did pull in some excess votes," Govindan said. "He had taken some of our votes, too," he said.

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Govindan said that the former MLA sold some of the LDF government's development projects as his own. "He took credit for the LDF projects in Nilambur," Govindan said.

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