Analysis | Heart attack: Cadres cause cardiac arrest for CPM in Payyannur, Kunhikrishnan beats Madhusoodanan

Kannur: “Nethruthwathe Anikal Thiruthanam”. The cadre should correct the leadership.

 CPM whistleblower and UDF-backed Independent candidate V Kunhikrishnan built his entire campaign around that one line. And by the verdict across Kerala -- particularly in Left bastions where dissident CPM leaders such as V Kunhikrishnan, T K Govindan and G Sudhakaran were in the fray -- voters, especially Left supporters, appear to have endorsed that call.

Of all the blows the LDF suffered on Monday, the defeat in Payyannur was perhaps the most humiliating, if not humbling.

Kunhikrishnan defeated sitting MLA T I Madhusoodanan by 7,487 votes in Payyannur. The significance of that result cannot be overstated.

 If Kerala is the CPM’s last engine of power, Payyannur is its beating heart. In 2021, when Madhusoodanan won by 49,780 votes, he secured 62.49% of the total votes polled, the highest vote share by any candidate in Kerala that year.

 This time, the man who brought him down was one of their own.

 Kunhikrishnan, a former CPM Kannur district committee member and Payyannur area secretary, had made just one demand to the party leadership: do not field Madhusoodanan again.

 Since 2022, he had accused the MLA of misappropriating funds collected for the family of slain CPM worker C V Dhanraj, funds raised for the Payyannur area committee office, both in 2016, and money mobilised for Madhusoodanan’s 2021 election campaign.

The party dismissed his allegations.

On January 22 this year, Kunhikrishnan went public. Four days later, on January 26, the party expelled him.

 On February 4, he released his book, “Nethruthwathe Anikal Thiruthanam” (The Cadre Should Correct the Leadership), detailing what he claimed was documentary evidence that the leadership had ignored. The crowd at the book launch at Gandhi Park in Payyannur suggested his message was finding resonance among the cadre. The books sold out before the event ended. Yet the party stood by Madhusoodanan, a member of the CPM district secretariat, and renominated him.

 That was when Kunhikrishnan entered the fray with a single mission: to stop Madhusoodanan from returning to the Assembly.

 His campaign revolved around those three financial allegations. It struck a chord.

Even in traditional CPM strongholds, Madhusoodanan’s campaign meetings were not always drawing expected crowds. In a constituency where public dissent against the party is rare, that silence itself became a message.

After polling on April 9, houses, vehicles and compound walls of those suspected of backing Kunhikrishnan were attacked, vandalised and demolished by alleged CPM workers.

But the results showed something the party had failed to read: Kunhikrishnan’s support ran far deeper than those who openly campaigned for him.

Like Chandy Oommen in Puthuppally, Kunhikrishnan ran a campaign with few posters or flex boards. His message had already travelled.

The UDF sensed an opening in a constituency it had never won since Payyannur was formed in 1967, and backed him.

This is a constituency that has elected towering Communist leaders such as M V Raghavan, Pinarayi Vijayan and P K Sreemathy.

Inside the CPM's leadership camp, there was quiet hope that Madhusoodanan would somehow scrape through.
But once counting began, the numbers told another story.

Madhusoodanan’s leads in party bastions such as Karivellur-Peralam, Kankole-Alapadamba, Peringome-Vayakkara panchayats, and Payyannur municipality were shockingly thin. The real slide became visible as votes from Eramam-Kuttur, Ramanthali and Cherupuzha came in.

The LDF retains control over most of these local bodies, including Payyannur municipality, often overwhelmingly. In Kankole-Alapadamba and Karivellur-Peralam, it controls all wards; in Eramam-Kuttur, 17 of 19. In Ramanthali, it controls 11 of 18 wards, with the IUML holding seven.

The lone exception is Cherupuzha, which is with the UDF.
That is what makes the result so devastating.

In the end, it was not the Opposition that defeated the CPM in Payyannur. It was the party’s own rank and file. If only the leadership had listened.