Kannur: With his 82nd birthday due in July, veteran socialist leader Kadannappalli Ramachandran has finally hit what may be the hardest wall in politics: voter fatigue. The veteran Kannur MLA and Congress (S) strongman was defeated on Monday by Congress candidate T O Mohanan, a former mayor of Kannur Corporation, bringing down the curtain, at least for now, on one of Kerala’s longest solo runs. He lost to Mohanan by 18,551 votes.

With the defeat, Ramachandran exits the Assembly after serving as MLA across four different terms between 1980 and 2026, and after more than five decades in electoral politics. 

Ramachandran’s storied career began in student politics through the Congress stream, rising through the Kerala Students Union and Youth Congress before scripting one of Kerala’s most talked-about early victories.

In 1971, at just 27 and still a law student, he won the Kasaragod Lok Sabha seat as a Congress candidate, defeating none other than E K Nayanar. He would go on to become a two-time MP and later an MLA from Irikkur, Edakkad and Kannur constituencies, besides serving as minister in multiple Left governments. His Congress roots would later become his biggest political asset in Kannur.

Since 1991, Kannur had consistently elected Congress candidates, including N. Ramakrishnan, K Sudhakaran, who won three straight terms in 1996, 2001 and 2006, and A P Abdullakutty in 2009 and 2011.

The Left could breach that Congress hold only when it fielded Kadannappalli in 2016, and again in 2021. It was his Congress imprint and his acceptability among traditional Congress voters that helped the LDF capture the constituency twice.

But in recent years, his electoral relevance rested on two pillars: the backing of the CPM, and the enduring perception among Kannur’s Congress-leaning voters that he was still one of their own. In 2021, he scraped through by just 1,745 votes against late Congress district president Satheesan Pacheni.

This time, however, even a chaotic candidate selection process in the Congress failed to rescue him. In the run-up to the election, the Congress was thrown into uncertainty after K Sudhakaran staked claim to the seat, flew to Delhi, and stayed holed up in an apartment while holding backroom negotiations with the party leadership.

After four days of brinkmanship that unsettled the party, Sudhakaran stepped back on March 19, declaring he would remain “subservient to the party” and would not contest without its permission, ending speculation that he might enter the fray as an independent. Only after that did the Congress announce T O Mohanan as its candidate.

The delayed start and the internal drama may have left a bitter aftertaste, but in the end, it did little to derail Mohanan’s march to victory and end the veteran’s run.

Ramachandran’s Congress (Secular), a splinter born out of the Congress-socialist churn of the late 1970s and aligned with the LDF since the early 1980s, had long ceased to function like a party of the masses. With little visible grassroots activity, it had increasingly come to revolve around Ramachandran himself -- a one-man outfit.

He has been its state president since 1990, effectively running it as a one-man outfit. In 2003, after a brief merger with the Nationalist Congress Party, he walked out and revived Congress (S) under his own leadership.

But in Kannur this time, after decades of survival, even the Left and the Congress vote banks that once carried him appear to have moved on.

For the CPM, however, Kadannappalli’s defeat may create a vacuum that will be felt in 2031. The Left no longer has another Congress-faced ally with his crossover appeal, personal network, and ability to draw traditional Congress voters into its fold.