CPI(M) signals an early start for LDF’s 2026 Assembly campaign

The CPI(M) State Secretariat has signalled an early start for the ruling Left Democratic Front (LDF)’s 2026 Assembly election campaign.

CPI(M) State secretary M.V. Govindan on Monday indicated that the LDF’s poll strategy would hinge on exposing the ideological equivalence between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to whittle down the United Democratic Front’s (UDF) traditional base among secular and minority community voters.

The CPI(M), he said, would expose the Congress-BJP bid to shift focus away from livelihood and development issues by combating religion and caste-based identity politics stoked by the Congress and the BJP.

On January 5, the LDF would mobilise the working class in strength to protest against the Centre’s new law, which undermined the MGNREG scheme, which guaranteed work for unskilled people, including women and senior citizens, chiefly in rural areas. They would lay siege to Lok Bhavan and to Central government offices across Kerala.

From January 15 to 22, Mr. Govindan stated, LDF workers would knock on doors to push Kerala’s development to the fore and spotlight the Congress and BJP’s gambit to offer simple solutions to complex issues with no real plan to hoodwink voters and the ruling front’s credible election manifesto, which plots a clear trajectory to build on 10 years of governance achievements.

The CPI(M) would also highlight how the Centre’s fiscal strangulation of Kerala directly affected the people. On January 12, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan would lead LDF MPs, MLAs, and Ministers in a sit-in protest against the Centre at Palayam Martyrs’ Square.

Mr. Govindan said the LDF would spotlight Congress as a shape-shifting political entity that subtly towed the Sangh Parivar’s anti-minority, nativist line, belying its avowed secular stance and its efforts to keep minorities in the UDF fold.

He said the the Congress’s rightward drift was recently evident in Leader of the Opposition V.D. Satheesan’s refusal to call out the RSS for the lynching of a migrant worker from Chhattisgarh in Palakkad last week.

Mr. Govindan said the LDF would weaponise the Karnataka government’s bulldozing of hundreds of houses of indigent Muslims and Dalits in Bengaluru to rupture the Congress’s secular pro-minority veneer in Kerala.

He said the LDF would also campaign against RSS’s apologists in the Congress, allegedly Shashi Tharoor and Digvijaya Singh, to expose the Congress’s Hindu majoratarian mindset, which reckoned minorities and Dalits as subaltern citizens.

Mr. Govindan said the en masse defection of Congress ward members to the BJP in Mattathur in Thrissur had promoted minority communities, chiefly Muslims, to view the UDF with scepticism.