Political and Administrative Hegemony of Left Democratic Front in Kerala in Policy Making and Policy Implementation with special reference to People’s Plan Campaign

This paper critically reviews the political hegemony of the Left Democratic Front (LDF) in Kerala over the 1996 People’s Plan Campaign (PPC) and examines how it helped the LDF to capture local government and its apparatuses in the state. It closely looks into the correlation between the political and administrative hegemony and policy making and policy implementation process with the help of the empirical evidences and experiments rooted in PPC. It further looks into the role of political hegemony and dominance of LDF in relation to Covid-19 pandemic management and assesses its role in generating performance legitimacy to the ruling LDF in the 2020 local government elections and 2021 Kerala State Assembly Elections. The introductory part of the paper discusses the emergence of 1996 PPC as one of the significant policy initiatives initiated by Left intellectuals and political elites in Kerala. The paper argues that the PPC campaign conceptualized by the LDF granted them political dominance not only in the areas of democratic decentralization and local governments but also in the field of public administration. The first part of the paper offers discussions on the evolution, strengths, challenges, and weaknesses in the PPC framework in Kerala since 1996. The second part of the paper looks into the role played by Kudumbashree, an offspring of the 1996 PPC, in leveraging political patronage and hegemony for the LDF by evolving into a reckoning force not only in empowering women but also the state at large. It also critically revisits the PPC and argues that the decentralization experiences in Kerala was operated within a controlled framework in which local governments were downsized by the state. The third part of the paper focuses on the revival of the PPC in 2016 and the fourth part of the paper discusses how clientelism and populist welfare schemes of the LDF government, especially during crises including the two great floods of 2018 and 2019 and the Covid-19 pandemic empowered their chances to normalize political hegemony. The paper further argues that the foundations laid by the first phase of the PPC in 1996 and second phase in 2016 had a significant role in generating performance legitimacy for the LDF in the 2020 local government elections and 2022 assembly elections in Kerala. The paper concludes that the LDF government used PPC used as a tool for political mobilization by infusing it with welfare and populistic measures and converted it into a sort of vote-bank politics by giving a perception that they follow a hegemonic and non-hegemonic generative politics. The crucial question that the paper attempts to determine is that the democratic decentralization under PPC can either be regarded as a “viable democratic model” that lies between the opposing viewpoints of “nothing can be done” and “everything can be done” or one that encompasses both hegemonic and non-hegemonic generative approaches.