“The first requisite for the happiness of the people,” Karl Marx prescribed, “is the abolition of religion.” But then he did not have to fight elections in India. Kerala’s Marxists would have told him that religion is pretty much a requisite for electoral happiness. They would have presented Mr K.S. Manoj Kurisinkal, the Communist Party of India (Marxist)’s candidate for the Alappuzha parliamentary constituency, as a case study. By choosing this erstwhile leader of the Kerala Catholic Youth Movement as its nominee, the party has blatantly sought to exploit his religious credentials. However, for a party that has made secularism its main poll plank against the political Hindutva of the Bharatiya Janata Party, it is necessary to put up a pretence. Hence the party’s attempt to drop one part of the candidate’s name which has an obvious Christian association. It may not be enough to ridicule it; the duplicity betrays the cynicism that has come to permeate Indian politics. Coming from the communists who never tire of holier-than-thou posturings, it seems particularly revolting. But this is not the first time that Kerala’s communists said one thing about ridding politics of caste and creed and did something very different. They struck up an electoral alliance with the Muslim League after criticizing the Congress for years for doing the same. And, when things changed, they tried to deceive themselves and others by calling it a mistake. It is possible that the party would some day pretend to repent Mr Kurisinkal’s nomination, calling it another historic blunder.

Unfortunately, this cynical use of caste and creed for electoral gains is not limited either to communists or to Kerala. The way all political parties do this across the country has become a blot on Indian democracy. One would have expected the curse of caste or communal politics to recede as Indian democracy matures. Quite the contrary seems to be happening. Worse, instead of fighting the menace, the parties are competing with each other for caste and communal vote banks. The result is a sorry spectacle in which elections are fought, not on ideologies and issues, but on sectarian considerations. And this is done increasingly in the open with no sense of guilt deterring the parties. True, the Election Commission’s code of conduct and other legal mechanisms exist to check such aberrations . But laws are of little help if the parties conspire to flout them by overt or covert means. And the parties seem to be revelling in the theory of the end of ideology. The only hope lies in the people seeing through the politicians’ dangerous game.