Thiruvananthapuram, March 17: If it is elections, it must be time for Kerala’s political parties to swap their progressive hat for a caste cap.

No party is immune to the communal syndrome, whether it is the Congress that swears by Mahatma Gandhi or the CPM that shuns caste for class.

The cast of candidates in the current elections underscores the importance parties attach to candidates’ communities. But the Left can’t afford to be blatant about it unlike the Congress-led combine that openly courts communities.

In coastal Alappuzha, the CPM has chosen Dr K.S. Manoj Kurisinkal, who was until the other day a leader of the Kerala Catholic Youth Movement, as the party’s candidate to contest on the hammer and sickle symbol.

Many saw it as a virtual CPM coup against the Congress, which is pressing sitting member V.M. Sudheeran, whose impartial rulings during an earlier stint as Speaker had made him one of the most respected politicians in the state, to reconsider his decision to quit electoral politics.

The CPM chipped off the surname Kurisinkal (the name of the candidate’s ancestral home which translates as at the Cross) to make Manoj more compatible to the party’s ideology.

But Alappuzha Bishop Stephen Athipozhiyil has forbidden diocesan and parish councils from campaigning for any particular candidate, which implies that the church will not support Manoj.

In Ernakulam, the commercial hub where Christians are a decisive force, the CPM has chosen Sebastian Paul, a Latin Catholic.

In Mukundapuram near Thrissur, the party has fielded former minister Lonappan Nambadan to tap the support of the Orthodox Syrian Church.

The CPM’s candidate in the Muslim-dominated Manjeri in the north is former government chief whip T.K. Hamsa.

The CPI pulled out P.K.Vasudevan Nair, a former chief minister renowned for uprightness in public life, from retirement to take on V.S. Sivakumar, who is seeking re-election in Thiruvananthapuram. Both candidates belong to the Nair community, a force to reckon with in the capital.

However, on surer political turf, the CPM has gone by the book and given weight to candidates’ political profiles. In Kasargod in the north, it has fielded P. Karunakaran, the general manager of the CPM’s party organ, Deshabhimani.

Kerala is also home to exclusive caste organisations like the Nair Service Society and the pro-Ezhava Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam that function as social pressure groups.

It is an electoral irony that such exclusive organisations come a cropper when they contest on their own. But their potential to play spoilers makes them valuable to the mainstream parties.

The most successful community-based political formations are the Muslim League and the Kerala Congress, the latter sustained mainly by the Catholic farming community.