Pinarayi Vijayan Is Done: The Rise, Reign, and Ruin of Kerala’s Last Czar

He came from nothing. He built everything. And then he became the very monster he once claimed to fight.

That is the story of Pinarayi Vijayan — and Kerala deserves to hear every ugly chapter of it.

The Boy from Pinarayi

He was born in 1944 in a small village in Kannur that shares his name. Poor family, communist roots, a world lit by the promise of revolution. Young Pinarayi entered student politics through the Students Federation of India, cut his teeth in the DYFI, and climbed through the CPI(M) machinery with the cold patience of a man who knew exactly where he wanted to sit. For decades he was the party’s iron man — the enforcer, the organiser, the one nobody dared to cross in the Kannur bloodlands where political violence was practically a cultural institution.

He wasn’t elected on charm. He was elected on fear. That distinction matters.

The Rise: Thirty Years in the Shadows

From state secretary to Politburo member, Pinarayi didn’t build influence through consensus. He built it through elimination — of rivals, of dissent, of any voice inside the CPI(M) that threatened his grip. By the time he became Chief Minister in 2016, he was not a leader the party chose. He was a force the party had no choice but to accept.

He came in promising clean governance, digital Kerala, infrastructure-led transformation. And for a moment — just a moment — people believed him. That belief was the biggest political con job this state has seen.

The SNC-Lavalin Rot

Let’s start with the scandal that should have ended his career before it truly began.

The Kerala State Electricity Board handed a ₹374 crore renovation contract to the Canadian firm SNC-Lavalin — a company later globally notorious for bribery. Pinarayi was the Electricity Minister. The CBI filed a chargesheet. The case dragged through courts for decades. He walked free not because he was innocent, but because the Indian legal system is magnificent at ensuring powerful men never actually face consequences. He wore that acquittal like a medal. It was, in fact, a blueprint.

The Reign: A Court of Silence

When Pinarayi became CM in 2016, something happened in Kerala that no one talks about loudly enough: the cabinet stopped functioning like a cabinet. Ministers stopped speaking their minds. Senior party leaders stopped pushing back. The press became careful. The bureaucracy became terrified. Even within the CPI(M) — a party built on comrades challenging comrades — the Politburo voice from Thiruvananthapuram brooked zero contradiction.

This is textbook narcissism in power. Not the pop-psychology variety. The clinical kind: an environment constructed so that no information that displeases the leader ever reaches him, and anyone who tries to deliver it is made an example of. Kerala’s cabinet became a room full of people nodding at a man who had decided he was always right. That is not governance. That is a court.

The Family Business of Corruption

Now we get to the part the CPM loyalists spend their waking hours trying to explain away.

His daughter, Veena Vijayan, runs a company called Exalogic Solutions. During her father’s tenure, this company collected crores in consultancy fees from firms that held government contracts. The Income Tax department raided her offices. The details that emerged were not ambiguous. This was not a coincidence. This was a chief minister’s daughter monetising his proximity to power, and everybody in Kerala knows it.

His son-in-law, Mohammed Riyas, was made Public Works Minister — a ministry that controls every road, building, and infrastructure contract in the state. Let that sit. The CM’s son-in-law runs PWD. And Pinarayi has made no secret of grooming Riyas as a future face of the party. Dynastic communism. The ideological absurdity of it is almost poetic, if it weren’t so brazenly corrupt.

The gold smuggling case. The Life Mission scam. The Karuvannur Cooperative Bank collapse that wiped out the savings of thousands of ordinary Keralites linked directly to CPM functionaries. Each scandal more brazen than the last, each investigation slower than molasses, each outcome more predictable: nothing sticks because the man at the top has ensured that the systems which should hold him accountable report, ultimately, to him.

The People He Forgot

Here is where it stops being a political story and becomes a moral one.

Kudumbashree workers — mostly women, mostly from the most economically vulnerable sections of Kerala society — marched for their wages. They protested for months. They sat in the sun, they raised their voices, they made their case with the quiet dignity of people who have nothing left to lose. Pinarayi Vijayan gave them silence. Not a meeting. Not an acknowledgment. Not even the basic respect of a government representative sitting across a table and saying: we hear you.

This is the same man who built his entire political identity on the liberation of Kerala’s poor. The same man who speaks endlessly about social justice from air-conditioned rooms while Kudumbashree women wait outside in the heat for a response that never comes.

The poor, in Pinarayi’s Kerala, exist to vote. Not to be heard.

The Ruin

In 2025 and early 2026, the Sabarimala gold theft scandal led to the arrest of senior CPI(M) leaders, including former Travancore Devaswom Board (TDB) presidents A. Padmakumar and N. Vasu. The Special Investigation Team (SIT) and Enforcement Directorate (ED) investigated the misappropriation of gold from temple artifacts, leading the opposition to call it a decisive blow to the ruling party’s image.

The 2024 Lok Sabha results delivered the verdict Kerala’s drawing rooms had been whispering for years. The CPM was decimated. The state that had returned them to power in 2021 turned its back decisively. Because people — even people who vote out of habit, out of loyalty, out of family tradition — eventually notice when the man in charge has stopped governing and started reigning.

Pinarayi Vijayan is not done because his enemies defeated him. He is done because he defeated himself — by becoming everything a communist leader was supposed to fight: unaccountable, dynastic, deaf to the poor, and convinced that power, once earned, is owed forever.

Kerala built him. Kerala is now left to clean up what he became.

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