Two more leaders from Kerala’s ruling Left Democratic Front have opened up about backstabbing and caste discrimination just months after a minister faced casteism at the hands of temple priests.

Former ministers and CPM and CPI veterans G. Sudhakaran and C. Divakaran have revealed how they lost elections due to either backstabbing or caste considerations, leaving their own parties in silence mode.

The CPI leader’s disclosure came just three months after minister for Devaswom (temple affairs) and the Dalit face of the LDF government, K. Radhakrishnan, revealed how he faced caste discrimination at the hands of two temple priests while presiding over a government event.

One of the senior-most CPI leaders, Divakaran had held the civil supplies portfolio in the LDF government headed by V.S. Achuthanandan from 2006 to 2011.

“I had contested in four elections and won three of them. The reason for my loss in the fourth election was extreme caste discrimination,” he said while addressing a gathering after launching a book on social renaissance at the Press Club in Thiruvananthapuram recently.

“People asked each other if I was their man. This is a very local usage (to find out if one belonged to a particular caste). I was sure of losing once I heard that,” he said, claiming he overheard people asking each other about his caste during the campaign.

While he did not specify the election he lost due to caste considerations, Divakaran, who belongs to the backward class, had lost to Shashi Tharoor, an upper caste Nair, of the Congress in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls from Thiruvananthapuram constituency.

The CPI veteran cited the secretariat in Thiruvananthapuram, the power centre of the government, as a hub of casteism. “I had worked from the secretariat for five years (when he was minister). It is Kerala’s epicentre for upper-caste domination. Nothing can be done.”

“One would be blackmailed and sidelined from public life for doing something that doesn’t amuse certain people. This continues even today in various forms. People still have the slave mentality to work for upper castes by taking it as their fate,” he added.

Months after the incident on Republic Day in 2023, Radhakrishnan had recalled how the priests at Nambiatrakovval Siva Temple in Payyannur, a town in the CPM bastion of Kannur, refused to hand him a small lamp used to light the ceremonial “nilavilakku”. Instead, they just left it on the floor for the minister to pick it up.

Sudhakaran, who was a popular public works minister in the previous LDF government helmed by Pinarayi Vijayan, claimed that a local leader ensured his defeat in the 2001 state polls against M.M. Hassan of the Congress from the Kayamkulam constituency.

“There are some who carry out backstabbing as an art and science. Such people exist even today, existed yesterday and will be there tomorrow,” Sudhakaran said while addressing a memorial of socialist P.A. Harris in Kayamkulam recently.

“Some of them stab with the knives they carry under their clothes,” Sudhakaran said figuratively, pointing out how his party colleagues ensured his defeat.