In his column TharoorThink ( Indian Express, April 30, 2026), Shashi Tharoor warns that the rise of “identity politics” in Kerala threatens social cohesion and governance.

Readers like me may admire his ornate English prose and intellectual flourish, yet seldom agree with his political arguments, particularly his tendency toward a kind of “soft Hindutva” accommodation of tradition and custom. Whether defending the traditional restriction on menstruating women entering the Sabarimala Temple or writing 'Why I Am a Hindu', he has repeatedly adopted positions that seek reconciliation with conservative religious sentiment.

And now, in this article, he advances yet another astonishing claim that the rise of identity politics threatens social cohesion, governance!

Certainly, the expansionist and polarising politics of the Bharatiya Janata Party has intensified identity-based mobilisation across India, including in Kerala. But the deeper problem with Shashi Tharoor’s argument lies elsewhere: it rests on the historically untenable assumption that Kerala’s politics was once essentially “development-oriented,” harmonious, and somehow above caste and identity.

The very phrase “social cohesion” is itself revealing. It functions as a sophisticated substitute for harmony or samrasta, a linguistic and ideological device long deployed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to counter, dilute, and displace the radical democratic demand for equality.

This is not history. It is political nostalgia manufactured into narrative. Was Kerala not among the most rigidly stratified caste societies in the subcontinent? Were large sections of lower-caste women not denied the right to cover their upper bodies? Does the memory of the so-called “breast tax” and the story of Nangeli not survive precisely because caste power extended even to the control of women’s bodies?

Was untouchability not brutally institutionalised? Was it not common for Namboodiris to have multiple marital alliances in Nair households. Were oppressed communities not denied access to public roads, temples, education, and dignity? Is the struggle of Ayyankali, who emerged from the Pulaya community and fought for the right of Dalits to walk public roads and access education, not central to Kerala’s democratic history?

And what of Narayana Guru? Was his movement not an assertion against caste hierarchy itself? Was it not identity-conscious, anti-Brahmanical, and socially transformative at the same time? Is it not true that the major non-Brahmin communities of Kerala were denied entry into the Vaikom Mahadeva Temple and even barred from using the roads around it, and that Mahatma Gandhi himself eventually stepped back from the movement against this discrimination? No politics in Kerala stood outside these realities- neither of the Congress nor of the Left.

Even communist mobilisation among peasants and workers was deeply intertwined with the assertion of communities such as the Ezhavas. To pretend otherwise is to misunderstand the very sociology of Kerala politics. The Left may have spoken the language of class, but caste and community realities always remained embedded within representation, organisation, and electoral calculations. Informal caste and religious balancing in ticket distribution was hardly absent from Kerala’s parliamentary culture.

One need not go very far for evidence against Shashi Tharoor’s claim. A ready reference exists in an article published in The Indian Express on May 23, 2016, the Lokniti-CSDS post-poll analysis titled “Why This Vote for Change Was Different” by Sandeep Shastri and K. M. Sajid Ibrahim. The article itself offers ample evidence that caste, community, and identity have long been deeply embedded in Kerala’s political and electoral landscape, contrary to the nostalgic image Tharoor now seeks to project. ‘The emergence of the BJP has also contributed to a shift in the social base of parties. The Christian and Muslim communities were largely seen as the vote base of the UDF while the Ezhava community had more often than not backed the LDF. The Nairs had gravitated towards the UDF in the last elections. There is a three-way split of the Nair and Ezhava vote, with the BJP doing better among the Nairs and the UDF better among the Ezhavas.”

Moreover, Shashi Tharoor’s formulation creates a false binary between “development politics” and “identity politics,” as though struggles for dignity, recognition, representation, and anti-caste transformation are somehow secondary or inferior to the discourse of governance and development. Yet the history of Kerala itself thoroughly disproves this distinction.

Land reforms, public education, temple-entry struggles, access to roads, labour rights, and social mobility were never caste-neutral processes. They emerged through social conflict, assertion, and the democratisation of power. What is called “identity politics” today was, for many oppressed communities, the language through which they first entered history as equal human beings.

The contradiction in Tharoor’s position becomes sharper given that the author of ‘Why I Am a Hindu’ himself publicly articulated a civilisational Hindu identity. If identities are politically dangerous in themselves, why is the assertion of Hindu identity acceptable while caste-based or anti-caste assertions are treated as threats to cohesion?

Kerala’s Muslim and Christian communities, too, have long possessed distinct institutional, educational, and social networks. Their identities have always shaped political negotiations and public life. To speak now as if Kerala once existed beyond all identity formations is intellectually disingenuous.

The real issue, then, is not the existence of identity politics. The issue is: whose identity is treated as legitimate, universal, cultured, and invisible, and whose identity is dismissed as divisive?

For centuries, Brahmanical patriarchy operated precisely through selective control over knowledge, history, and legitimacy. Erasures in historiography, silences around caste violence, and the reduction of anti-caste struggles into mere “social reform” were never politically neutral acts. That too was politics.Kerala’s parliamentary culture has never been outside those structures of negotiation, hierarchy, and power.

To reduce Kerala’s transformation merely to “development politics” while downplaying the historic role of anti-caste assertion, gender struggles, and community-based democratisation is not only historically shallow, it risks erasing the very forces that made modern Kerala possible.

- The writer is the editor of Streekaal, a Hindi feminist magazine, and the author and editor of several books, including the acclaimed series Bharat ke Rajneta (India’s Statesmen).

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