I can't claim to have got my mind around it to a very useful degree, or around Indian politics generally, but it's rather magnificent to get a glimpse of it all.
Here are a few pictures I snapped, which illustrate some of it. In recent times, Kerala's often been governed by a left wing alliance led by the Communist Party of India Marxist. When they are out of power it's been a coalition led by the good old Congress Party. The third big force in Indian politics - 'new broom' Prime Minister Narendra Modi's BJP - hasn't yet quite got there in Kerala, but we saw a very serious and enthusiastic march by a group of supporters, waving their new brooms and machetes rather menacingly to signal their intent to clean up the place.
Another march, pictured below, was by supporters of the incumbent Congress state government. They too looked rather joyless. They looked very convinced indeed about the seriousness of their task (to keep it unclean maybe!) or dare I suggest that they were just being paid to do it?
You'll notice there are four different brands of communist parties represented in these pictures. As I said, it's complicated. Here's Wikipedia on Kerala politics. They know it better than me:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Kerala
The burnt-out bus? I'm not sure. It's on the border between Kerala and Tamil Nadu. I tried to find references to it, and learned that in September last year, in response to the jailing of the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister for corruption, there was widespread rioting, and burning of government buildings and buses. Maybe this was one of those buses? And I just read that before her political career, she had been a film star - that's another common quirk of Indian politics.
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