Straight bat: Non-committed voters give fronts a run for their money

Non-committed voters, presumed to be not less than 15 per cent, are giving the jitters to the UDF and LDF, who have no effective strategy as yet to win them over in a State where the total vote margin between rival fronts is tiny. It was
0.89 per cent in Assembly polls 2011 and 0.13 per cent in the civic polls last year.

The non-committed segment is the strongest in central Kerala, stronger in southern districts and just about 10 per cent in northern Kerala. Their size whittles down significantly in constituencies comprising party villages in northern Malabar.

Over the years, the tribe of committed loyal voters had shrunk mainly because educated voters started relating to candidates with better credentials than their party labels. This segment is not swayed by propaganda but make its choices on the basis of available information and perceptions, formed from the experience of the past five years of governance.

These voters are young, unlike the old whose loyalties remain party-bound. The
young voters also have multiple identities of caste, class, region and religion, like their parents. But their aspirations for better living standards and pursuit of liberal values make them behave as a class and remain non-committal, party-wise.

A poll tracker by Kairali TV channel in mid-January points to a higher percentage of non-committed voters. It says that in central Kerala the size of this segment could be between 30 per cent and 40 per cent, above 10 per cent in north Kerala and between 20 per cent and 30 per cent in southern Kerala.

Dr K M Sajad Ibrahim at the Kerala University Department of Politics says the non-committed voter size is still an assumption. But such voters are for real and make or mar destinies of fronts and candidates. Such voters are volatile. Kairali survey respondents said development and law and order were two crucial issues on which they felt Oommen Chandy Government had scored better. But on corruption and a host of other issues, respondents gave very poor scores to the current dispensation.

Dr Ibrahim said Congress had suffered the worst in terms of loyalty erosion over the years while there was a growing Leftist deficit in the LDF. But Congress made up for its dwindling support base by aligning with the community-based Muslim League and Kerala Congress.

What finally determines the poll outcome will be the popular perception of the development agenda and factors of anti-incumbency. The Kerala voter has always been adversarial towards the incumbent Government, except in 1979 after the Emergency, when he voted in the ruling
dispensation.