V D Satheesan was never the obvious choice for Kerala’s next chief minister, except to the voters.There is a photograph in my head from the Kerala Literature Festival in 2024, of Satheesan standing in the corner of a tent at Kozhikode beach, asking me about a Bulgarian novelist. I had just interviewed Georgi Gospodinov, the International Booker winner, who was wandering around the festival largely unrecognised. When I mentioned this to Satheesan in passing, expecting nothing more than polite acknowledgement, he immediately wanted to know where Gospodinov was, whether they could meet, and what I had asked him.AdvertisementAnd then, before I could answer, he gave me a 15-minute lesson on Time Shelter, Gospodinov’s novel about a clinic where each floor recreates a different decade, where patients with dementia choose which era to live in. He had read it. He had thought about it. He spoke about memory and nostalgia and the European right with the seriousness of a man who reads at midnight and then calls the author the next morning — writers in Kerala have actually received calls from Satheesan when he was the leader of the Opposition.I remember thinking that afternoon, watching him move through the festival meeting one notable intellectual after another, that this is the Congress leader in Kerala who least resembles a Congress leader. There were four Congress figures at the festival that year. Two of them, including Shafi Parambil and Rahul Mamkootathil, were there essentially as Satheesan’s people. The fourth was Shashi Tharoor, who had two back-to-back sessions that Sunday, one on the larger problems of India and another on cricket, and a second event in Kochi later the same evening that the organisers had double-booked him for without quite working out that Kochi was four hours away by road. They refused to take his no for an answer. A private chopper was sent to airlift him out of Kozhikode. Satheesan stayed back and worked the room. He was on the ground and was seen to be.Satheesan has spent his entire career being the not-obvious choice. He was once tipped to head KSU. It did not happen. He was tipped for Youth Congress. It did not happen. He was tipped for KPCC president. It did not happen. He has written about these disappointments in his book, which is itself an unusual thing for a Congress politician to do, to admit on paper that you were passed over. His father was a forest officer, his mother a homemaker. He is from a Nair family but has spent 30 years refusing to bend the knee to the NSS, the dominant caste organisation of Malayali Nairs.AdvertisementAlso Read | V D Satheesan is new Kerala CM. It’s also a win for democratic competitionWhat he had instead was his constituency in central Kerala, Paravur, and a method. He lost his first election in Paravur in 1996. But he stayed in the constituency for the next five years, doing the work, and won in 2001, and has won every time since, to the point where the Left no longer treats Paravur as a Left seat like they used to do before Satheesan.That method, of consistency over charisma, has been the whole career. It is also why he could read the Madhav Gadgil report correctly when most of his party was running from it, why he could go at Thomas Isaac on economics when nobody else in the Congress wanted to take that fight, and why the cultural Left in Kerala has slowly, almost reluctantly, started to recognise him as one of theirs in everything but the party flag.This is why the public protests after the election were not really about Satheesan personally. They were about the perception that the Congress high command, having watched the voters deliver 63 seats and an unmistakable mandate, was about to hand the chair to KC Venugopal anyway. The legislators preferred Venugopal. He raises funds, manages crises, and perhaps most importantly, has Rahul Gandhi’s ear. Forty-plus MLAs had reportedly vouched for him. But the public knew, in the way the public in Kerala still occasionally knows, that the mandate was for the other man.So Satheesan now inherits a cabinet that did not want him, a caste organisation that opposed him, and a state that expected him. He has spoken at length about Kerala’s fiscal stress, environmental problems, drug menace and the cultural drift of Malayali youth. He now has to fix some of it. Kerala’s voters punish non-delivery with a thoroughness that is almost ritual.you may likeAlso Read | Is the Left really outdated? The truth about the Kerala model and social harmonyBut for the first time in a long time, the Congress in Kerala has a leader who reads Gospodinov at midnight and stays back to meet the cultural notables in the afternoon that he could very well spend with a caste leader or party funder. That combination of cultural seriousness and ground patience is rarer in this party than it should be.A loyalist of his, I spoke to recently, put the whole sidelining question more sharply than I had heard it put before. If somebody fails an exam and gets punished, we can understand that, he said. What is the logic of winning the exam and still getting punished? Satheesan won Paravur six times and was never made a minister. He arrives at Cliff House without a single day of executive experience behind him, which is both the most striking fact of this transition and the one his rivals inside the Congress will quietly hold against him from week one.He also arrives at a moment when the BJP, for the first time, has two of its tallest state leaders, Rajeev Chandrashekar and V Muraleedharan, sitting inside the Kerala assembly. So the next five years will be about whether the Congress in Kerala can still be the natural alternative to the Left, or whether that role is now contested. The Congress leadership I have been speaking to in the last week is openly hoping that Satheesan is the man who keeps the party in power for the next 10 years, the way Oommen Chandy was once expected to. Whether he can is a different question, and one he will have to answer largely alone.The writer is Head of Videos, IE Malayalam