(This is the seventh in a series of insightful reports from the ground, titled The Race From India to Bharat. The author travels all across India as 960 million voters get ready to celebrate the largest festival of democracy in the world: the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. What do ordinary Indians think and feel about the past, present, and future of India? Are they convinced that the old fault lines are healing?)
(Read part one here, part two here, part three here, part four here, part five here, and part six here.)
There is a deep churn in Kerala society and politics that could have profound implications for the future even as the Congress-led alliance looks set to repeat its 2019 sweep in the state.
It took the author exactly one hour by car to travel from the birthplace of Adi Shankaracharya in Palady to Saint Francis Church in Fort Kochi where Vasco Da Gama was buried after he died in 1524. It was early in the morning and the traffic had not yet started. Three days spent in God’s Own Country reinforced the belief that there is no other melting pot like India anywhere else in the world.