M A Baby
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A brief biography
As of 2025 April
BS AnilKumar, April 9, 2025: The Times of India
Unlike what his name suggests, Mariam Alexander Baby, the newly elected 71-year-old CPM general secretary, is a plus-size man. You will always find him wearing a short-sleeved shirt and mundu (dhoti), with a cloth bag slung usually over his right shoulder. Unlike many other comrades in his party, the man with a short-trimmed white beard wears a winsome smile.
His election last Sunday at the party congress in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, was unanimous, but not unopposed. The CPM Kerala unit itself was not initially in favour of his candidature. It wanted Brinda Karat to run the party. However, the Bengal unit fiercely opposed it, and a section of leaders led by politburo member Ashok Dhawale was projected as Sitaram Yechury’s successor. The Kerala unit was then left with little choice but to go with Prakash Karat’s suggestion and pick Baby. For Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan, Baby was certainly a better choice than Dhawale, who always sided with his bitter rival, former CM VS Achuthanandan, in the party’s internal fights.
But things were not always smooth between Pinarayi and Baby. Baby had stolen a march on Pinarayi in the late 1990s. He was VS’s go-to man, not Pinarayi.
The year was 1998. Baby was known internally as VS’s ‘principal henchman’. Pinarayi, too, was an aide of VS. A party state conference was underway at Palakkad. VS was up against a tough challenge from a group of senior CITU leaders. There was no chance of a consensus candidate emerging. So, VS forced an election and the task fell on Baby to swing things for him. He got in touch with pro-CITU delegates who would vote and won them over to VS’s side. And VS won.
The message was not lost on Pinarayi that VS depended on Baby to get things done; it was obvious who wielded more power, Pinarayi or Baby. Then things changed some years later. By 2005, Pinarayi had fallen out with VS, and Baby had quietly moved into the Pinarayi camp. At the state conference at Malappuram that year, VS took on Pinarayi, but met with a humiliating defeat. It was not lost on the party bosses whose side Baby had taken this time. Such switching of loyalties made Baby a suspect. Could one trust him? Baby, too, realised that it was time to stay neutral. He had learnt a key lesson, and has since never taken sides in internal fights. And that stood him in good stead 20 years later, when he was elected CPM general secretary in Madurai, only the second person from Kerala to hold the post after EMS Namboodiripad.
An RS MP At 32
Baby was born in a Latin Christian family in a coastal village in Kerala’s Kollam district on April 5, 1954. His entry into politics was as a student leader, rising through the ranks of SFI and DYFI in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He, however, never graduated, dropping out of college finally. Many of those who went to college with him recall Baby as an affable but fiery student activist, but someone who knew where to draw the line: Baby never advocated violence on campus. Once a member of CPM, his rise was meteoric. The party sent him to Rajya Sabha in 1986 at the age of 32, where he was an MP for two terms. He was a favourite of several national leaders like Basava Punnayya. During those days, when Pinarayi Vijayan had yet to make his mark, Baby was even touted as a probable CM candidate for Kerala and future state secretary. But destiny had something else in store.
Launched Kochi Biennale
Baby grew up playing football, like most boys in the coastal state. Just that he was fairly good at it. And then he developed an interest in art and music. Many leading artists became friends with him. But as he circled the art world, he seemed to drift a bit from the grind of daily politics. Worse, his hobnobbing with elite artists earned him many critics in the party for deviating from “Marxian principles”.
But the criticism didn’t have any long-term consequences. VS, during his term as CM between 2006 and 2011, made him the education and cultural affairs minister (despite him having aligned with Pinarayi).
Baby was instrumental in starting the Kochi Biennale, an international platform for contemporary art. The same Baby, however, courted controversy by referring to Prof T J Joseph, whose right-hand palm was chopped off by PFI workers, as a “stupid” fellow. He was also accused of trying to propagate atheism in school textbooks.
Things started going wrong after that. He contested from Kollam in the 2014 general elections and was defeated badly. That virtually sealed his parliamentary career. Then, in 2022, when former state secretary Kodiyeri Balakrishnan passed away, Pinarayi handpicked M V Govindan as the new secretary, even though he was much junior to Baby. And then Madurai happened, breathing new life into Baby’s career.
Tough Road Ahead
Baby is taking over as CPM general secretary when CPM’s fortunes are almost at an all-time low. The party is in office in only Kerala, and is not even in the reckoning in West Bengal, which CPM governed for 34 straight years from 1977 till 2011, and Tripura, where the party helmed the state for 20 years from 1993 to 2013. Nationally, it has only 4 MPs in the Lok Sabha. In the 2024 general elections, the party’s vote share was a dismal 1.8%.
His task is difficult. He has to strengthen the party’s ties with Congress, which involves a delicate balancing act. In Kera-la, CPM contests against Congress in state polls, while it needs to put up a united fight against BJP in LS polls. The contradictions can be overwhelming. And then, he needs to breathe life into the state units in Bengal and Tripura. Most importantly, he needs to make the party relevant again nationally. Just over 20 years ago, in 2004, CPM had 43 MPs in the Lok Sabha, a sizable number that made the party count. He also needs to mend ties with CPI, and that might prove difficult. CPI leaders say as a cultural minister, Baby never honoured their requests for posts in cultural departments run by the govt. CPI state secretary Veliyam Bhargavan had then said Baby was a “fake man” who defied the rules of coalition politics.
But Baby is known for comebacks. He is soft-spoken, friendly, a person who always takes phone calls, and if he ever misses one, he makes it a point of returning the call. He is well-read, fluent in both Hindi and English, and has the rare knack of getting along with difficult individuals and winning them over. And no one has ever accused him of corruption, a rare thing in today’s politics.
