In evaluating democracy in the developing world, scholars have generally focused on the nature of the regime in power, and have directed much of their attention to the role of political parties and other organized political actors in the electoral arena.

If making a democratic state has been difficult, making a responsive state has been even more difficult. Nowhere is this more so the case than in India. The general picture of Indian democracy stands as a reminder that there is no linear progression to democracy. Much as the robustness of India’s democratic institutions have been rightfully celebrated, the effectiveness of those institutions is increasingly in doubt. Fifty-four years of almost uninterrupted democratic rule has done little to reduce the multiple exclusions of India’s subalterns. Digging below the surface, moreover, one finds that within the unitary institutional domain marked by the boundaries of the Indian nation-state, there are marked degrees of democracy. India’s post-transition history has produced multiple trajectories of democratization. The most notable example of democratic deepening is the case of the south-western state of Kerala which stands out not only because of its storied history of popular movements led by the Communist Party of India - Marxist (CPI(M) or CPM) and of an activist state that has achieved some of the most dramatic social and redistributive gains in the developing world, but also because since 1996 is has been the site of one of the boldest, most self-conscious and most extensive experiments in empowered participatory governance.

This chapter describes the Kerala's democratization trajectory as an explicit political project aimed at dismantling entrenched forms of bureaucratic domination and patronage politics by reinvigorating Kerala’s tradition of direct, movement-based political engagement and fundamentally democratising the institutional character of the state.