The signal is getting messy. In the hyper-localized, high-stakes operating system of Kerala politics, there’s a bug that keeps popping up every time the national leadership tries to sync with the regional branch. The latest glitch? Mani Shankar Aiyar decided to go off-script. Again.

At a recent book launch, the veteran Congress leader decided to shower Pinarayi Vijayan, the Chief Minister of Kerala and a man who treats political survival like a dark-mode endurance test, with a level of praise that would make a campaign manager sweat. Vijayan, never one to let a PR opportunity go to waste, caught the ball and threw it back. He called Aiyar’s remarks "charismatic words."

It’s the kind of exchange that looks great on a teleprompter in Delhi but feels like a hardware failure for the Congress workers on the ground in Thiruvananthapuram.

Let’s look at the hardware. You have the Congress party, a legacy system trying desperately to reboot itself through the INDIA alliance. Then you have the CPI(M) in Kerala, which is effectively the incumbent OS that refuses to let any third-party apps—meaning the Congress-led UDF—get any meaningful CPU time. Nationally, they’re supposed to be running on the same server, fighting the "good fight." Locally, they’re trying to delete each other’s partitions.

Aiyar is the ultimate legacy feature. He’s brilliant, unpredictable, and possesses a total lack of a mute button. By hailing Vijayan, he didn’t just offer a compliment; he spiked the local Congress unit’s drinks. Imagine being a local Congress worker who spends their Tuesday protesting against the K-Rail SilverLine project—a $8 billion infrastructure bet that’s as controversial as a forced software update—only to see your party’s national veteran basically ask the rival CEO for an autograph. It’s not just awkward. It’s a total system crash.

Vijayan’s response was a masterclass in low-energy dominance. By calling Aiyar’s words "charismatic," he didn’t concede any ground. He didn't promise a merger. He just accepted the praise like a king accepting a tribute from a neighboring, slightly confused province. He knows exactly what this does. It makes the local Congress leadership look like they’re shouting into a void while their bosses in the north are busy exchanging pleasantries with the enemy.

The price tag for this kind of "charismatic" cross-talk isn’t cheap. For the Congress, it’s the erosion of brand clarity. If the guy at the top of the rival ticket is someone your national leaders admire, why should the average voter bother switching? It’s a marketing nightmare. You can’t sell a "Change the Government" platform when your own party elders are giving the current management a five-star review on Yelp.

We’ve seen this movie before. The INDIA alliance is trying to build a unified front-end, but the back-end is a spaghetti-code mess of regional rivalries and historical grudges. In Kerala, the friction is real. It’s about jobs, it’s about the gold smuggling scandals that periodically clog the news cycle, and it’s about a political culture that doesn't do "nuance" very well.

Aiyar probably thinks he’s being statesman-like. He’s playing the long game, looking at the national map and seeing a need for unity. But politics isn't a strategy game played on a clean UI; it’s a messy, analog business of keeping your base from jumping ship. Every time a Congress leader praises a Left leader, a few more bytes of the party’s local identity get corrupted.

The optics are broken, and the patch notes aren't coming anytime soon. Vijayan gets to walk away looking like the grown-up in the room, the "charismatic" leader who can win over even his fiercest critics. Meanwhile, the Congress in Kerala has to go back to the drawing board to explain why they’re fighting a man their own leaders seem to think is doing a pretty decent job.

It’s a classic case of a national vision being totally incompatible with local reality. The Congress is trying to run a global app on a local network that hasn't been upgraded since the 1970s. You can talk about unity all you want, but when the "charismatic words" start flying, someone’s bound to get hit by the shrapnel.

The real question is whether the Congress leadership actually cares about the local fallout, or if they’ve decided that Kerala is a sacrifice they’re willing to make for a national reboot that might never even happen. One thing is certain: the "charismatic" exchange didn't cost Vijayan a single vote, but it definitely left the Congress looking for a technician.

How many more compliments can the Congress’s local credibility survive before it just turns into a sub-folder of the CPI(M)?