Elections to the institutions of local self-government in Kerala - the corporations, municipalities, district panchayats, block panchayats, and village panchayats - have yielded an almost evenly balanced result. If we ignore the significant number of independents who have won seats and may owe informal allegiance to one of the two major fronts, both the LDF and UDF seem to have walked away with the honours, depending on the region of the state or level of governance that is examined. In the rural areas, at the lowest grama panchayat level, the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) was only marginally ahead of the CPI(M)-led left democratic front (LDF), winning 42.7 per cent of the seats as compared with 40.2 per cent in the case of the latter. It had however garnered a wider lead at the block panchayat level, by winning close to 50 per cent of the seats (as compared with the LDF's 43.5 per cent). On th other hand, at the district panchayat level the LDF was way ahead of the UDF with 53 per cent of successful candidates as compared with the latter's 40 per cent. Similarly in the urban areas while the UDF dominated the list of successful candidates in the municipalities, the LDF was substantially ahead in terms of seats won in elections to the corporations.
 
This polarised and closely balanced structure of the result would in other circumstances have been considered normal. Historically, the two major fronts in Kerala have each garnered a relatively large share of the vote, and the result in terms of seats won and governments formed has been determined by marginal differences in these vote shares, with power shifting almost cyclically between one formation and the other. Yet the results of the recent elections have taken both the LDF, which rules the state, and the UDF, which sits in the opposition, by surprise.
 
Two factors account for this element of surprise. First, though the current results seem to follow the familiar "Kerala model" at the political level, it constitutes a significant setback for the LDF when viewed relative to its performance in the previous local elections in 1995. In what was seen as a major swing in favour of the LDF, that election yielded a substantially strong LDF presence at the village, block and district panchayats, suggesting that trends operative at the state level need not prevail at lower levels of governance.
 
Second, this setback comes in the wake of what by all accounts was a bold, innovative and successful decentralised planning effort. A number of features distinguish the Kerala experiment with decentralised planning from similar, concerted efforts in a few other states. To start with, it was launched with a bold decision to earmark 35-40 per cent of plan funds for projects and programmes prepared by the local institutions. Further, this devolution was not predicated on the existence of the capacity to plan and utilise these funds at the lower levels or their "absorptive capacity" Making this a prerequisite tends to indefinitely postpone actual devolution. Rather, the experiment chose to build that capacity in the "act of doing" or in the course of putting to use the funds devolved. And, finally, to ensure that that the lack of capacity did not result in large-scale waste and leakage, the experiment sought to build that capacity through a campaign of mass-mobilisation, which ensured transparency and accountability in the use of funds as well as exploited the dispersed expertise available with Kerala's middle-class intelligentsia. In the event, the People's Planning Campaign galvanised the people in substantial parts of the State, made major advances in innovative local level planning and reached substantial benefits in the form of housing and basic services to the poorest sections of the urban and rural population.
 
The enthusiasm that the campaign aroused and the achievements it notched up on the development front were widely expected influence the voting behaviour of the population at the local level, strengthening the observed divergence between state and local level electoral trends. In fact, this expectation pervaded the opposition front as well, though in public UDF leaders attributed the likely success of the LDF to a misuse of Plan funds for partisan purposes.
 
The fact that the results belied all expectations is therefore a puzzle. The shortfall is all the more puzzling because it is to be expected that the election of those who would represent the interests of a much smaller unit of political organisation such as the village, block or district would be far more influenced by local issues and by the credentials of individual candidates. The reputation of the candidates is expected to matter more at the local level because voter perception on this count would be better formed given their closeness to the candidates fielded. These features of elections to local bodies and the fact that in recent years the People's Campaign has dominated local political mobilisation, were expected to make voter assessment of the results of the campaign and the contribution of the candidates fielded to its successful implementation major influences on voter behaviour. As a  consequence a consolidation of the LDF's position was seen as most likely.
 
It is this background that renders the local body election results puzzling to all, independent of their political persuasion. In response to this upset, the divergence between the expected and the actual result, or the inability of the LDF to encash in the form of votes the goodwill generated by the People's Campaign, is being interpreted in three different ways. The first is to dismiss the claims of the People's Campaign itself regarding its achievements. In actual fact, it is argued by some, the campaign did not deliver any major advances on the economic front but merely changed the means and institutional mechanisms through which plan funds leaked their way into a few hands and away from the beneficiaries they were ostensibly targeted at. It hardly bears stating that more direct evidence, garnered not just by independent national and international social scientists and observers, but also by officials from a not-too-friendly national government, refutes any such argument. The physical achievements recorded in the first two years of implementation of the campaign (1997-98 and 1998-99) are not just impressive in themselves but way beyond the historical record: 7,947 kilometres of roads were laid, 98,494 houses were built, 240,307 sanitary latrines were constructed, 50,162 wells were dug, 17,489 public taps were installed and 15,563 ponds were cleaned. Given this evidence, only the most cynical can yield to such a conclusion in the face of the puzzling result.