The second tendency has been to argue that in the current context in Kerala the voting behaviour of the people is not influenced by efforts at innovative State intervention or improved economic well-being. There could be two kinds of reasons advanced as to why such a dissociation of politics from economics could occur, leaving the former to be driven and determined by a logic of its own. It could be held that backward social mores including caste and community influences could be so strong as to result in the formation of vote banks that are not easily broken by economic developments.  However, this position does not explain why the results in the 1995 elections were so heavily in favour of the LDF whereas those in 2000 were not, since no major shift in caste and community influences seem to have occurred during those years. Nor does it tally with the fact that literacy and educational achievement in Kerala are so high, resulting in a far greater degree of political and social awareness than elsewhere that serves as a counterweight to pure caste and communal mobilisation. The restriction of the BJP to a few wins in selected pockets in the State, despite large expenditures and an unusually large number of seats contested, is one among many indicators corroborating that judgement.
 
A more persuasive explanation for any perceived dissociation between economics and politics could be the dominance for historical reasons of a middle class. Combined with the enriching influence of remittances from abroad accruing to a large number of households, this structure of the population could make local level efforts targeted at the poor less of an influence on the voting behaviour of a substantial section of the population. Here again, the argument is weakened by the fact that the People's Planning Campaign has, according to many commentators, drawn substantial sections of the middle classes into its fold as experts, trainers and volunteers. The enthusiasm generated by the campaign has touched not just its most obvious beneficiaries, but even the better-endowed sections of the community.
 
All of this suggests that any attempt to understand the LDF's shortfall in performance relative to expectations or its inability to translate the goodwill generated by the People's Planning experiment into votes at the polls should focus on factors that may have neutralised the political advantages yielded by the People's Planning Campaign. There are, no doubt, many state-level political and social developments that could have influenced voter behaviour. One such influence, for example, could have been the controversy, legal tangle and the confusion created by the transition to the plus-two system in the educational sphere. While the well-meaning search for correspondence with the national pattern may have influenced the decision, the controversies surrounding its implementation and the fact that it forced many entrants into the plus-two stage  to choose less well-endowed and less prestigious institutions could not but have been a source of resentment. And given the importance attached to education in a highly literate state like Kerala, the effect of this development may have been negative for the LDF which rules the state. Many other such state-level decisions or developments could have influenced the result and are likely to be brought up in the ongoing post-mortem.
 
But this may not provide a full explanation given the important role of local issues and perceptions in what were local elections. Post-election analyses can only speculate as to what those local factors were and how their effects were mediated. Needless to say, the People's Campaign was not a purely LDF affair, even if the decentralised planning experiment was launched by the LDF government in the state. It had drawn into its fold individuals of all persuasions and political affiliation, who came together on a common developmental agenda. In fact, many individuals who contributed to the campaign's success in particular localities owed allegiance to parties belonging to the UDF. It is quite possible that they reaped the benefits of that success, and rightly so. This would only speak for the fairness and transparency of the campaign.
 
To boot, the LDF's electoral strategy may have undermined its ability to encash in similar fashion the success of the campaign, despite the fact that a majority of elected local representatives involved in implementing the campaign owed allegiance to it. The People's Planning Campaign we must recognise has generated a situation where the actual power and prestige of the local institutions has increased tremendously. This has rendered positions in local bodies more important from the point of view of both political parties and individuals. As a result, independent of the success of incumbent representatives in carrying forward the campaign, they have it appears been replaced by almost all parties by candidates chosen by the party machinery. The extent to which this has happened is not clear. But, for example, when questioned in a television debate about the substitution of incumbent representatives by new candidates by the LDF, Thomas Isaac, one of the architects of the campaign, admitted that only about a fifth of the incumbents had been given an opportunity to run for a second term in these elections. Even incumbents in some of the highly successful "model panchayats" had been substituted by new faces. This could have influenced voters who were looking to the abilities of the contestants as individuals to carry forward the campaign, rather than to whether they were affiliated to the front that instituted the campaign in the first instance. Interestingly, according to reports, around 85 per cent of incumbent LDF representatives who contested again in these elections have been returned. This suggests that the choice of candidates could have had an important role to play in explaining the electoral outcome.
 
All such evidence and arguments would no doubt be closely examined in the search for explanations for the surprising result yielded by the elections. They have been raised here not as clinching arguments but only to lend support to the view that the electoral outcome in Kerala should not be seen either as public apathy towards or indictment of a path-breaking experiment. Nor should it be seen as indicating that people-centred economic policies and strategies have little political relevance. To do so would be to denude democratic politics of all substance and to subvert the search for development alternatives for the new millennium.