A weaver's son from a coastal village in what was then the Madras Presidency, Pinarayi Vijayan has spent decades rising up the ranks in Kerala's politics before he became the chief minister in 2016. Born in 1944 in Kannur district's Pinarayi village, he is the 14th child of Mundayil Koran and Kalyani, a family that struggled with poverty. His father died early. Pinarayi Vijayan, then a teen, had to take up handloom weaving after he finished school education. Eventually, he got admission into Government Brennen College in Thalassery, where he completed a pre-university course and subsequently a Bachelor's degree in Economics.
Pinarayi Vijayan gained his first experience of student politics during this period, and he graduated as a highly capable student organiser.
The actual political journey began inside the Kerala Students' Federation, the predecessor to the Students' Federation of India, where he served as both president and secretary. He also led the Kerala Socialist Youth Federation, participating in the agitational politics of Kerala's communist movement before most of his contemporaries had found what they wanted to do.
He was taken into the Kannur district committee of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), at 24 and was a key member of the party's district secretariat by 28.
He contested his first election in 1970, when he stood from Kuthuparamba and won. He would go on to win the same constituency in 1977, 1991 and 1996, each time with a wider margin. A fifth term followed in 2016 from Dharmadom, the year he became chief minister.
Pinarayi Vijayan's supporters are particularly proud about his actions during the Emergency years. When he raised his voice against the suspension of civil liberties by the then prime minister Indira Gandhi, he was arrested and subjected to physical abuse. Instead of going silent, he returned to public life and continued where he had left off.
In the EK Nayanar ministry formed after the Left's 1996 victory in Kerala, Pinarayi Vijayan was handed the electricity portfolio. It was a department struggling with both supply shortages and organisational inertia. His tenure is still cited in state political circles as among the more effective in the ministry's history: generation capacity expanded, distribution improved, and the groundwork for greater self-sufficiency was laid within a compressed timeline.
In 1998, Pinarayi Vijayan became the party's state secretary and held that post till 2015. During those years, the CPI(M) struck gold with a significant win in the 2006 assembly election, and an unexpected showing in the 2014 Lok Sabha election.
In 2002, he was elevated to the CPI(M) politburo, a position he continues to hold.
After he became Kerala's 12th chief minister in May 2016, he faced some of the hardest challenges of his political journey. The catastrophic floods in 2018 which was the worst the state had seen in nearly a century tested his administration's capacity to respond at scale. The COVID-19 pandemic came as a more serious stress test. Under his leadership, the Kerala model of public health response drew international attention during the early phases of the outbreak, with the southern state's relatively controlled mortality figures becoming a reference point in global policy discussions.
He was re-elected in 2021, becoming only the second chief minister in Kerala's post-Independence history to return to office for a consecutive term. This feat is something Pinarayi Vijayan's party hardsells in its subsequent campaigns.
At 80, Pinarayi Vijayan gets to hear praise now and then for the state's social indicators, but his state is also constantly troubled by fiscal stress. His rivals accuse him of running a party that brooks little internal dissent. The BJP as well as the Congress continue to raise issues linked to the political violence that has long shadowed Kannur, the district that made him.
He is still an influential voice in the CPI(M). Pinarayi Vijayan modernised Kerala or made the system so centralised that it broke down would be known on counting day on May 4. Exit polls indicate he will not return. But health warning: exit polls often get it wrong.
