Kerala is the new Malapuram

 

The Bollywood Stereotype on Islam

 

Did 32,000 Kerala girls join ISIS?

 

Reign of Terror by PFI in India & more reasons to shelve the Islamophobia Bill

 

Deceived, Brainwashed & Converted: How Shruti was lured into Islam & her escape

 

Sree Iyer on Kerala Gold Smuggling & Vijayan's involvement and whether he will resign

 

Modi II: Kerala’s Communist CM borrows from PM Modi’s playbook in his second innings

D K Singh in The Print

Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan at a press conference after the Left Democratic Front won the assembly election, at Kannoor in Dharmadom Sunday | Photo: ANI


Of all the wannabe Modis in Indian politics, this one must make the Prime Minister’s 56-inch chest swell with pride and satisfaction — a dyed-in-the-wool comrade from Kerala, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan.

Though often dubbed as “dhoti-clad Modi” for what his critics believed was his autocratic style of functioning and intolerance to dissent, Vijayan has started copying Narendra Modi’s governance model in earnest only in his second innings as CM.

His first act after winning another term in Kerala last week — picking up his ministers and allocation of portfolios — had Modi’s imprint all over. The CM has entrusted himself with the charge of “all important policy matters”, apart from 27 departments.

This means that no minister in the Kerala government would be able to take any policy decision without the approval of the CM. All ministers in Kerala will effectively be puppets, with Vijayan pulling the strings. It’s straight out of PM Modi’s playbook. 

The ‘Modi model’

After assuming office in 2014, Modi had done the same thing, taking charge of “all important policy issues”, apart from other portfolios. It dawned on his ministers soon that they were mere puppets with a symbolic role in policymaking, if at all.

In another move, the Vijayan-controlled Communist Party of India (Marxist) secretariat has decided that private secretaries of the ministers would be nominated by the party. It was similar to what had happened after the Modi government took over in 2014. It issued guidelines that any officer, official or private person, who had worked as personal staff (PS) of a minister in the previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government wouldn’t be appointed for the same role in the NDA government. The reason cited was: “Due to administrative requirements.”

It was so strict that even Rajnath Singh, then home minister, couldn’t have a PS of his own choice — an IPS officer from the Uttar Pradesh cadre who had served as PS to a UPA minister — despite personally taking it up with the PMO. As it is, while bureaucrats who have to serve as PS of Modi’s ministers are closely vetted, most others, including officers on special duty (OSDs), are drawn from Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) or affiliated organisations, especially its students’ wing — the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP).

Pinarayi Vijayan has now got the CPI(M) to adopt this model in his government. The idea is simple: to watch over the ministers through their personal staff. In fact, a couple of years after this model had come into place in New Delhi, Vijayan seemed to have gotten drawn to the idea of having control over the personal staff of ministers. In December 2016, he had convened a meeting of these staff, which caused much heartburn among ministers.

Five years later, the CM has got the party to take away the ministers’ discretion in choosing their private secretaries.

Emulating Modi

It may be too early to say how far the Vijayan government would go in emulating the Modi model of governance in his second innings. Many in political circles are already drawing a parallel between the two, given how the Kerala CM dealt with his rivals and potential challengers in the party.

After taking over as Kerala CM in 2016, Vijayan had virtually shunted his arch-rival and former CM V.S. Achuthanandan into a sort of margdarshak mandal, making him chairman of the administrative reforms commission and keeping him out of poll campaigns. With pre-poll surveys predicting a historic second consecutive term for the Left, Vijayan went about getting rid of potential challengers, denying party tickets to those who had had two consecutive terms as legislators; it resulted in five ministers’ removal from the poll race. After the elections, he got rid of the rest of his potential challengers, dropping all ministers from the previous government in the name of inducting ‘fresh blood’.

Many comrades in Kerala may not be surprised by the turn of events in the first week of Vijayan’s second innings. The most powerful Communist leader in India today, Vijayan was dubbed as “dhoti-clad Modi” by his detractors to denote his authoritarian style of functioning and the use of the government and the party apparatus to promote his personality cult.

He was also accused of turning Kerala into a sort of police state. There were allegations of fake encounter killings of Maoists, custodial deaths and torture, and apathy to political violence and murders. Months ahead of the 2021 assembly election, he brought a controversial amendment to the Kerala Police Act, which was seen as an attempt to curb free speech in the garb of preventing social media abuse. The government later withdrew the amendment following much criticism.

In an interview to ThePrint in the run-up to the assembly polls, this is how Vijayan responded to his description as Kerala’s Modi: “I do not know what kind of person Narendra Modi is. The people of Kerala know what kind of person I am for many years. I don’t now have to emulate Narendra Modi. I have my own style and methods. Modi might have his own style.”

Seven weeks after that interview, Vijayan seems to have found merits in that description as he starts his second term, emulating Modi.

One Nation One Healthcare System for India?

 

The Straw Man and The Great Indian Kitchen

By Girish Menon

In the introduction to his book ‘How to win every argument’ Madsen Pirie writes:

Sound reasoning is the basis of winning an argument. Logical fallacies undermine arguments…Many of the fallacies are committed by people genuinely ignorant of logical reasoning, the nature of evidence or what counts as relevant material. Others however might be committed by persons bent on deception. If there is insufficient force behind the argument and the evidence, fallacies can add enough weight to carry them through.

The Malayalam film The Great Indian Kitchen is one such exercise in fallacious reasoning. The film maker sets up and destroys a Straw Man in the form of some highly conservative Sabarimala devotees who are male, upper caste and Hindu­. In such households, the film argues, the women are perennially confined to the kitchen and subject to male whims. Some women have bought into the system while the female protagonist and her mother-in-law take up the feminist cause of subversion and rebellion.

A Straw Man, Pirie writes, is a misrepresentation of your opponent’s position, created by you for the express purpose of being knocked down. This is usually done by over-stating an opponent’s position. If your opponent will not make himself an extremist, you can oblige with a Straw Man.

The Straw Man is fallacious because he says nothing about the real argument. Its function is to elicit, by the ease of his demolition, a scorn which can be directed at the real figure he represents.

This writer carried out a straw poll (not representative at all!) among those who supported the filmmaker’s thesis and not one of them stated that they were aware of such instances happening to people known to them. Instead, most of them pointed their fingers to North Kerala where apparently such practices are rife. I did ask a former resident of North Kerala if such things happened there and his response was that ‘Women everywhere were the same North or any part of Kerala’.

Some feminists I know took up cudgels on behalf of the female protagonist even though their own life experiences did not match the film’s heroine. They quoted some sisters who were treated badly by their husbands, but added that these husbands also wanted to live of their wife's earnings. However, they were not willing to question the failure of the female protagonist, who is depicted as educated and modern, to carry out due diligence before entering into the marital contract.

In this writer’s view, the creation and destruction of the Straw Man is the only protest available to progressives and feminists. Because, despite the Supreme Court’s progressive decision in the Sabarimala case, even the progressive left government has declared its inability to implement reforms to Sabarimala rituals. This is because the majority opinion which includes many Hindu women want to maintain the status quo and are unconvinced by the feminist rhetoric.

Why Modi doesn't like Kerala's Communists beating the corporates at their own game : Thomas Isaac

 

India's Monsoon Muslims

 

Universal Basic Income promised to Kerala

 

Reversing Love Jihad in Kerala

 

E. Sreedharan On Love Jihad to Beef Politics - Inside the Metro-Man's new innings as a BJP politician

 

Kerala’s next crisis: How to deal with return of lakhs of ‘Gone to Gulf’ people

More than 5 lakh Keralites are expected to return from Gulf & state has to deal with plight of those losing jobs there and erosion of its remittance economy writes BOBBY GHOSH in The Print


   

Gone to Gulf.” That phrase came up a lot in conversations among grown-ups that I overheard as a schoolboy in Kerala during the early 1980s. My father, who managed a lobster-export business in the port of Kochi, was constantly griping about workers who quit on short notice — or none at all — to take up jobs in the Gulf cities of Muscat, Doha or Jeddah.

His friends — executives in rubber or coffee plantations, officials in the state-run shipyard or port authority — had the same problem: a constant exodus of workers, most of them “gone to Gulf.”

The jobs there were usually menial, and Dad harrumphed about Keralites giving up a gig at an air-conditioned lobster-processing plant “to get roasted in the desert sun.” He was astonished when his secretary, a university graduate he had marked for a bright future in the company, gave it up for a job pumping gas in Sharjah.

But neither Dad nor his friends could compete with the salaries being offered in the Persian Gulf countries. In their helplessness, they took empty comfort in making dire predictions of the day when Arab employers, having built all the palaces they could want, would finally send the foolish young Keralites back home, to beg for their old jobs.

Instead, years later, my father would join the exodus, agreeing to manage a small shipyard near Dubai, lured by the prospect of a final payday before retirement. He was not amused when I suggested that he had been inspired by that promising young secretary and “gone to Gulf” himself.

Four decades on, the dark auguries of Dad and his friends are coming true for many Keralites in the Gulf: Their Arab employers are laying them off in large numbers. And not just them, or there. The coronavirus pandemic has been devastating for foreign workers everywhere.

The official numbers have yet to be reported, but it’s safe to say that so far thousands have died and millions have lost their jobs. The impact on their families back home has been doubly debilitating: The loss of income from abroad — often from the sole breadwinner in the family — comes at a time of acute local hardship.

For economies that depend on this foreign income, the outlook for 2020 is bleak. The World Bank expects a 20% plunge in remittances to low- and middle-income countries. This plunge would be the steepest in history, far exceeding the 5% dip after the 2009 global financial crisis. The pain will be felt acutely in Kerala, which has an unhealthy addiction to remittances, and has failed to create alternative opportunities for its labour force.



This loss of income is likely just the start of a long cycle of despair. It will be years before countries that employ large numbers of foreign workers fully recover from the economic damage caused by the pandemic. Even when they do, they will have less room for migrants. Fewer Keralites will have the opportunity to join the ranks of the “gone to Gulf,” with profound economic implications for their families and their state.

Gulf’s localisation

In the petrostates of the Arabian Peninsula, the post-pandemic economic downturn will add impetus to long-standing programs designed to replace foreign workers with locals. Authorities in six member-states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have for years been pressing employers — using catchphrases like “Saudization” and “Omanization” — to reduce their dependence on foreigners.

These initiatives have tended to wax and wane with the price of oil: When it is high, unemployed citizens can depend on generous government subsidies, allaying concerns about foreigners taking all the jobs. It helps that many of the jobs done by migrants are unattractive, menial and low-paying.

But years of low oil prices combined with the swelling ranks of unemployed locals have forced authorities to take localization programs more seriously. These programs are at the heart of ambitious economic and social reforms being pursued by new, young rulers like Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Qatar’s Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and Oman’s Sultan Haitham bin Tariq Al Said.

This reformist zeal is bad news for countries at the other end of the migration chain. Since the fall in oil prices in 2014, remittances from the GCC have plateaued. (In the case of Saudi Arabia, they have fallen precipitously.)




This year, judging by the early indicators, they are projected to go off a cliff. Remittances from the United Arab Emirates to India are expected to drop 35% in the second quarter alone. The UAE is the GCC’s largest source of remittances, and India is their top recipient.

Indeed, India should have experienced a slowing of money flows over the past few years. It bucked the trend in large part due to massive flooding in Kerala in 2018 and 2019, which led to spikes in remittances as Keralites in the Gulf sent home larger-than-usual sums to help with relief and reconstruction.

But that streak is about to be snapped. Unlike previous natural disasters, the pandemic is depleting the flow of money from abroad.

Kerala’s Gulf handicap

Kerala, which has ancient ties to the Gulf, will likely feel the pinch more than other Indian states. It receives nearly a fifth of remittances to the country, most of it from the GCC, whose members are home to between 2 million and 2.5 million Keralites. Although the state government doesn’t publish annual remittance figures, they are thought to consistently account for over a third of Kerala’s GDP.

This dependence leaves the government of Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan handicapped even as it grapples with the impact of the pandemic. Kerala was the first Indian state to record a case of Covid-19 — a student who had returned from university in Wuhan, the Chinese ground zero of the crisis. Vijayan, a Marxist who had won acclaim for his adroit administration during the floods in the previous two years, moved quickly to flatten the curve.

Now the pandemic is spiking again, in Kerala as well as across India. With a loss of state revenues due to the effects of the lockdown, Vijayan could really use another surge in remittances from the Gulf. But this time, it is the diaspora that is in distress, and he must deal with the plight of Keralites who are losing their livelihoods in the GCC as well as the anxieties of their families at home.

The state expects more than 500,000 Keralites to return, many of them in the special repatriation flights organized by the Indian government. This figure is almost certainly an underestimate. Many others will make the return journey months from now, as companies and governments cut more jobs in the Gulf. “It will be a long time before we know how many Keralites have come home,” says S. Irudaya Rajan, who researches migration and remittance flows at the Center for Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala’s capital.

Speaking to me privately, some Kerala government officials say they are not especially alarmed about the localization efforts of the Gulf states. The demand for Kerala’s best and brightest, they say, will resume after the pandemic. Just because the authorities want jobs to be filled by locals doesn’t mean there are sufficient numbers of locals who can fill them.

But Shashi Tharoor, a member of India’s parliament from the state, allows that business may never return to usual. “It’s not just about Arabs taking jobs, but the jobs themselves disappearing for good,” he says.

Junaid Ahmad, the World Bank’s country director in India, likens Kerala’s challenge to that of post-conflict countries, where governments must reintegrate former fighters into society, by training and providing them with economic opportunities. Vijayan has to do the same for the returning Keralites, Ahmad says, “but instead of working with a peace dividend, he has to do this despite a loss in remittances.”

What’s more, he has to do it under extreme pressure at a politically inopportune moment. Diaspora groups are a powerful lobbying force in the state, and Vijayan faces elections in less than a year.


The remittances trap

The recalibration of Kerala’s remittance-dependent economy will take longer. The migration of Keralites to the Gulf began in the 1970s; it was already a steady stream when I was a schoolboy in Kochi. By the turn of the century, nearly 1.5 million Keralites lived and worked in the GCC.

Kerala was uniquely positioned to cater to the seemingly insatiable demand for foreign workers from the petrostates. A long maritime history had made Keralites culturally prone to seeking their fortune abroad, and a series of business-unfriendly governments, not all of Vijayan’s Marxist stripe, had prevented the development of a robust private sector at home. (The company that employed my father in Kochi had left Kerala before I finished high school.)

Kerala’s proud record for near-total literacy gave its citizens a leg-up over other Indians — not to mention Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and others — seeking jobs in the Gulf. Despite their better education, the overwhelming majority of Keralites did jobs that indeed required being “roasted in the desert sun,” as Dad put it. In the classic migration pattern, young men endured great physical hardship and forewent luxuries to save up, remit money home and bring over friends and relatives. The steady exodus allowed the state government to get away with its poor economic management; jobs in the Gulf made up for unemployment and remittances fueled consumption. The running joke was that Kerala had a “money-order economy.”

But the money coming from the GCC was rarely put to the most efficient use: Much of it went into personal consumption — families bought gold and property, built homes. Bungalows popped up in formerly poor villages throughout the state.

This spending yielded little employment outside the construction sector, and even there much of the work involved back-breaking labour, hardly in keeping with the aspirations of educated Keralites. In an ironic echo of migration patterns in the Gulf, Kerala began to attract low-cost labour from other Indian states. The remittances were never used to build a significant industrial base, or to develop an information-technology sector comparable to its neighbours. In the absence of a sizeable private sector, “there were no other investment possibilities,” says Reuben Abraham, CEO of the IDFC Institute, a public-policy think tank.

Still the remittances kept growing. In time, Keralites began to climb the value chain abroad, from blue- to white-collar jobs, from construction to banking, insurance and other services. This ascent, in addition to the size of the settled diaspora, meant that although other Indian states sent more workers to the Gulf annually, Keralites were able to send more money home.

Now, Keralites risk becoming victims of their own success: It is those white-collar jobs that are most likely to be localised. “Saudis and Emiratis are not going to work on construction sites,” says Rajeev Mangottil of VPS Healthcare, a large Keralite-owned company that runs a chain of hospitals in the GCC. “Foreigners who are working in offices are very vulnerable right now.”

What happens now

Many tens of thousands have already lost jobs to the pandemic’s economic impact, and it may be months before an accurate count is available. Emirates, the Dubai-based airline and one of the UAE’s largest employers, will eventually trim 30,000 from its rolls. (Dubai, it is worth remembering, was already experiencing its fastest pace of job losses in a decade before the pandemic struck.) Unsurprisingly, hundreds of thousands of Indians have registered for special repatriation flights from the UAE.

Among Keralites who have lost white-collar jobs in Dubai, panic has set in. Few have any expectation of finding work back home, much less work that will sustain the lifestyle they enjoyed in the Gulf. “Those who have lost their jobs but have EMIs (equated monthly installments) to pay are stuck,” says Mangottil. “People are applying for jobs that pay half their previous salaries.” When hope is finally extinguished, they will swell the ranks of returnees to Kerala.

What awaits them allows for little optimism. Top state officials, already working flat out to contain the coronavirus spike, have not yet articulated a strategy for dealing with the returning migrants. The government has announced some self-employment schemes, involving small loans and subsidies. But these were conceived before the pandemic, when the returnees numbered in three or four digits, not six.

The glass-half-full view is that the returnees will bring world-class skills and reserves of experience not easily found in Kerala. S.D. Shibulal, co-founder of the tech giant Infosys and one of the state’s more successful entrepreneurs, reckons that a nascent knowledge industry “offers good opportunities for returnees to invest.”

Putting what the World Bank’s Ahmad calls the “skills dividend” to use, however, will be a challenge for a state where socialist policies and powerful unions have created a reputation for hostility toward business. Kerala ranks 21st among 29 states in the Indian government’s ease-of-doing-business rankings.

Changing that perception will require more than efficient management of natural calamities. Competition for investment is fierce among Indian states and will grow fiercer as investments shrink with a slowdown in the global economy. Even if returning Keralites feel inclined to invest in business, there’s no guarantee they will restrict themselves to their home state.

Some officials argue that it would be short-sighted to focus too much on the returnees and lose sight of Kerala’s competitive advantage in the global labour market. Exporting workers is what the state does best. If demand shrinks in the Gulf, it will eventually pop up elsewhere: It’s a matter of pointing the outflow of migrant Keralites in the right direction. Government energies, these officials argue, are better expended on ensuring that the next generation of leavers has the right skills to compete and succeed wherever opportunities arise.

Even before the pandemic, says Tharoor, “Kerala’s big question has always been, How do we get enough people working abroad and sending money home?” That question is now being asked by the governments of dozens of countries that depend on remittances. The past few months have made finding the answer much more urgent.

The coronavirus slayer! How Kerala's rock star health minister helped save it from Covid-19

KK Shailaja has been hailed as the reason a state of 35 million people has only lost four to the virus. Here’s how the former teacher did it writes Laura Spinney in The Guardian 

 

‘Our clinics for respiratory disease meant we could look out for community transmission’: KK Shailaja, health minister.


On 20 January, KK Shailaja phoned one of her medically trained deputies. She had read online about a dangerous new virus spreading in China. “Will it come to us?” she asked. “Definitely, Madam,” he replied. And so the health minister of the Indian state of Kerala began her preparations.

Four months later, Kerala has reported only 524 cases of Covid-19, four deaths and – according to Shailaja – no community transmission. The state has a population of about 35 million and a GDP per capita of only £2,200. By contrast, the UK (double the population, GDP per capita of £40,400) has reported more than 40,000 deaths, while the US (10 times the population, GDP per capita of £51,000) has reported more than 82,000 deaths; both countries have rampant community transmission.

As such, Shailaja Teacher, as the 63-year-old minister is affectionately known, has attracted some new nicknames in recent weeks – Coronavirus Slayer and Rockstar Health Minister among them. The names sit oddly with the merry, bespectacled former secondary school science teacher, but they reflect the widespread admiration she has drawn for demonstrating that effective disease containment is possible not only in a democracy, but in a poor one. 

How has this been achieved? Three days after reading about the new virus in China, and before Kerala had its first case of Covid-19, Shailaja held the first meeting of her rapid response team. The next day, 24 January, the team set up a control room and instructed the medical officers in Kerala’s 14 districts to do the same at their level. By the time the first case arrived, on 27 January, via a plane from Wuhan, the state had already adopted the World Health Organization’s protocol of test, trace, isolate and support.

As the passengers filed off the Chinese flight, they had their temperatures checked. Three who were found to be running a fever were isolated in a nearby hospital. The remaining passengers were placed in home quarantine – sent there with information pamphlets about Covid-19 that had already been printed in the local language, Malayalam. The hospitalised patients tested positive for Covid-19, but the disease had been contained. “The first part was a victory,” says Shailaja. “But the virus continued to spread beyond China and soon it was everywhere.”

In late February, encountering one of Shailaja’s surveillance teams at the airport, a Malayali family returning from Venice was evasive about its travel history and went home without submitting to the now-standard controls. By the time medical personnel detected a case of Covid-19 and traced it back to them, their contacts were in the hundreds. Contact tracers tracked them all down, with the help of advertisements and social media, and they were placed in quarantine. Six developed Covid-19.

Another cluster had been contained, but by now large numbers of overseas workers were heading home to Kerala from infected Gulf states, some of them carrying the virus. On 23 March, all flights into the state’s four international airports were stopped. Two days later, India entered a nationwide lockdown.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Indian citizens arriving from the Gulf states are bussed to a quarantine centre. Photograph: Arunchandra Bose/AFP via Getty Images

At the height of the virus in Kerala, 170,000 people were quarantined and placed under strict surveillance by visiting health workers, with those who lacked an inside bathroom housed in improvised isolation units at the state government’s expense. That number has shrunk to 21,000. “We have also been accommodating and feeding 150,000 migrant workers from neighbouring states who were trapped here by the lockdown,” she says. “We fed them properly – three meals a day for six weeks.” Those workers are now being sent home on charter trains.

Shailaja was already a celebrity of sorts in India before Covid-19. Last year, a movie called Virus was released, inspired by her handling of an outbreak of an even deadlier viral disease, Nipah, in 2018. (She found the character who played her a little too worried-looking; in reality, she has said, she couldn’t afford to show fear.) She was praised not only for her proactive response, but also for visiting the village at the centre of the outbreak.

The villagers were terrified and ready to flee, because they did not understand how the disease was spreading. “I rushed there with my doctors, we organised a meeting in the panchayat [village council] office and I explained that there was no need to leave, because the virus could only spread through direct contact,” she says. “If you kept at least a metre from a coughing person, it couldn’t travel. When we explained that, they became calm – and stayed.”

Nipah prepared Shailaja for Covid-19, she says, because it taught her that a highly contagious disease for which there is no treatment or vaccine should be taken seriously. In a way, though, she had been preparing for both outbreaks all her life.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist), of which she is a member, has been prominent in Kerala’s governments since 1957, the year after her birth. (It was part of the Communist Party of India until 1964, when it broke away.) Born into a family of activists and freedom fighters – her grandmother campaigned against untouchability – she watched the so-called “Kerala model” be assembled from the ground up; when we speak, this is what she wants to talk about.

The foundations of the model are land reform – enacted via legislation that capped how much land a family could own and increased land ownership among tenant farmers – a decentralised public health system and investment in public education. Every village has a primary health centre and there are hospitals at each level of its administration, as well as 10 medical colleges.

This is true of other states, too, says MP Cariappa, a public health expert based in Pune, Maharashtra state, but nowhere else are people so invested in their primary health system. Kerala enjoys the highest life expectancy and the lowest infant mortality of any state in India; it is also the most literate state. “With widespread access to education, there is a definite understanding of health being important to the wellbeing of people,” says Cariappa.

Shailaja says: “I heard about those struggles – the agricultural movement and the freedom fight – from my grandma. She was a very good storyteller.” Although emergency measures such as the lockdown are the preserve of the national government, each Indian state sets its own health policy. If the Kerala model had not been in place, she insists, her government’s response to Covid-19 would not have been possible.

FacebookTwitterPinterest A walk-in test centre in Ernakulam, Kerala. Photograph: Reuters

That said, the state’s primary health centres had started to show signs of age. When Shailaja’s party came to power in 2016, it undertook a modernisation programme. One pre-pandemic innovation was to create clinics and a registry for respiratory disease – a big problem in India. “That meant we could spot conversion to Covid-19 and look out for community transmission,” Shailaja says. “It helped us very much.”

When the outbreak started, each district was asked to dedicate two hospitals to Covid-19, while each medical college set aside 500 beds. Separate entrances and exits were designated. Diagnostic tests were in short supply, especially after the disease reached wealthier western countries, so they were reserved for patients with symptoms and their close contacts, as well as for random sampling of asymptomatic people and those in the most exposed groups: health workers, police and volunteers.

Shailaja says a test in Kerala produces a result within 48 hours. “In the Gulf, as in the US and UK – all technologically fit countries – they are having to wait seven days,” she says. “What is happening there?” She doesn’t want to judge, she says, but she has been mystified by the large death tolls in those countries: “I think testing is very important – also quarantining and hospital surveillance – and people in those countries are not getting that.” She knows, because Malayalis living in those countries have phoned her to say so.

Places of worship were closed under the rules of lockdown, resulting in protests in some Indian states, but resistance has been noticeably absent in Kerala – in part, perhaps, because its chief minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, consulted with local faith leaders about the closures. Shailaja says Kerala’s high literacy level is another factor: “People understand why they must stay at home. You can explain it to them.”

The Indian government plans to lift the lockdown on 17 May (the date has been extended twice). After that, she predicts, there will be a huge influx of Malayalis to Kerala from the heavily infected Gulf region. “It will be a great challenge, but we are preparing for it,” she says. There are plans A, B and C, with plan C – the worst-case scenario – involving the requisitioning of hotels, hostels and conference centres to provide 165,000 beds. If they need more than 5,000 ventilators, they will struggle – although more are on order – but the real limiting factor will be manpower, especially when it comes to contact tracing. “We are training up schoolteachers,” Shailaja says.

Once the second wave has passed – if, indeed, there is a second wave – these teachers will return to schools. She hopes to do the same, eventually, because her ministerial term will finish with the state elections a year from now. Since she does not think the threat of Covid-19 will subside any time soon, what secret would she like to pass on to her successor? She laughs her infectious laugh, because the secret is no secret: “Proper planning.”

Give Us Kerala Model Over Gujarat Model, Any Day

Ramachandra Guha in NDTV

When, towards the end of the first decade of the present century, Narendra Modi began speaking frequently about something he called the 'Gujarat Model', it was the second time a state of the Indian Union had that grand, self-promoting, suffix added to its name. The first was Kerala. The origins of the term 'Kerala Model' go back to a study done in the 1970s by economists associated with the Centre for Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram. This showed that when it came to indices of population (as in declining birth rates), education (as in remarkably high literacy for women) and health (as in lower infant mortality and higher life expectancy), this small state in a desperately poor country had done as well - and sometimes better - than parts of Europe and North America.

Boosted to begin with by economists and demographers, Kerala soon came in for praise from sociologists and political scientists. The former argued that caste and class distinctions had radically diminished in Kerala over the course of the 20th century; the latter showed that, when it came to implementing the provisions of the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution, Kerala was ahead of other states. More power had been devolved to municipalities and panchayats than elsewhere in India.

Success, as John F. Kennedy famously remarked, has many fathers (while failure is an orphan). When these achievements of the state of Kerala became widely known, many groups rushed to claim their share of the credit. The communists, who had been in power for long stretches, said it was their economic radicalism that did it. Followers of Sri Narayana Guru (1855-1928) said it was the egalitarianism promoted by that great social reformer which led to much of what followed. Those still loyal to the royal houses of Travancore and Cochin observed that when it came to education, and especially girls' education, their Rulers were more progressive than Maharajas and Nawabs elsewhere. The Christian community of Kerala also chipped in, noting that some of the best schools, colleges, and hospitals were run by the Church. It was left to that fine Australian historian of Kerala and India, Robin Jeffrey, to critically analyse all these claims, and demonstrate in what order and what magnitude they contributed. His book Politics, Women and Wellbeing remains the definitive work on the subject.

Such were the elements of the 'Kerala Model'. What did the 'Gujarat Model' that Narendra Modi began speaking of, c. 2007, comprise? Mr Modi did not himself ever define it very precisely. But there is little doubt that the coinage itself was inspired and provoked by what had preceded it. The Gujarat Model would, Mr Modi was suggesting, be different from, and better than, the Kerala Model. Among the noticeable weaknesses of the latter was that it did not really encourage private enterprise. Marxist ideology and trade union politics both inhibited this. On the other hand, the Vibrant Gujarat Summits organized once every two years when Mr Modi was Chief Minister were intended precisely to attract private investment.

This openness to private capital was, for Mr Modi's supporters, undoubtedly the most attractive feature of what he was marketing as the 'Gujarat Model'. It was this that brought to him the support of big business, and of small business as well, when he launched his campaign for Prime Minister. Young professionals, disgusted by the cronyism and corruption of the UPA regime, flocked to his support, seeing him as a modernizing Messiah who would make India an economic powerhouse.

With the support of these groups, and many others, Narendra Modi was elected Prime Minister in May 2014.

There were other aspects of the Gujarat Model that Narendra Modi did not speak about, but which those who knew the state rather better than the Titans of Indian industry were perfectly aware of. These included the relegation of minorities (and particularly Muslims) to second-class status; the centralization of power in the Chief Minister and the creation of a cult of personality around him; attacks on the independence and autonomy of universities; curbs on the freedom of the press; and, not least, a vengeful attitude towards critics and political rivals.

These darker sides of the Gujarat Model were all played down in Mr Modi's Prime Ministerial campaign. But in the six years since he has been in power at the Centre, they have become starkly visible. The communalization of politics and of popular discourse, the capturing of public institutions, the intimidation of the press, the use of the police and investigating agencies to harass opponents, and, perhaps above all, the deification of the Great Leader by the party, the Cabinet, the Government, and the Godi Media - these have characterized the Prime Ministerial tenure of Narendra Modi. Meanwhile, the most widely advertised positive feature of the Gujarat Model before 2014 has proved to be a dud. Far from being a free-market reformer, Narendra Modi has demonstrated that he is an absolute statist in economic matters. As an investment banker who once enthusiastically supported him recently told me in disgust: "Narendra Modi is our most left-wing Prime Minister ever - he is even more left-wing than Jawaharlal Nehru".

Which brings me back to the Kerala Model, which the Gujarat Model sought to replace or supplant. Talked about a great deal in the 1980s and 1990s, in recent years, the term was not much heard in policy discourse any more. It had fallen into disuse, presumably consigned to the dustbin of history. The onset of COVID-19 has now thankfully rescued it, and indeed brought it back to centre-stage. For in how it has confronted, tackled, and tamed the COVID crisis, Kerala has once again showed itself to be a model for India - and perhaps the world.

There has been some excellent reporting on how Kerala flattened the curve. It seems clear that there is a deeper historical legacy behind the success of this state. Because the people of Kerala are better educated, they have followed the practices in their daily life least likely to allow community transmission. Because they have such excellent health care, if people do test positive, they can be treated promptly and adequately. Because caste and gender distinctions are less extreme than elsewhere in India, access to health care and medical information is less skewed. Because decentralization of power is embedded in systems of governance, panchayat heads do not have to wait for a signal from a Big Boss before deciding to act. There are two other features of Kerala's political culture that have helped them in the present context; its top leaders are generally more grounded and less imperious than elsewhere, and bipartisanship comes more easily to the state's politicians.

The state of Kerala is by no means perfect. While there have been no serious communal riots for many decades, in everyday life there is still some amount of reserve in relations between Hindus, Christians and Muslims. Casteism and patriarchy have been weakened, but by no means eliminated. The intelligentsia still remain unreasonably suspicious of private enterprise, which will hurt the state greatly in the post-COVID era, after remittances from the Gulf have dried up.

For all their flaws, the state and people of Kerala have many things to teach us, who live in the rest of India. We forgot about their virtues in the past decade, but now these virtues are once more being discussed, to both inspire and chastise us. The success of the state in the past and in the present have rested on science, transparency, decentralization, and social equality. These are, as it were, the four pillars of the Kerala Model. On the other hand, the four pillars of the Gujarat Model are superstition, secrecy, centralization, and communal bigotry. Give us the first over the second, any day.

Arif Muhammad Khan praises Kerala and explains the high literacy rate

Why Sabarimala is surprising even Kerala, and why it is an opportunity

With all the claims of literacy, good healthcare system and the resultant general progressiveness of Kerala, it largely seemed like a reasonable expectation that women would just start going to the Sabarimala temple writes N P Ashley in The Indian Express

I find surprised, and even flabbergasted, Malayalis and non-Malayalis around me on the Sabarimala issue.

Even though a lot of people had reservations about the Supreme Court verdict which lifted the ban on women of menstrual ages from entering the Sabarimala temple, it was largely expected that, like the famous declaration of the Temple Entry Proclamation which allowed the lower caste groups temple entry in Kerala in 1936, women would just start going to the temple by and by. With all the claims of literacy, good healthcare system and the resultant general progressiveness of Kerala, it largely seemed like a reasonable expectation.

But events unfurled in quite a different way: the televised break down of law and order in the area, the rule of fear and insecurity that hovers around the state on this issue and the unending high-voltage discussions on mass and social media gave a sense of a state at siege. Though all parties are oath-bound and duty-bound to endorse the Constitution of India, and even when most parties at the national level have taken the official national position that there should be no ban on women only because of they are of the menstruating age (this includes the RSS and the Congress), their state leadership got so scared of the sentiments of their supporters and decided to resist the implementation of the court order through campaigns or even physically. The attempts have been so successful that not a single woman of the age between 10 and 50 have entered the inner sanctum of the temple to this day.

 

Women devotees at Sabarimala.

The typicality of Sabarimala

Three aspects of Kerala society throw light on the typicality of the developments: one, Kerala is a hyper consumerist, middle class society in which party supporters behave like consumers with a sense of entitlement. Politicians are only capable of giving what these supporters like and want. This should explain how the state committees of national parties have decided to take a position contradicting their national leadership. Two, though Kerala somersaulted into a global economy in 1970s itself, its values are completely feudal: a huge house, marrying off a daughter in all pomp and glory, and strict allegiance to family, community or party are still cherished.

The cocktail of feudal values and capitalist life-conditions provides the third aspect of the Kerala society: misogyny. Sabarimala is only one of the spaces in Kerala where women have no entry. Public spaces are largely inaccessible to unaccompanied women after nightfall, places of worship, festival venues and grounds are male homosocial havens, mass media and entertainment industries revolve around a handful of male icons, in many households women continue to belong to the kitchen and drawing rooms are still men’s, and lastly and most importantly, political and cultural discussions are held by men, of men and for men (even feminism is just another discussion topic for men!). In short, Kerala’s public sphere is saturated with male bodies and their understanding of the world.

This is not to belittle the amazing movements of the women in the last 30 years for the rights to body, property, work, dignity and presence. But the subcultural space of male bonding has defined itself against all such naming them to be feminist. The all too existing possibility that “feminist” in itself can be used as an allegation, like “terrorist” or “Maoist” in today’s Kerala should tell us something about contemporary Kerala. This becomes all the more revealing when compared with the moral ground that North Indian feminists have won against patriarchy on the ground, creating a new common sense, making it impossible even for the majoritarian right to oppose the Supreme Court verdicts on decriminalising homosexuality and lifting the ban on women to enter Sabarimala.

This is nothing new: though women’s rights were a crucial concern for the social justice project on caste reformation and economic restructuring called Kerala Renaissance (beginning in the early 20th century), men limited their participation to the level of ideas without extending it to bodies and spaces. Women continued to be in-charge of households, preparing children for a male chauvinist society and men continued to talk about things political and social. These women and their domestic spaces were addressed only by two entities: the religious organisations and by television serials (both were designed and developed by men again). Other than making fun of them and treating these as innocuous, men never had interrogations about the exclusivity of the spaces they held. Family WhatsApp groups seem to mould these sensibilities into community stories of victimhood and fear mongering. This blackhole of the Kerala public sphere must be acknowledged in the contemporary developments.

 

Kerala Renaissance: Archaic, Aestheticised or Unfinished?

Sabarimala women’s temple entry issue largely has four categories of people involved: Violent Ritualists (mostly male) who oppose women’s temple entry and believe that women who dare should be stopped using violence and terror, Anti-Violence Ritualists who oppose women’s temple entry but believe that use of violence and abuse by vigilante groups is unacceptable, Constitutionalists who believe that the verdict is, to borrow Gandhi’s words on the Temple Entry proclamation for the lower caste groups, one written in golden letters upholding constitutional morality and must be implemented by getting rid of the violent men at any cost, and Institutionalists who believe that though the judgment could have as well not come at all, now that it has, there is a need to respect the judgment and implement it, slowly and strategically.

All these groups seem equally lost about something or the other: Ritualists don’t know till how long they can hold the fort (every party has people who make contradictory statements is a good sign of it), Constitutionalists have not come up with any practical solution to the law and order troubles that might come up with what has now been construed as the “event of that single woman’s temple entry” (One of the questions they should consider answering is how did this “social vacuum” around Constitutional values come about!) and Institutionalists seem to be rather half-hearted about any actual step by any woman to enter the temple.

Among the four, the first, the Violent Ritualists, given how anti-social their acts have been merit no discussions. They need to be removed from the space and booked, along with their political patrons in the media and elsewhere, for their acts. The Anti-Violence Ritualists, Constitutionalists and Institutionalists can, and I believe they need to, hold conversations.

What would be the reference point of such conversations? Many are resorting to idealisation of the Kerala Renaissance which I find problematic in a discussion about women’s bodies for its very exclusive history on that front. Post 1970s Kerala has been such a different space that much of this rhetoric ring no bell with the life-realities of Malayalis now- as future cannot be in some past and nostalgia for it, it is unlikely to take anybody forward. Reviving any kind of golden past in itself is a regressive position.

Secondly, Kerala Renaissance has been made into an empty symbol to such a point that all sides are actually using the same images. The constitutionalists and institutionalists are constantly reminding people of the dark ages before the Kerala Renaissance while the Ritualists have used the photos of the Renaissance leaders on their “rath yathra” vehicle, and thus making them null entities politically.

The only useful and viable option is to see Kerala Renaissance as an unfinished project: one that talked of social justice for the backward castes like ezhavas while abandoning dalits and adivasis, one that spoke of women but never let them speak and one that believed in freedom from feudalism but without ever being able to come out of feudal values. Kerala Renaissance surely has, in it, a moment and a spirit that is ethical, inclusive and brave that can be captured but it cannot be a destination.

For this act of completion, let women sit together and come up with ethical, practical and effective solutions which are capable of redefining the very social values of the Malayali society. For once, men need to listen and just listen for the saturation they have caused is itself a huge part of the problem.

The underbelly of the state has come out right in the open, while the symptoms have always been there. Now this is an opportunity: let there be new thoughts, new imagery, new set of bodies from the receiving end changing the very paradigm towards a more egalitarian and more inclusive tomorrow. Kerala needs more and Malayalis deserve better!

Reinventing communism can help both the CPI and India

Anand B in The Hindu




The Communist Party of India and its ideology seem to have lost a bit of its sheen in the last three decades, today peeking shyly from the Kerala undergrowth. Time to take to the streets — er, the social media? | Wikipedia

December 26, 1925, was the day the Communist Party of India considers as its foundation day. The party is now 92 years old. There are 84 parties that branched out from this party and follow communism today. This is, however, not about the party leaders or the staunch followers of communist philosophies in the party. This is more about actual communist and socialist workers — people who believe in communism and socialism regardless of their being a member of any affiliated parties.

The communist parties have succeeded in alienating themselves and the communist philosophy as a whole from the youth. Sure, the parties have members under the age of 35. But again, this isn’t about the party or its student-body members.

This is about the man (or woman) who works hard every day to earn a living. The man who no longer cares about philosophies or society as a whole. With the advent of technological advances, communism or Marxism has been left behind. Unfortunately, it is not Marx’s fault. He welcomed technology. He never recommended the destruction of the means of production; he asked the workers to seize it for the greater good. 
The IT and BPO industry sans unions have completely blocked a section of society — a vibrant section — from the philosophies and, subsequently, the parties too. An industry which attracted a whole generation for over two decades now has been kept away from the Left and this has crippled the spread of the ideology as well as its philosophy and politics greatly.

How did communism grow?

To delve a bit deeper, let us take a look at how communism spread. It did not spread merely through charismatic oratory figures or sectarian ideologies like caste or language. It spread from the bottom up. It spread from the workshops. It spread from the factories. It spread from weavers. It spread from the farmers. It spread in the form of trade unions. It spread in the form of student bodies. It spread based on the success it had in the form of USSR, which went toe to toe with the United States.

This meant a person who was to eventually join the party would first have to be attracted by its ideology and the philosophy. This was achieved by a propagandisation of the benefits one would get as a member of the proletariat as much as the power of the workers’ rights against the exploitation they were subjected to. It was done by apprising the worker of their rights. Grassroots propagandists like Jeevanandam or Jyoti Basu or E.M.S. Namboodiripad, who went on to become leaders, greatly helped in taking this message to the common man.

What changed?

The factors that helped in spreading the ideology largely disappeared during the final decade of the last century.

With the globalisation of the Indian Market, the death of the USSR, and the absence of grassroots propagandist leaders in the league of EMS or Jeevanandam, the party and its ideology have come in for hard times. The current party leaders confining their discourse largely to politics is not helping either. Not to mention, the mass influx of American culture along with the growth of the IT/BPO industry further dented its reach — the youth became more interested in seizing the day than seizing the means of production. And then, when the communists of the country started to set themselves against both globalisation and pop culture, they completely alienated the present generation, and they were forced to retreat to the universities in the north and factories in the States they ruled.

But they do exist. The philosophy, like all others, cannot be killed so long as even one person believes in it — indeed, even if no individual believes in it. The communists, however, are no longer as ideologically relevant or politically dominant as they used to be and should be to keep the social balance. Nor are they spreading the word as effectively as they used to.

The fact that they still limit themselves to talking about farmers and factory workers is ensuring that a young section of society finds communism or socialism an alien concept. Without meandering into the partisan part of it, being unrelatable is not doing the philosophy or the ideology any favours.

The need for communism

So, why bother with rejuvenating a dying movement? Because the need for communism and socialism is now higher than ever. When the Right gets stronger, the Left is needed to balance it out just as the Right balances the Left. Like the force from Star Wars, the balance of power needs to be restored.

On the personal front, the youth no longer are interested in hunger unless it is their own. They are not interested in problems until it affects them. By living each day for itself, we, the youth, have forgotten the lessons the past taught us and ignore the impact that forgetting these lessons can have on the future. Likes, Shares and Retweets are the highest form of response you can get for actual issues from other members of the proletariat today. All their intelligence and ability to understand politics and social structures is being squandered as they spend all of it on pop culture. The politics in House of Cards and Game of Thrones is more interesting than the actual politics that affect them on a day-to-day basis.

Seeing the bigger picture, unchallenged power corrupts. Congress — left of Center under the leadership of Rahul Gandhi — is just not enough. With the currently weak leadership in the party, be it at the regional or national level, Congress is not even a challenge for someone like Modi. As much as we need the aggressive development BJP promises, we also need to have checks and balances politically.
The news channels are not helping. They are giving more coverage to moralistic or mundane controversies (Padmavati, Trump tweets) than actual issues of economic and ecological significance (GST implementation, education sector woes). It is easier to distract the news channels than to distract the youth. Thanks to the TRP race, the current hot issue matters more than the ones that are important to the country as a whole in the long run.

Socialistic and Communist thinking could be the perfect cure for these modern-day ills and help create a future generation that is aware of the hows and whys of the policies that affects them. Taking the thinking to the youth and first-time voters will help the country greatly. The parties that follow Marx are the ones who should take ownership with this. They are better equipped to take this responsibility than anybody else.

What can they do?

Marx talks more about factories in his manifesto than agriculture. Lenin is credited with bringing in farmers into the fold of socialism and communism — he brought in the sickle and made the philosophy relevant to a larger audience.

Instead of limiting themselves to Marx’s writing, they need to evolve, much like Lenin, and reach out to the larger audience on the issue that affects them. They lost a wonderful opportunity during the recession-driven IT layoffs, for instance, to emphasise their philosophical importance.

Just like they went to universities to reach students, went to factories to reach workers and to farms to reach farmers, they need to go where the youth are concentrated today — the social media.

The philosophy needs to go into their handheld device, those we spend more time with than our better halves or parents. It is up to the party to take it there, to them, with a renewed set of issues that can be solved or mitigated by the application of socialism. This cannot involve merely creating an app which echoes the leaders’ political critique of Modi’s policies but also about creating awareness about the philosophy as a whole in a simple and reinvented ways. They also need to acknowledge that the present generation seeks out the trappings of global pop culture to decide which ideas to consume. Therefore, communism needs to outgrow the books and literature that helped propagate the philosophy in its heyday and be more proactive in its outreach.

Failure to evolve will result in extinction. And socialism/communism is one philosophy that needs to exist in our country and survive as a counterbalance for the other side. The ball is in the parties’ court for now, as always. It is up to them to decide on what to do with it, for it decides their future and ours.