Plots
And Politics In God's Own Country: Fifty Years Of Kerala
By Shajahan Madampat
02 December, 2006
Countercurrents.org
On
November 1, 2006, Kerala, the small Indian state of idyllic beauty and
rampantly itinerant people, turned 50. It was in November 1956 that
the state was formed, bringing together British Malabar, Travancore,
and Kochi, three provinces with Malayalam as the common language.
Some stale, 'goes without
saying' sort of clichés usually precede any discussion on Kerala
politics: It is a state where a communist government, or kind of a communist
government, was voted to power for the first time in human history.
Long after hair splitting
on the virtues of Joseph Stalin ceased to be fashionable elsewhere in
the world, Kerala continued to revel in it, trying hard to sort out
profound historical riddles, which the rest of the world had successfully
resolved decades ago! Kerala boasts of having had a fairly successful
experiment in land reforms, thanks to the Left movement. The Left in
Kerala, paradoxically, has consistently been Right concerning man-woman
relations and other 'morality shattering indulgences', facilitating
at least one major common ground with religious establishments. It was
hard to fall in love - that is if you are a party cadre - unless you
have prior permission from the 'New Class'. If you are not party cadre,
then the religious establishment will take care of your love life!
All political parties vie with each other in bringing life to a standstill
at the drop of a hat, notwithstanding the wide spread public resentment
against 'hartals', and half educated theoreticians vindicate it as being
reflective of the ethos of a politicized society.
Malayalees are a highly literate
society - never mind they confuse literacy with education - thanks to
which they are able to devour a big dose of tasteless pulp fiction published
in titillating magazines, which count their print run in millions. To
make matters worse, or better - depending on your perspective - you
now have a number of yellow periodicals scrupulously and indignantly
peeping into the bedrooms of public figures. Pornography as a sanctimonious
moralizing agent is a unique Malayalee contribution!
Collective Paranoid Disorder
marks the political culture of Kerala today. In that, interestingly,
it competes with the United States, whose alleged machinations are the
root cause behind all the ills plaguing Malayalee society. Malayalee
intellectuals, several of them to be precise, derive immense pleasure
bordering on cerebral orgasm sans foreplay in unraveling the mysterious
imperialist conspiracies behind small local events unfolding in Kerala.
Conspiracy theory is an easy substitute for substantive analysis in
God's own country.
There is almost an overarching
consensus across the political spectrum that the real villains behind
every unwanted political pregnancy in Kerala are external agents. And
this in a state a quarter of whose population ekes out their livelihood
working abroad or in other Indian states.
Computers, Railways, industrial development, tractors, modernization
in agriculture, international airports - there is hardly anything that
Kerala hasn't opposed at first, only to regret and welcome a few years
later, when it has become passé. Malayali society is an eternal
opposition, politicized into a cocoon, ceaselessly replacing the materiality
of change with the triviality of shallow polemic. It is misleadingly
progressive and democratic on the surface, but if you scratch that surface,
the mindset of a bygone feudal era stares you in the face. This famously
politicized state will go down in history with the ignominy of having
festively returned to power the government that had brutally implemented
Indira Gandhi's notorious 'Emergency' in the seventies.
Community formations of an
unprecedented kind have played a significant role in the evolution of
electoral politics in Kerala. It is perhaps the only state in India
in which castes have successfully transformed into political communities
with enormous bargaining power at their disposal. Other religious groups
have also been mobilized into political communities, with the result
that, on the one hand, a certain sense of empowerment has dawned on
most of the groups with strong arithmetic on their side, and on the
other, the danger of confessional politics crossing the Rubicon to full
fledged communalism poses a perpetual threat to the fragile fabric of
the polity. The flipside of this whole situation is that miniscule minorities,
who lack the right electoral arithmetic, such as the adivasis, are left
out in the lurch and their legitimate grievances remain unaddressed.
The left, despite its noble
intentions, is destined to work through this inescapable web of communitarian
political formations, often getting caught in the vortex of competitive
confessional claims to the power cake. Accommodating such claims also
assumes especial political importance because the larger threat to the
polity, the fascist Hindutwa brigade, is making every effort to catapult
itself into the political mainstream through the creaks within the structure
of binary coalition politics. In short, the left is caught between a
labyrinth and a treacherous road and it justifiably chooses the latter.
The other major player, Indian
National Congress, leading the non-left, but not Right sort of coalition,
is on an unstoppable suicidal course. Internecine rivalries of the silliest
nature have rendered this dinosaur almost irrelevant. The short and
long of it all is that politics in Kerala is moving in the direction
of nihilist nay saying, while the Malayalees, an incorrigible consumerist
society, consume with total resignation even the news of their being
perpetually screwed up by their own leaders.
The latest fashion that Malayalees
avidly consume is a series of sex scandals, hitting headlines with irksome
regularity, 'featuring' public figures of all hues. Hypocritical to
the core on matters carnal, Kerala is the site of a perpetual phallic
dance and a moral crusade for sexual prudery going on hand in hand.
A sensationalist media,
both print and visual, play their humble role in making this drama more
and more interesting!!
Shajahan Madampat is a cultural critic and commentator.
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