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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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