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<font size="1"><a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/11-kerala/">https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/11-kerala/</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">There Are So Many Lessons to Learn from Kerala: The Eleventh Newsletter (2021).</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Vijay Prashad - March 18, 2021</div>
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<div id="gmail-attachment_38249" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/GenderBudgetCover-Ajunath-1.jpg" alt="Anujath Sindhu Vinaylal (India), Gender and Child Equality, 2017." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="343" height="482"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-38249" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Anujath Sindhu Vinaylal (India), <em>My mother and the mothers in the neighborhood</em>, 2017.</span></p></div>
<p>Dear friends,</p>
<p>Greetings from the desk of the <a href="https://thetricontinental.org/">Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research</a>.</p>
<p>Indian farmers and agricultural workers have crossed the hundred-day
mark of their protest against the government of Prime Minister Narendra
Modi. They will not withdraw until the government repeals laws that
deliver the advantages of agriculture to large corporate houses. This,
the farmers and agricultural workers say, is an existential struggle.
Surrender is equivalent to death: even before these laws were passed,
more than <a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/articles/we-didnt-bleed-him-enough/">315,000</a> Indian farmers had committed suicide since 1995 because of the debt burden placed on them.</p>
<p>Over the next one and a half months, assembly <a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2021/03/03/how-indias-farmers-protests-could-upend-the-political-landscape/">elections</a>
will take place in four Indian states (Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and
West Bengal) and in one union territory (Puducherry). There are 225
million people who live in these four states, which would, if measured
by itself, make this area the fifth largest country in the world after
Indonesia. Prime Minister Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is not a
serious contender in any of these states.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_38113" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Community-Gopika-Babu-1.jpg" alt="Gopika Babu (India), Community, 2021." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="362" height="482"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-38113" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Gopika Babu (India), <i>Community</i>, 2021.</span></p></div>
<p>In Kerala (population 35 million), the Left Democratic Front has been
in the government for the past five years, during which it has
confronted a number of serious crises: the aftereffects of Cyclone Ockhi
in 2017, the <a href="https://www.who.int/southeastasia/outbreaks-and-emergencies/health-emergency-information-risk-assessment/surveillance-and-risk-assessment/nipah-virus-outbreak-in-kerala">Nipah</a> virus outbreak of 2018, the <a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/how-kerala-fought-the-heaviest-deluge-in-nearly-a-century/">floods</a> of 2018 and 2019, and then the COVID-19 <a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/studies-3-coronashock-and-socialism/">pandemic</a>. As a result, Kerala’s health minister, K.K. Shailaja, has earned the nickname the ‘<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/14/the-coronavirus-slayer-how-keralas-rock-star-health-minister-helped-save-it-from-covid-19">Coronavirus Slayer</a>’
because of the state’s rapid and comprehensive approach to breaking the
chain of infection. All polls indicate that the Left will return to the
government, breaking an anti-incumbency trend in the state since 1980.</p>
<p><span><span class="gmail-caption">Vijay Prashad speaks to Kerala’s Finance
Minister Thomas Isaac about the upcoming legislative elections in
Kerala, courtesy of Peoples Dispatch.</span></span></p>
<p>To better understand the great gains made by the Left Democratic
Front government over the past five years, I spoke to Kerala’s Finance
Minister T. M. Thomas Isaac, a Central Committee member of the Communist
Party of India (Marxist). Isaac begins by telling me that the switch
back and forth between the Left Front and the Right Front, as he called
it, has ‘cost Kerala a lot of social advancement’. If the Left wins
again, he says, it will ‘be in power continuously for ten years. That is
a sufficiently long period to leave a very substantial imprint upon
Kerala’s development process’.</p>
<p>The general orientation of the Left’s approach toward Kerala’s
development, Isaac said, has been ‘a kind of hop, step, and jump’:</p>
<p>The hop, the first stage, is redistributive politics. Kerala has been
very noted for that. Our trade union movement has succeeded in having
significant redistribution of income. Kerala has the highest wage rates
in the country. Our peasant movement has been able to redistribute
landed assets through a very successful land reform programme. Powerful
social movements which pre-date even the Left movement in Kerala, [and]
whose tradition the Left has carried forward, have pressurised
successive governments which have been in power in Kerala to provide
education, healthcare, [and for the] basic needs of everyone. Therefore,
in Kerala, an ordinary person enjoys a quality of life which is much
superior to the rest of India.</p>
<p>But there is a problem with this process. Because we have to spend so
much on the social sector, there won’t be sufficient money [or]
resources for building infrastructure. So [after] a programme of social
development spread over more than half a century, there’s a serious
infrastructure deficit in Kerala.</p>
<p>Our present government has been very remarkable in meeting the
crises, ensuring that there is no social breakdown, ensuring that nobody
in Kerala would go hungry, and [that] everybody will get treatment
during COVID times and so on. But we did something more remarkable.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_38135" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/GreenKerala-JunainaMuhammed-5.jpg" alt="Junaina Muhammed (India), Green Kerala, 2021." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="402" height="482"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-38135" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Junaina Muhammed (India), <i>Green Kerala</i>, 2021.</span></p></div>
<p>What the government did was to build the state’s infrastructure and
begin to pivot to another economic foundation. The amount needed to
upgrade the infrastructure is staggering, about Rs. 60,000 crores (or
$11 billion). How does a Left government raise the funds to finance this
kind of infrastructural development? Kerala, as a state within India,
cannot borrow beyond a certain limit, so the Left government set up
instruments such as the Kerala Infrastructure Investment Fund Board
(KIIFB). Through the Board, the government was able to spend Rs. 10,000
crores (US$1.85 billion) and ‘has produced a remarkable change in the
infrastructure’. After the hop (redistribution) and infrastructural
development (step), comes the jump:</p>
<p>The jump is the programme that we have placed before the people. Now
that infrastructure is there, [such as] transmission lines, assured
electricity, industrial parks for investors to come and invest, we will
have K-FON [Kerala-Fibre Optic Network], a super-highway of internet
owned by the state, which is available to any service provider. [It
ensures] equal treatment to everybody; nobody will have an [undue]
advantage. And we are going to provide internet to everybody. It is the
right of every individual. All the poor are going to get broadband
connectivity for free.</p>
<p>All of this has provided a background for us to take the next big
jump. That is, we now want to change the economic base of our economy.
Our economic base is commercial crops, which are in serious crisis
because of opening up [to ‘free trade’], or labour-intensive traditional
industries, or very polluting chemical industries and so on. Therefore,
we realise now, industries which are of our core competence would be
knowledge industries, service industries, skill-based industries, and so
on. Now how do you make this paradigm shift from your traditional
economic base to the new [one]?</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_38146" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/HighTechSchool-KadambariVaiga-3.jpg" alt="Kadambari Vaiga (India), High-tech School, 2020." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="482" height="482"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-38146" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Kadambari Vaiga (India), <i>High-tech School</i>, 2020.</span></p></div>
<p>What will the new economic opportunities be for Kerala? First,
because of the shift to the digital platform economy, Kerala will now
develop its IT industry with the immense advantages of the state’s high
literacy rates as well as 100% state-funded internet connectivity that
will soon be available to the entire population. This, Isaac said, ‘is
going to have a tremendous impact upon women’s employment’. Second,
Kerala’s Left government will restructure higher education to promote
innovation and deepen Kerala’s history of cooperative production (the
example here is the Uralungal Labour Contract Cooperative Society, which
recently rebuilt an old bridge in five months, seven months ahead of
schedule).</p>
<p>Kerala aims to go beyond the paradigms of the Gujarat Model (high
rates of growth for capitalist firms, but little social security and
welfare for the people), the Uttar Pradesh Model (neither high growth
nor social welfare), and the model that would provide high welfare but
little industrial growth. The new Kerala project would go for high but
managed growth and high welfare. ‘We want to create in Kerala [the basis
for] individual dignity of life, security, and welfare’, Isaac says,
which requires both industry and welfare. ‘We are not a socialist
country’, he reminds me; ‘we are part of Indian capitalism. But in this
part, within the limitations, we shall design a society which will
inspire all progressive-thinking people in India. Yes, it is possible to
build something different. That’s the idea of Kerala’.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/studies-feminisms-2-kanak-mukherjee/"><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Kanak_EN_TT.jpg" alt="" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="482" height="253"></a></p>
<p>A key element in the Kerala Model is the powerful social movements
that grip the state. Amongst them is a mass front of the
hundred-year-old <a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/dossier-32-communist-movement-in-india/">communist</a>
movement and the All-India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA),
which formed forty years ago in 1981 and which has a membership in
excess of ten million women. One of the founders of AIDWA was Kanak
Mukherjee (1921-2005). Kanakdi, as she was called, joined the freedom
movement at the age of ten and never stopped fighting to emancipate our
world from the chains of colonialism and capitalism. In 1938, at the age
of seventeen, Kanakdi joined the Communist Party of India, using her
immense talents to organise students and industrial workers. In 1942, as
part of the anti-fascist struggle, Kanakdi helped found the Mahila Atma
Raksha Samiti (‘Women’s Self Defence Committee’), which played a key
role in helping those devastated by the Bengal Famine of 1943 – a famine
created by imperialist policy that resulted in as many as three million
deaths. These experiences deepened Kanakdi’s commitment to the
communist struggle, to which she devoted the rest of her life.</p>
<p>To honour this pioneer communist, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research dedicated our second feminisms <a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/studies-feminisms-2-kanak-mukherjee/">study</a> (<i>Women of Struggle, Women in Struggle</i>)
to her life and work. Professor Elisabeth Armstrong, who was a key
contributor to this study, recently published a book on AIDWA, which is
now out as a <a href="https://mayday.leftword.com/catalog/product/view/id/22300">paperback</a> from LeftWord Books.</p>
<p>Today, organisations such as AIDWA continue to lift the confidence
and power of working-class and peasant women, whose role has been
considerable in Kerala and in the farmer’s revolt, as well as in
struggles across the world. They speak out not only about their
suffering but also about their aspirations, their great dreams of a
socialist society – dreams that need to be built alongside other
instruments such as the Left Democratic Front government in Kerala.</p>
<p>Warmly,</p>
<p>Vijay</p>
<p><br></p>
<p><a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/11-kerala/?output=pdf">Download as PDF</a> </p></div></div></div>
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