By Vinaya
In October 2017, exactly a century after Russian revolution, an article was published in The Washington Post and described Kerala, a southern Indian state “one of the few places on earth where a communist can still dream”. 2017 also marked sixty years of India’s first democratically elected communist government coming into power in Kerala. The socialist movement swept through one third of the globe by the second half of 20th century, eventually waned by stagnant economies, capitalist pressurisation and resistance from its own people. But the story of communism in Kerala is absolutely different from that of the communist regimes existing elsewhere in the world, instead of transforming itself into an autocratic force, Kerala’s Communists embraced electoral politics and since 1957 are frequently voted into power. The Communist Party in Kerala is exclusive because it has always functioned under the conditions of a liberal democracy, counting on success in multi-party elections to stay in power. Unlike many other communist governments, it did not crush political dissent. Communist Party of India’s 1957 constitution stated it might allow the existence of opposing parties. Party leaders, like E.MS Namboodiripad, didn’t support the idea of using military units to stay in power because it might give out a nasty portrayal of the CPI on a global stage. This reliance on the people’s opinions created what is called a “benevolent” communist government, but it also made it difficult to enact radical reforms. Therefore, the reforms introduced by the communist governments in Kerala were moderately socialist. These moderate socialist reforms also proved highly successful. There have been huge investments in education that have produced a 95 percent literacy rate, the highest in India, and a universal health care system. Kerala can never ignore the immense contribution of the Left movement in making it one of the most socially progressive places in the world. As far back as 1960, Kerala outpaced the rest of India in terms of literacy and life expectancy, but this divergence truly became appreciable from 1980 onwards when Kerala’s male literacy rates were more than 30 percentage points higher than India’s overall average and its life expectancy at birth was 13 years greater. By the 1990s, Kerala not only bested India but also China and in fact in 1990-1991, Kerala’s female literacy rates were higher than any single province in China. By 1999 anticipation for males and females in Kerala was 74 years, one year higher than South Korea, four years than China, and eleven years higher than India’s overall. (From, India: Development and Participation (2005) by Jean Dreze, Amartya Sen.; quoted by Apoorva Shah in his article ‘Putting the Kerala Model to Rest: Lessons for a New Era of Development in India’). The history of left governments in Kerala has offered the “Kerala Model” of development to the world – a people’s alternative to the rising forces of globalisation. Michael Parenti, in his 1997 book “Black shirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism”, wrote,
“Consider Kerala, a state in India where the actions of popular organizations and mass movements have won important victories over the last forty years against politico-economic oppression, generating a level of social development considerably better than that found in most of the Third World, and accomplished without outside investment. Though Kerala has no special sources of wealth, it has had decades of communist organizing and political struggle that reached and moved large numbers of people and breathed life into the state’s democracy.”
Thinking of communism in Kerala is important at a time of growing inequality and religious division in India and around the world, for it offers a people’s alternative in a capitalised world and a socially progressive model that reaches out.
