India’s central government views the state of Kerala with suspicion and disdain. Politicians from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) often present it as an internal, fifth-columnist enemy.
Kerala has for decades been a vital heartland of the country’s communist movement. Despite its increasingly isolated status, the state continues to regularly vote for the communist-led Left Democratic Front (LDF), most recently in 2021. The year 2021 was the LDF’s sixth election victory since 1980, and the first time it won two consecutive terms.
What is it that has made the movement so enduringly successful at a time when Indian politics has veered sharply to the right at a national level? And are there lessons for the international left to learn?
Fort Kochi is a sultry Kerala fishing port on the Laccadive Sea, where egrets tread carefully through the surf and vendors wait in the shade of giant banyan trees for takers. They are selling ice cream, fruit juice, chaat, or sliced pineapple scattered with chilli powder.
The humid still of afternoon is cut by beckoning calls from the fishermen, poised high in the precarious scaffolding of their bamboo fishing nets. Curious tourists watch them, waiting for a demonstration of their craft. Ming Dynasty admiral and diplomat Zheng He first brought the nets they cast here in 1410.
When Zheng He arrived, foreigners had already been visiting the Malabar Coast since the time of the ancient Sumerians, including Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Greeks. The Romans were particularly keen on the Malabar pepper, vast amounts of which they exchanged for gold. A Jewish community once took refuge here after the Spanish monarchy’s Alhambra Decree of 1492 expelled them from Iberia.
There is Arab influence, too: as early as the seventh century CE, locals forged relations with maritime traders eager to bring the region’s surfeit of spices to burgeoning markets in Aleppo, Baghdad, and Cairo. The association was cultural as well as economic, with Kerala now widely recognized as the entry point of Islam into India.
As industrial capitalism came into being, mercantilist social relations inevitably gave way to even less equitable forms of colonial subjugation. First the Portuguese, then the Dutch asserted their own claims to Kerala’s trade networks, before the imposition of British colonial rule.
This complex, heterogenous history, endowed by the particulars of its geography — hemmed in as it is by the Arabian Sea on one side and the Western Ghats mountain range on the other — give Kerala a sense of uniqueness, an otherness from the rest of India. One gets the sense that at its very core, the Keralan identity is intrinsically different from that of its neighboring states.
However, the most prominent indicator of the state’s idiosyncrasy lies not in the pages of history books nor in its wide range of extant architecture, redolent of each of these distinct chapters. It is emblazoned on the walls and hung from the rafters, printed on flags, banners, and political posters: communist iconography, everywhere you go.
Two young men sit out in front of Red Youngs Sports Club, an unassuming building in Calvathy, Fort Kochi. A large red flag bearing a hammer and sickle is tied proudly to the nondescript building’s curlicued iron window bars.
Inside, a framed portrait of Vladimir Lenin takes pride of place on the wall. Beneath are photographs: activists in front of the club, reading, smoking, and sitting in front of images of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. The building was once the local Communist Party’s office.
“You don’t have sports clubs in your country?” a young man asks, bemused by my sense of intrigue. “Not ones with pictures of Lenin inside,” I respond.
Adhil is a former member of the club. He says Red Youngs was crucial in shaping his political understanding:
People like us are influenced by the place itself. When I was young, our party office was here, we could see the meetings happening. We would see the red flags, the posters of Che Guevara and Karl Marx. And so we got to know about communism as we grew up.
Not all agree, however, that the proliferation of signs represents a vitalized movement. Nissim Mannathukkaren is an academic and the author of Communism, Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Theory: The Left in South India. He argues that the sloganeering and iconography are merely the aesthetic remnants of something now lost:
Much of what the communist movement in Kerala is doing in practice is basically social democracy, encased in this older communist revolutionary rhetoric of the Soviet Union, or China . . . the revolutionary rhetoric has not dissipated. But in reality, they practice social democracy.
Yet Adhil is keen to emphasize that clubs such as Red Youngs are not important simply for their reproduction of revolutionary motifs: “Mostly we did social services; collecting food from our homes and those of neighbors to distribute. We conducted sports tournaments too: football, cricket, and carrom [an Indian board game].”
His account is one of a very ordinary institution, significant more in terms of its embeddedness in the community than anything else. It speaks to the very ordinary way in which communism is viewed in Kerala: as a part of daily life, a fact not only of politics but the social sphere in which people conduct their everyday activities.
When the Communist Party of India (CPI) came into being in the 1920s, the Malabar Coast was still divided into the principalities that would eventually become the state of Kerala. The region had long been the site of numerous rebellions against British colonialism. Its largely impoverished, rural population suffered greatly under a caste system overseen by rulers who were acquiescent to rule from London.
These repeated insurrections were not simply responses to oppression that were devoid of ideology or strategic thinking. A deeply engrained pattern of agrarian social relations on account of Kerala’s long trading history laid the foundations for coordinated action and the easy circulation of radical ideas.
Even under British rule, government investment in infrastructure that was designed to supported agricultural expansion showed the potential benefits of public expenditure. This inadvertently prefigured the ideals of a robust welfare state and the use of centralized policy-making and helped undermine the prevailing distinctions of class and caste.
In the years following the Russian Revolution, communist involvement in local agrarian struggles increased. Peasant unions were formed, hunger marches took place demanding rights for farmers, and workers in the coir industry began organizing and gaining support.
Much of the country was riven with social divisions caused by imperial rule and the hierarchical caste structure. In Kerala, as yet still split into the Malabar District and the Cochin and Travancore kingdoms, particular religious distinctions overlaid these lines of cleavage. The area’s huge Muslim and Christian populations comprised a comparatively large proportion of the disaffected working class.
When Muslim laborers seized Malabar District land from British-backed Hindu landlords in 1921, they declared independence and established temporary self-rule for the region, making owners of the previously exploited tenants. Although British forces recaptured the area six months later, the episode demonstrated the ultimate interconnectedness between regionally specific religious oppression and the broader anti-colonial class struggle.
The British authorities imposed a national ban on the CPI and persecuted its leaders. By the 1930s, communists in what would become Kerala had begun to organize within the (legal) Congress Socialist Party, a left faction of the Indian National Congress. Vijoo Krishnan, a Kerala politburo member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M) describes the period thus:
The socialists functioned as a distinct group within the Congress Party. Unlike Congress, they took up the issues of workers and peasants . . . the [Communist] Party from its inception was clear in the demand for complete independence from the British rule; at a time when the Indian National Congress was still toying with the idea of dominion status . . . it took almost a decade more to give the call for complete independence.
While the Communist movement was actively participating in the anti-imperialist struggle, it also took up agitations against social discrimination, social injustices, and the basic demands of the working class as well as the peasantry against feudal landlords. These activities played a key role in strengthening the foundation of the communist movement in Kerala.
It wasn’t until 1942, with Britain and the USSR allied against the Nazis, that the national CPI ban was repealed. The party’s popularity surged not only in what would soon become Kerala, where the CPI took a lead in a series of peasant uprisings, but in other parts of India, too: Telangana, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, and Tripura.
Continued governmental persecution forced several Kerala communists into hiding. They included one of India’s most celebrated left-wing intellectuals, the historian Elamkulam Manakkal Sankaran Namboodiripad, known as E. M. S., a founder both of the Congress Socialist Party and subsequently the CPI in Kerala.
In 1947, the British finally relinquished their colonial grip and Jawaharlal Nehru became India’s first prime minister. However, despite Nehru’s own social democratic leanings and the integral role of leftists in the struggle for independence, repression of communists continued under the new order, with some CPI leaders in jail and others in hiding. In 1950, twenty-two communists were fatally shot through the windows of their cells by prison guards at Salem Jail in present-day Tamil Nadu.
In the 1951–52 elections, the CPI won the second-highest number of seats, though its parliamentary group was much smaller than that of Nehru’s ruling Congress. Meanwhile, an effort to reorganize states along linguistic lines was underway. By 1956, Travancore, Cochin, and Malabar were brought together to form the modern state of Kerala.
Kerala’s inaugural legislative elections the following year brought victory for the CPI, with sixty seats compared to forty-three for Congress. With support from independent MPs, E. M. S. became the state’s first chief minister and the first communist leader in India to head a popularly elected government.
The new administration set about enacting popular legislation, such as protecting tenant farmers from eviction and handing them titles to the land they had tilled for centuries, as well as instituting a minimum wage. The landlord classes were outraged.
Prime Minister Nehru responded in 1959 by invoking an arcane provision in the national constitution that enabled the dismissal of Kerala’s cabinet and direct rule from New Delhi. It foreshadowed the federal perception that still persists today — that of Kerala as an essentially alien disruptor.
When new elections were held in 1960, the CPI’s vote share went up, but it lost many of its seats to a Congress-led alliance that formed the next state government. After sharp inner-party controversies over a number of issues, the Communists subsequently divided into two parties, the CPI and the CPI(M). E. M. S. helped lead the CPI(M) breakaway, which went on to become the larger of the two groups.
The divide between the two communist parties became especially bitter when the CPI supported Nehru’s daughter and successor Indira Gandhi as she imposed emergency rule during the 1970s, forcing many communists into hiding. It was only after this episode that the CPI in Kerala was able to reconcile with the CPI(M) in the framework of the LDF.
The alliance also includes several smaller parties, though the CPI(M) continues to be the senior partner. Since the breakthrough in 1980, the LDF has alternated in office with the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF), until its reelection in 2021.
The Kerala communists and their left allies have won control of a state within an otherwise hostile federal system. Mannathukkaren argues that these conditions have necessitated the CPI(M)’s gradual rightward turn:
[They] are working in a framework within which there is formal democracy and all the constitutional measures are not communist, having been formulated by the Congress party, a bourgeois party. It is a bourgeois democratic setup. . . . There is no other way for a party working within this capitalist system to function other than by making compromises with it.
Kerala’s current chief minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, who was imprisoned and tortured during the period of emergency rule, is the longest-serving secretary of the CPI(M)’s Kerala state committee. Vijayan’s administration has continued building on the foundations of what development economists have dubbed the “Kerala Model” — a term that has since become synonymous with the achievements of Keralan communism in the field of human development.
Kerala today has near-universal access to health and education. It ranks second among Indian states in the Human Development Index of the United Nations Development Programme and boasts the lowest multidimensional poverty rate in the country. The Keralan district of Kottayam has etched its name in history this year, becoming the first Indian district to eradicate extreme poverty.
Under the LIFE Mission, launched in 2017, the state has provided around 450,000 houses for those still in extreme poverty. Nearly 60,000 families have received support for income generation, housing, and access to identity documents.
The most remarkable achievements of the Kerala Model may be in the field of health care. By 2020, the average life expectancy was approximately seventy-five years — the best in the country and significantly higher than the national average of seventy — and the state has some of the lowest infant mortality rates in India. These successes are all the more impressive when one considers that Kerala has a nominal GDP of about ₹13.11 lakh crore (US $167 billion), placing it eleventh among Indian states.
For Mannathukkaren, these constitute the achievements of an essentially social democratic party that has long since eschewed communism in practice and opted for accommodation with multinational capital. He notes the pressures to which the LDF administrations have been subjected, including Kerala’s high emigration rate, the decline of its agriculture, and the constant search for external investment, evidenced by the 2019 launch of bonds on the London Stock Exchange:
Kerala is a small place. The rest of India is entirely capitalist; so is the rest of the world. It is simply impossible for a communist party to continue to have the goal of transcending or abolishing capitalism under these conditions.
However, Vijoo Krishnan challenges the equation of the CPI(M) with parties of the European center left:
Clear positions against the 12-hour work day, pro-corporate labor laws, and the privatization of the public sector — these are all a significant departure from the social democratic parties of Europe. There is absolutely no truth [to the claim] that the CPI(M) has moved to the right. It continues to remain the vanguard of the working class, a staunchly anti-imperialist party standing for proletarian internationalism.
Despite the siege conditions, Kerala’s communism endures. This contrasts with the experience of West Bengal, where the communist-led Left Front held power for several decades before suffering a heavy defeat in 2011, from which it has yet to recover. It also contrasts with the national political scene, where the two communist parties have now been reduced to six seats in the Lok Sabha, having elected fifty-three MPs — about one-tenth of the total — in the 2004 election.
Kerala remain relatively impervious to the Hindutva forces that have come to dominate national politics. In last year’s Lok Sabha election, both the UDF and the LDF comfortably outpolled the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance that holds power in New Delhi, although the BJP did win its first-ever Keralan seat.
In November of this year, the state hopes to declare itself the first in India to have eradicated extreme poverty. Whatever the future may bring, it is surely a triumph that it has been able to hold on for this long.
Great Job Ben Morris & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
