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Kerala politics: Casteist and communal

Towards the end of the nineteenth century Swami Vivekananda set out on a journey across India. The last place on his itinerary was Kerala, specifically the princely state of Travancore. (Kanyakumari was then part of that kingdom.) Having wandered across the nation, one would have thought that the Swami would be inured to the idiocies of the caste system. He was not, despairingly describing Kerala as a "lunatic asylum".

I am sorry to say that Vivekananda's reaction would have been much the same had he been alive to tour modern Kerala. He would have been right to do so -- look no farther than the dramatics of Kerala politics. Make no mistake about it, caste and religion are major forces in Kerala's electoral politics to this day.

There will soon be a flurry of elections in Kerala. Next month, in September, the state elects a new panchayat and municipalities. In February, there will be a new assembly. For several decades, the choice has been limited where the voters of Kerala are concerned -- they can opt either for the Congress-led United Democratic Front or for the CPI-M dominated Left Democratic Front. Is it possible that there is, finally, a real choice for an electorate that is bored or angry with both?

To begin with the Left Democratic Front, there is an undeclared but very real split in the CPI-M. The CITU, which is the trade union wing of the party, is up in arms. To exacerbate matters, there is an acrimonious debate about whether or not the party should be allied with the Muslim League. The CPI is angry with Big Brother CPI-M, and is itching to teach it a lesson. Finally, the Revolutionary Socialist Party has openly split, and one of the factions is all set to join the United Democratic Front.

How about the Congress? Both A K Antony and K Karunakaran are back at their old game of one-upmanship. As with the Marxists, nobody will admit this publicly, but watch for the fun anyway. And of course the Muslim League -- currently a member of the United Democratic Front -- is debating a proposal to join the Left Democratic Front.

When the leaders are confused, bickering, or both, you cannot fault the troops in the field for following suit. The result, I think, will be some strange coalitions at the grassroots level. I imagine that there shall be partnerships struck at the local level between individual parties in the United Democratic Front with individual partners in the Left Democratic Front. In fact, I understand that the CPI-M at any rate has given the nod for its units to forge alliances where they seem profitable.

What is going on? The smaller parties have several reasons to be angry with the two major organisations -- the Congress and the CPI-M. In previous years, they might have been very grouchy about it but they would not actually have done anything about it. That was before the great United Front experiment of the 1996-1997 period in Delhi. Whatever else happened, it taught smaller groups how much nuisance value they possess. Larger parties may or may not be able to survive without a junior partner, but their survival becomes just a bit more uncertain. This gives smaller parties a certain amount of power and they are not shy about using it.

Of course, parties such as the CPI and the Muslim League are not exactly 'small' on the Kerala stage. They are the second largest groups in the Left Democratic Front and the United Democratic Front respectively. And each one has a history of crossing sides when it was felt to be necessary. (The longest lived, and in my opinion the best, government that Kerala ever enjoyed was a Congress-CPI. coalition under Achutha Menon.) And yes, the Muslim League was an on-and-off partner of the Marxists until the late E M S Namboodiripad decreed otherwise a little over a decade ago.

Personal ambition, antipathy, or probably a combination of both account for some of the tiffs between leaders such as Antony and Karunakaran. Or, for that matter, between a Nayanar and an Achuthanandan. Boiled down to basics, however, the battle for Kerala shall come down to a contest for the hearts and minds of the voters of Malabar. It is this region that has occupied the attention of both major parties. But both the Congress and the CPI-M believe that the electorate is aching for a change. There is, to put it bluntly, just not enough space for both to exist -- and that could be true of the state as a whole. Both the Congress and the Left Front are hard put to explain just where they differ on hard issues, or why they should be fighting in Thiruvananthapuram when they are on the same side in Delhi.

The truth is that there is now very little room for the Congress and the CPI-M to stand out from each other where policies are concerned. The calculation is that whichever party wins the assembly polls of 2001 shall continue to survive, whereas the other one will be ground out.

This will be a very interesting period in Kerala politics. (It shall also be a very violent one; Kerala, believe it or not, was second only to Bihar when it came to electoral malpractices in the general election of 1999 according to the Election Commission's own statistics.) If 'no news is good news', then I am sorry for my home state, because it will be hitting the headlines a little more often than is necessary.

T V R Shenoy