https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/can...oreign-media-1768706?pfrom=home-lateststories
Was reading some articles, found an interesting one concerning how Communist parties still flourish in this state, despite them fucking up hard in other states like West Bengal. Have highlighted some choice bits from the article:
Was reading some articles, found an interesting one concerning how Communist parties still flourish in this state, despite them fucking up hard in other states like West Bengal. Have highlighted some choice bits from the article:
On a recent morning in southern India, one of the world's last true-believing communists rose to speak in a place where communists can still whip up the masses and win elections.
Thomas Isaac, the finance minister for the state of Kerala, gazed out at a crowd of hundreds who had gathered to honor the founding father of Kerala's Communist Party, a man killed by a snakebite while organizing farmworkers whose dying words were reputed to have been: "Comrades, forward!"
A row of hammer and sickle flags fluttered in the wind. People raised clenched fists in a "red salute" and chanted "Long live the revolution!"
"We are trying to build our dream state in this fascist India!" Isaac began, and in so many ways it was still true.
A century after Bolsheviks swarmed the Winter Palace in Petrograd, Russia (now St. Petersburg), the Indian state of Kerala, home to 35 million people, remains one of the few places on earth where a communist can still dream.
But in Kerala - far from the high-stakes maneuvers of the Cold War and nearly 2,000 miles from the Indian capital of New Delhi - history has taken the most unexpected of detours.
Instead of ossifying into an autocratic force, Kerala's communists embraced electoral politics and since 1957 have been routinely voted into power. Instead of being associated with repression or failure, the party of Marx is widely associated with huge investments in education that have produced a 95 percent literacy rate, the highest in India, and a health-care system where citizens earning only a few dollars a day still qualify for free heart surgery.
This modern incarnation of communism also has produced one of the stranger paradoxes of the global economy: Millions of healthy, educated workers setting off to the supercharged, capitalist economies of the Persian Gulf dreaming of riches and increasingly finding them.
And that has raised an existential question for Isaac and Kerala's other 21st-century communists: Can they survive their own success?
The story of communism in Kerala did not begin with a revolution, the storming of the capital, or even Marx. Instead, its beginnings in 1939 were far more idiosyncratic, rooted in resistance to British rule, a commitment to land reform and opposition to India's caste system.
Unlike communists in China, Latin America or Eastern Europe, party leaders in Kerala never seized factories - the "means of production" in the words of Marx - or banned private property. Instead, they competed in elections with the center-left Indian National Congress party, winning some years and losing others.
Communism became for many a piece of their identity. In the 1970s and 1980s it wasn't uncommon for parents to name their children "Lenin," "Stalin" or, in the case of one girl, "Soviet Breeze." Pictures of early Soviet leaders like Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin were hung on the walls in party offices alongside Indian heroes such as the party's founder, Krishna Pillai.
In the Soviet Union, the Communist Party had been something remote - "a mysterious and implacable external power," as one scholar put it. In Kerala, the communist party is made up of people like Isaac, the finance minister, whose iPhone was now ringing.
"Yes, comrade," he answered.
Isaac, who became an atheist when he joined the party, posed with the newlyweds under a statue of a pale, gaunt Christ on the cross, because in Kerala the communists had never sought to stamp out religion. Soon he was back in the van rushing down a narrow, potholed road past makeshift tea stands, coconut sellers and clusters of simple, cement homes, each one with electricity and indoor toilets. Kerala is one of the few states in India where this is true.
Isaac estimated that the government would have to subsidize the workers' salaries for about 10 years, until they retired and their jobs probably disappeared.
He knew such subsidies were only possible because of the decidedly un-communist lives that the younger generations are pursuing. Increasingly these young workers are fleeing Kerala's low-wage economy for the booming states of the Persian Gulf, leaving Isaac to oversee an economy unlike anything Marx ever imagined - one fueled by global demand for Kerala's healthy, educated workforce. Even with the Gulf money, Isaac is still running the largest deficit of any Indian state.
As finance minister, Isaac dreams of building new highways, bridges and industrial parks that might make it easier to attract high-paying jobs to Kerala - "the best physical and social infrastructure in all of India!" he often said.
But, for now, his government has more pressing priorities: expanding Kerala's four international airports, each of which offers nonstop flights to the Gulf, and adding a fifth.
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In the 1980s and 1990s Kerala's migrant workers found work building highways and skyscrapers in the Gulf. These days their better-educated successors fill jobs overseas as accountants, nurses, lawyers, doctors and mid-level civil servants. More than one-third of Kerala's gross domestic product last year came from remittances.
These migrants are remaking Kerala's culture. One of the most popular programs on local television is "World of Expats," a reality show that helps distraught family members find relatives who have gone missing in the Gulf.
They are also remaking the state's humble landscape. Kerala is a place where big, gated homes - "Gulf houses" in the local lingo - sit next to simple houses. Many of the big homes also sit empty for much of the year, while their owners are abroad working. One government study from 2011 estimated that there were nearly 1 million empty or partially occupied homes. Meanwhile, Isaac worries about a shortage of housing for the poor.
A big reason for the Communist Party's survival in Kerala has been its ability to adapt to the demands of electoral politics and accommodate different and even contradictory views. As a result the very meaning of communism in Kerala has become a subject of debate.
For many, especially the young, communism today is more about the ideal of equal opportunity than the ideology of Marx or Lenin."We believe all people are the same class and should have the same chance in life," said Shigin Pradeesh, 20, a university student and son of a low-wage coconut picker, who was waiting by the front desk of the party headquarters in the village of Pinarayi.
"I am not a selfish person," he said. "That's why I am a communist."
In Kerala the communist idea often survives in the most parochial of ways. When the party decided to open a worker-owned amusement park cooperative, some party officials complained that the proposed name - "Malabar Pleasures" - was misguided. Pleasure, after all, is a "bourgeois" concept. The name was changed to "Incredible Park."
Director Amal Neerad's "Comrade in America" opened at theaters in Kerala, Abu Dhabi and Dubai on May 5, which also happened to be Marx's birthday. In the film, Neerad's communist hero fights for the poor and falls in love with an American woman visiting family in Kerala. When she returns to the United States, he risks his life sneaking across the U.S.-Mexican border to win her back.
The film gently pokes fun at self-important communists and their long-winded speeches about revolution. In one of its many whimsical moments, the lovesick hero drinks too much and hallucinates a conversation with Che who tells him that the "best lovers among us are communist comrades. Those who don't have anything to hide can create revolutions and love deeply."
In the end, the hero's love chooses capitalist America over him. One film critic described Neerad's lead comrade as a "losing man." To Neerad, a former party activist, this was too bleak. "He's a losing believer," the filmmaker said.
This was perhaps one more way to think of communism in Kerala at a time of growing inequality and religious division in India and around the world.
"It's a failed dream," Neerad said. "But it's our only hope."
