The latest news from Chengara is alarming. As if in retaliation to the rally taken out by dalit and human rights activists on 30 August, the very next day, a group of people who were travelling to the struggle site were attacked by the goons who continue the blockade. The whole group — eight men and thirteen women, including Omana, six months pregnant,were beaten heavily, and Omana’s two-year-child was snatched and thrown down. The injured are in hospital and activists are trying to get a case registered with the police.Intimidating posters have appeared all over Pathanamthitta town, declaring that the estate will be ‘cleared’on 3 September by the unions. All this, while the police watches, and a spineless admininstration looks the other way. Apparently, the administration now takes its orders from the CPM district committee.Meanwhile, the leadership continues to talk of the package, which will apparently come only after the protestors have been thoroughly intimidated, physically and emotionally,and reduced to cowering, nervous wrecks.

I have had friends asking me whether those who describe this as ‘Kerala’s Nandigram’aren’t going over the top. Well,if ‘Nandigram’ doesn’t refer anymore to a concrete set of events but to a certain new style of political elimination practised by cadre parties that monopolise the language of left politics,in which the party elites turn those sections of ‘political society’ absorbed into the fringes of its unions and mass organisations against their sisters and brothers who refuse such absorption, then ‘Nandigram’ is not new. We have had earlier versions, large and small.However, variations are bound to occur across time and regions. Dalit activists in Kerala who conducted struggles for surplus land in the late 1970s and 80s can tell us about earlier ‘Nandigram’, for sure. And there are variations across regions. Applied Nandigram varies as the regional coordinates change.
The Kerala style, in these days of the ‘neoliberal turn’ (as distinguished from the ‘liberal turn’ of the 1990s), is distinctly different. It seems to involve a certain ‘silent-violent extermination’, as different from Bengal’s ‘model’. For instance, in the 2006 elections in Wayanad, the Vidhava-Agathy Munnetam (Movement of Widows and Destitutes),an independent organisation of the widows of farmers who committed suicides to escape mounting debts, which had rapidly gained much public acceptance,fielded a candidate.She was regarded as a threat to the CPM-supported candidtae, slated to win easily. A defamation campaign, coupled with intimidation by party musclemen, was unleashed against the leading members of the organisation. The violence unleashed on the organisers was interestingly muted — through false police cases– and inflicted in a  way that the body remained relatively unmarked by physical scars. Such pressure was put that it destroyed the public support for these women, painting them in the most lurid colours imaginable. Both the Congress and CPM were complicit in this ‘silent-violence’ to exterminate challenge from the poor who chose to remain outside its fringes.But the CPM as usual was one step ahead, with newspapers supporting the LDF candidate enthusiatically participating in the silencing and defaming. Simultaneously,the left reasserted its paternity over the issues that the widows’ organisation was trying to raise.Most of the prominent members of the widows’ organisation were indeed part of the left-fringe until very recently, and no wonder that the elites’ determination to wipe them out was so pronounced.Two years later, today,this organisation is yet to fully recover from the violence it endured.

The similarities with Chengara are striking. Here too silencing coupled with defamation has been rampant. Physical violence has been carefully calibrated to extract obedience through generating fear– rape, of course leaves no obvious scars on the body. The scale is much higher though. And of course the ‘dalit convention’ recently concluded at Kochi was precisely a take-over exercise.

So as the Hindu right-wing unfurls Moditva in Orissa — which of course differs because of the different regional scenario — the CPM’s styles of extermination of subaltern challenges varies, in history and according to region. Ah, a new ‘Kerala Model’, indeed!