The panchayat elections in Kerala are over and the dust has settled in the battle-field. In the past weeks, I have been repeatedly asked, why aren’t you writing something on the elections? Well, I told them, I have many failings but I do not suffer from Schadenfreude.

But more importantly,what is  new, worth writing about?  Is there anything new about the CPM’s losses? No, it has been hurtling this way down, and all cries of warning went unheeded. Is there anything surprising about the ‘communal consolidation’ that the CPM intellectuals are busy pointing their trembling fingers at? Well,  I wouldn’t be surprised. After all, it is they who drummed up virulent Islamophobia. Who did they expect it to serve? I’d be surprised, in fact, if the Hindu, Christian, and Muslim votes didn’t get consolidated, and this time the BJP saw that the CPM had worked hard to prepare the ground which was easier for them to occupy! The BJP’s opening of account in electoral politics in Kerala, therefore, comes as no surprise. And what about the Party Secretary who thinks a six percentage fall in vote share for the LDF is no big deal? Ha, no surprise, certainly! The man never had a grip over his thoughts or words.Besides, he’s just following a rule. In such situations, the general rule is (applicable to the UDF as well): when in trouble with elections, evoke the ‘mass base argument’ as if the elections are a trifle, as if the party is aiming at a revolution in the near future.

And what about the media which was so caught up by the reservation of fifty per cent of the seats in local bodies, how come they are talking sexist? Well, I can only respond that that the silliness of some reports in the media which claim that ‘Bangles jingle as fifty percent seats are occupied by women’ is slightly better than the wit of CPM organizers in Thiruvananthapuram who jokingly called candidate-selection efforts pennupiduttam (woman-grabbing) and the imagination of the enlightened activist in Kollam who sighed that from now on, the Corporation will resemble the cashew-factory (where women workers, who are treated as ‘secondary earners’ and not full workers, and who are made to carry out poorly paid, low-skill, laborious tasks, predominate). What about the unprecedented violence during polling? Unprecedented, yes, unexpected, no. Everybody not blessed by the rose-tinted spectacles of CPM intellectuals can well see that the CPM has been bidding for its own minor version of dominance without hegemony. So what else to expect?

Many think the losses of the CPM are well-deserved, but it is sad indeed to see that Kerala, where the dominant left had truly rich opportunities to reinvent itself creatively after the early 1990s, is moving dangerously close to post-communist East European societies complete with violent gangs, widespread corruption, and with greed reinvented as as the acceptable and respectable social value. The inability of local governance to control this tide, the vacuousness of all the hype around ‘participatory democracy’ in the mid-90s is so apparent now.Intellectuals close to the CPM have been expressing their surprise and shock too. But there is a curious imitative quality to these expressions which leaves one unconvinced of their sincerity. They all look too keen to seize upon the explanation offered by the Party Secretary regarding the losses; in fact they look more like efforts to echo his words so that they acquire the semblance of truth. Well, if there is one quality that marks the intellectuals of the CPM, it is their enduring and self-deceiving mendacity. So powerful is this that it not only renders them blind, but also makes them enormously, genuinely, proud of their blindness!

Here is where I think it is necessary to go back and examine some of the much-discussed media interventions in Kerala from the left. I mean, specifically, the Reality Show that sought to showcase the achievements of local self-governments in Kerala that became controversial after it was accused of being ‘CPM propaganda’, the Green Kerala Express. I do not buy the line that it was born out of a media-conspiracy hatched in the AKG Centre, with the specific intent of showcasing the CPM-led panchayats. I happen to know many who were judges: most of them are well-meaning scholars and activists who repose different degrees of faith in civil society of the Putnamite variant.Many of the panchayat presidents who participated in the show are also well-known to me; their commitment and sincerity are unquestionable. However, taken as a whole, the Green Kerala Express is an excellent instance to illustrate the kind of mendacity I mentioned: of lying to oneself to such an extent that one ends up believing the lie. One ends up propagating the lie of the left genuinely believing it to be unbiased and true; one is genuinely devoid of the ability to be self-reflexive. In simple words, the Green Kerala Express helped to hide from view the political functions that the category of the ‘local’ fulfills in contemporary Kerala. It thus helped to minimize the critique of such functions; it also limited our ability to imagine other forms of politics, projecting the ‘local’ as the horizon of alternate politics and development.

To be able to see this, one must reexamine the history of the coming of ‘local governance’ to Kerala as a political move — one aimed at refurbishing the hegemony of the dominant left in Kerala. By the 1990s  the dominant left had to tide over several crises, including the fall of the Soviet Union and liberalization, which put the ‘Kerala Model’ under severe strain. By then, critiques of the Kerala Model had become quite powerful; if it was to serve as an instrument of hegemony, it would have to be seriously reinvented to make up for its failings. Secondly,the dominant left had to contain the political challenges raised to it by environmentalism and feminism in the 1980s and 90s. Neither of these forces could match the former in numbers. However, their strong interventionist presence in the public sphere eroded the bases of dominant left hegemony.Also, the flow of wealth through the Gulf migration had stirred up consumerism in a major way, which also threatened to undermine the general assent for social democracy in the state. Obviously, these multiple crises could not be dealt with a simple dose of neoliberalism; but the governance agenda could be modified.

Noticing these imperatives makes it possible to understand why the celebrated ‘People’s Planning Campaign’, when pared down to substantial elements, yields a motley patchwork of bits and pieces borrowed from the various alternative frameworks for democracy-and-development that were formed and circulated in and through ‘third-wave democratization’ — ‘participatory democracy’, ‘participatory citizenship’, ‘pro-poor growth’, ‘good governance’. ‘social capital’, ‘new public management’, ‘gender mainstreaming’ — all these and more may be spotted in a single quick look. And along with this are thrown in Gandhian ideals of village self-rule, vestiges of earlier left discourse such as ‘class struggle’.

I do believe that the ‘local’ took shape here precisely in these attempts to negotiate many contradictory pulls. In order to manage these heterogeneous imperatives,leftist political space came to be divided into two specific domains, that of ‘high politics’ and ‘local governance’.The former represents State-wide politics with direct links to the national scene where competition between parties and ideologies are fierce and often acrimonious. It is also considered to be the domain in which the key transformative processes of – for instance of class struggle – must be played out. It is also the seat of the power over all major decisions affecting the whole population of the State, both legislative and executive. In contrast, the domain of local governance consists of a number of interconnected governable units – the different tiers of the panchayats – and of which the most basic unit is the ‘neighborhood group’. These are ‘hypermoralized communities’ of neoliberal governance.

‘High politics’ and ‘local governance’ differ from each other in crucial ways, three of which are of particular importance. First is in the degree of activity and autonomy. While the former is characterized by a certain hyperactivity especially in political decisions and policy innovation: this is demonstrated by the many dramatic instances of state action undertaken by leaders, including the dramatic ushering of the PPC itself (called the ‘big-bang approach’) and the more recent ‘Munnar demolitions’ by the present LDF Chief Minister, V S Achuthanandan. In contrast, in the latter is subordinate to the former, marked by a strikingly non-democratic governing-by-rule-and-procedure, and squarely under the supervision and guardianship of several agencies such as the Department of Local Self-Government, the Planning Board, and the Ombudsman. Indeed, the left-ruled panchayats are as subject to these in most cases as any other. Secondly, the modes of rule prominent in each also seem to differ. The political and moral authoritarianism of the left In ‘high politics’, the left’s political and moral authoritarianism and use of force, if not violence, to silence critics, is amply evident, whereas in ‘local governance’, there is concession to consensus-building and panchayat members of the left, while controlled by the party local committees, are still expected to function together with their political opponents. Thirdly, the relation of each domain to capital is also different: while in high politics leaders struggle to smoothly translate the earlier agenda of state-led large-scale industrialized development into approval for predatory neoliberal growth, the domain of local governance tries out ‘sustainable and small-scale development programmes’ and even tries to fight predatory capital, as in Plachimada, where the panchayat took on Coco-Cola.

The People’s Planning Campaign (PPC), as a bid for hegemony was housed in the newly-opened space of local governance, and essentially involved four key moves, of which three are of interest here:

First, through the construction of the discourse of local governance that drew eclectically on several political and ideological agendas that emerged in and through the ‘Third Wave Democratization’ after the fall of the Soviet Union, the left sought to gain flexibility in rhetoric to resolve multiple dilemmas and contradictory pulls.Nevertheless, this utility of this move diminished rapidly, since it left the advocates of the PPC open to charges of bad faith and ultimately eroded the fragile consensus that had been achieved about decentralization within the Left, leading to one of the most acrimonious public debates in the history of Kerala, in which leading figures in the CPM and intellectuals close to it publicly traded charges against each other.

Secondly, the left sought to deal with the challenges it faced – from feminism and environmentalism on the one hand and consumerism on the other – through incorporating them in a ‘transformist’ way similar to that of New Labour in UK.This worked by blunting the political edge of these critiques while addressing a few selected issues they raised.Indeed, there is reason to believe that the ‘empowerment’ envisaged by the PPC stayed well within the bounds of the ‘social’, a domain historically conceded to the ‘feminine’ in Kerala and identified as women’s space, and did not open up the political to women despite the reservations.Environmentalism too was adapted with its political edge blunted, as ‘sustainable development’. These resolutions soon rang utterly hollow. The prolonged battle fought by the feminist movement in Kerala against elements across almost the entire political spectrum over cases of sexual violence in which politicians were directly did reveal that the question of patriarchy could not be encompassed by the limited and markedly economistic liberal-feminist solutions that were being advanced in People’s Planning.

Consumerism, however, was never critiqued in a fundamental sense; instead, consumerism among the poor was ‘transformatively’ articulated through the welfare entitlements distributed through the panchayats. Welfare is now highly individualized, targeting poor households rather than oriented towards the welfare of groups, and focused on the state’s consumption resources handouts.‘Transformative’ articulation of this sort may contain the threat perceived by the left, but it promises ultimately to backfire on the political itself. On the one hand, the sapping of the political charge of feminism and environmentalism weakens the possibility of alternate ways of imagining politics; on the other, consumerism is not curtailed but appeased in this move, and it continues to the wider support for the leftist agenda. Consumerism is hardly about social positions alone; it is far more about the significance of the difference between social positions. Increased welfare allotments do not disturb the latter; social inequality remains sanctioned silently. The worst consequence of this falls precisely on the left. Consumerism leads people away from public services even when they are of reasonable quality towards ‘high-status’ private sector alternatives, a process very visible in education in contemporary Kerala. This destroys the wider ‘moral constituency’ of the left, which was rooted in the shared experience of public education and public health care across social class. Indeed,how I wish that CPM intellectuals would start reflecting on this erosion of the left’s moral community instead of blindly shaking their heads sadly as His Pompous Majesty delivers judgment about the party’s losses.

Thirdly, there was also the move towards the disarticulation of some ideas and goals associated with the early left. Marked among these was the CPM’s commitment to redistribution of land to the Dalits and Adivasis, who were not beneficiaries of land redistribution during the land reforms of the 1970s. Contrary to expectations that the welfare disbursement targeting the Scheduled Castes and Tribes streamlined and strengthened through the PRIs would effectively substitute earlier demands for land for these groups as a productive resource, militant struggles broke out in the post-millennium years in Kerala for precisely this resource from among the Dalits and the Adivasis. The divide between high politics and local governance became blatantly clear in the course of these struggles.The Chief Minister of Kerala and veteran communist V S Achuthanandan even ordered the Dalit-led protestors at Chengara to return to their native villages and put in applications for three cents of land in their panchayats . In defiance, these struggles located themselves in and addressed not the domain of local governance, but that of high politics – and in fact refused to be disciplined into the former.  And as the idea of land redistribution to Dalits was being disarticulated, advocates of the PPC tried to project EMS Nambutiripad’s interest in decentralization as a fundamental aspect of the left’s political legacy since the mid-20th century.

Indeed, the present in Kerala is one in which this bid by the left to refurbish its hegemony has been severely damaged.The confusion is more than apparent, The CPM cannot yet decide whether it wants to espouse the Muslim cause or not, or how to do so; it either gives in to pandering the conservative opinion among Muslims (that, for instance, collapses anti-homophobic formations into a ‘conspiracy of cultural pollution through globalization’) or rakes up shameless Islamophobia. It does not know how to deal with Dalit anger except by brutally suppressing such movements as the DHRM.It wants to build a new constituency from BPL women, but cannot risk politicizing them for fear of upsetting dominant new elite gender norms. Therefore despite all its efforts at the national level to distance itself from the feminists and embrace (a minimal) feminist analysis, the AIDWA in Kerala, including its risen star T N Seema, remains a formidable conservative force. And the increasing use of violence in the face of criticism, even against leading intellectuals sympathetic to the left, is indeed a symptom of deepening crisis.

Did the Green Kerala Express give us any sense of this crisis unfolding? No! It gave us reassurances that all was well at the local level. It reinforced the idea that the diluted liberal feminism of the panchayat is all that is achievable in anti-patriarchal politics. It assured us that environmental issues can and must be tackled at that level. In other words it limited the horizons of our political imaginations; and more seriously, urged us to forget the authoritarianism, the hideous anti-environmentalism, the unrepentant patriarchy of the left in high politics. Green Kerala Express rode on a certain demotic populism that tried to deflect our attention from high politics. But as is evident from the election results, it didn’t work. People apparently still remember that power still resides in high politics.

And so am I surprised that the CPM lost precisely those panchayats which took the top spots in the Green Kerala Express reality show? Alas, no. Now, am I surprised by the awful incident in which a woman presiding officer, apparently the daughter of a CPM ‘party family’,was slapped hard by a local functionary of the CPM because she refused to allow someone to vote without proper documents? That this shocking incident happened in Kanjikkuzhi, Mararikkulam, much-advertised as the living laboratory of ‘participatory development’ in Kerala? No, really … But how I wish life in Kerala were less predictable!