Dear friends and colleagues

I write this letter to you as a dissident feminist who leads a beleagured life under what can only be described in George Orwell’s words from 1984: the majoritarian post-socialist oligarchy that presently rules Kerala.

I can imagine how distant the image of Kerala that this evokes must be for many of you. The establishment feminists of Kerala who are the chief organizers of the Conference mightoffer some liberal criticism of the ‘Kerala Model’ alright, but they largely remain somehow un-bothered, in practice if not in letter, by the steady erosion of the democratizing legacies of the twentieth century and the emergence of new challenges, both. More worryingly, they turn a blind eye to power. I am certain that many of you think, and the ‘establishment feminists’ who will greet you here will encourage you to continue thinking, that Kerala is a haven against Hindutva and Hindu majoritarianism, and an enduring welfare state holding strong against the relentless neoliberal onsalught.

How I wish this were an occasion on which Kerala’s dissident feminists could dialogue with the establishment feminists before a larger body of women’s studies scholars! That would have been a more equal platform — where evidence, good arguments, and feminist ethics would be valued over half-truths, logical fallacies, and the violence of punitive publics while debating crucial issues such as sexual violence and the deepening fascist state. As long as the establishment feminists choose to use the latter three as their bolster, it is not even practically possible to have a dialogue with them. At the IAWS, these bolsters will have to be set aside and actually hidden, even.

[Not that any of us ‘dissidents’ have been let anywhere near the organizing! The President of IAWS had met me when she came to Kerala for the AIDWA conference earlier this year, and I had indeed agreed, on her suggestion,that I could present our latest work on informal sector women workers, which attempts to understand brahmanical patriarchy as a dynamic system in twenty-first century Kerala, and its intersections with rising inequalities and increasingly-neoliberalized welfarism here. She told me that this was exactly the thrust of this conference and we (including a local organizer) would be in touch, but I never heard from them again. And I learned that the organizing meetings had happened from pictures on FB, and they were full of AIDWA women and their friends.]

But asking for such a dialogue may be wishing too much anyway, because you are here to discuss much more expansive questions, and not of the Kerala context. Indeed, that is precisely the reason why the IAWS organizers in Kerala (which include so-called ‘independent’ NGOs which have shown little more than craven admiration for the present dispensation) find it useful. For it is part of the ideological strategy of the post-socialist oligarchy in Kerala to shout their throats hoarse at Hindutva in north India, but tactfully ignore glaring compromises with Hindutva in Kerala. The IAWS Conference is an excellent opportunity for such an ideological exercise again.

Let me therefore set that aside. Instead, I wish to put before you some questions about contemporary socio-political developments in twenty-first century Kerala which somehow seem to escape the feminist radar.

First of all, why is the feminist mainstream, dominated by establishment feminists, so incapable of seeing the Hindu majoritarianism of the Left in Kerala turning increasingly to compromises with Hindutva? There was a moment in our recent past in which the Left would try to salvage another vision of the Hindu community, infused with the thought and ethics of the great spiritual seer of the twentieth century, Sree Narayana Guru, which is the very antithesis of the Hindutva imagination — this was during the Hindu right-wing riots against the SC judgment permitting the entry of women pilgrims of menstruating ages into the Sabarimala temple in 2018. However, it was soon evident that this was a passing moment. The Left revealed that it did not have the internal resources, intellectual and moral, to shape such an ‘ethical majority’ as imagined in Sree Narayana Guru’s dharma; indeed the very response of the Left to the right-wing protests was full of male hubris. Since then, the concessions to Hindutva have been ever more frequent.

These have been often public, but beyond the public, beyond Islamophobia, the abjection of Malayali Muslims through the instruments of the state seems to continue apace. For example, there seems to be a sharp rise in the police filing cases against protestors belonging to Muslim organizations in Malappuram, Kerala’s Muslim-dominated district. Muslim activists there report that now any small demonstration by Muslim organizations carries the risk of the police filing cases against each and every protestor involved; they also report that the police have sometimes tried to stir up perfectly peaceful protests so that they can charge the more serious sections of the IPC. The district-level statistics do show a sharp increase in the cases charged — from 12642 in 2019 go 19045 in 2021 and 26957 in 2022 — when there is no reason to think that the nature or number of protests was/is higher in Malappuram than in other districts. It is well-known that migration for work has been a key route out of poverty to north Kerala Muslims. A police case means the denial of passports and the curtailment of mobility. If this is not the persecution of Muslims, silent maybe but vicious nevertheless, what is it?

I won’t blame you if you are swayed by accounts that are part of the CPM’s own Islamophobic attacks on Islamic organizations which nicely dovetail into the Hindutva state’s punitive priorities — but please do note that this issue was recently raised by the Muslim Students’ Front, of the Muslim League, not the Islamic organizations. I want to also mention that this government has charged multiple cases against many of us for supporting the call for a hartal by Dalit and Islamic organizations during the anti-CAA struggle. I myself have eight cases, in Kozhikode, for allegedly abetting protests that disrupt traffic and cause a nuisance to commuters. The Pinarayi government, before the elections that gave it a second term, had announced that it would be withdrawing all political cases but those against the anti-CAA protests remain. Indeed, this government is out to punish even the most respected of dissident voices — and this is apparent in its determination not to withdraw the case against the 95-year-old A. Vasu, one of the most respected of Left voices in Kerala today, for his protests against the extrajudicial killing of two Maoist leaders by the Kerala police seven years back. He is in jail, and the government refuses to rethink its stand –– even though bucketfuls of tears were shed for Father Stan Swamy by the same government and its supporters.

How has the Women’s Studies community and the mainstream feminists in Kerala responded to this situation? Except for visiting Vasu in jail, what have they chosen to do, what all have they chosen to ignore? Despite mounting Islamophobia, they continue to more or less ignore the islamic women’s organizations which have been active against not just Hindutva patriarchy but also against the perversion of Kerala’s welfare system — in other words, they have not just been intervening not just in culture but also in development. Their support has been crucial in two recent cases in which Muslim women protested against the medical system that seems unbelievably insensitive and violent. But the old grim idea that the only good Muslim is the liberal one seems to prevail.

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Secondly, how do the Women’s Studies community and the mainstream feminists in Kerala view the changing contours of capitalism in Kerala and its consequences? There is every reason to think that Kerala is today as infected as any other region in Kerala by predatory neoliberal capitalism. The presence of capital in even the most interior spaces aiming at resource extraction is undeniable in Kerala now, and the loss of ecological stability, studies around the world show, affects disprivileged women the most. Then how come we are so silent? There are struggles happening all over the state, especially on the coast, which is ravaged by both predatory capital and the effects of climate change. The hapless coastal people of the Thiruvananthapuram district and elsewhere — hailed in 2018 as the saviours of Kerala who rescued some 60,000 people when the Indian Navy could do barely anything — are fighting a desperate battle against the Adani Ports and the Kerala government which tries now to further dispossess them with such projects as the coastal highway.

The dispossession on the coast has serious consequences for women of the coastal fisher communities — from losing the space of the beach for livelihood activities, having to deal with displacement and scattering of families and communities, the severe loss of income, companionship, and sense of security, the mental health consequences, the even-more crushing triple burden… Clearly, neoliberal capitalism with the state favouring big capital against the people is in fullswing right before our eyes, but somehow feminist conversations about it are so weak! It is as if the women of coastal communities fall out of the feminist imagination — though they were among the first to be mobilized by elite-born feminists in Kerala — and left to fend for themselves on the streets in struggle. Feminists claim to do ‘whatever they can’ — distribute minor resources from projects funded by state agencies and others, but seem to be able to do little else. And indeed, when they show solidarity, they seem to be quickly disciplined, and the rest of us sink into quiesent comfort, so it seems!

We are of course keen to espouse the cause of women of the fisher community in the halls of power and it is of course not difficult in Kerala precisely because all the elite here would really like to to preserve their own self- image as doers of social justice! There is something horribly unethical about this.

Worse, it appears that leading figures of mainstream feminism still cling to radical-feminism-laced understandings of capitalism as essentially bad because it commodfies women’s bodies. So it is still about beauty contests and sexualized advertisements, and of course, the anti-sex work position! When neoliberalized predatory capitalism is literally pulling out women’s lives and livelihoods by their very roots.

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Thirdly, though feminists in Kerala and even more perhaps, the Women’s Studies community here, talk a lot about how they are all for intersectionality in knowledge and politics, there is little to show that they are committed to it in any way. Whether in the Hadiya case of 2017 or the Anupama Chandran case of 2021, the mainstream feminists were the very opposite of intersectional; indeed, it was the timely solidarity shown by prominent Indian feminist intellectuals that contributed to the success of these battles. As for the LGBTQI+ voices that have gained in strength since 2015, the mainstream feminists waited until the state waved the green signal! But there is very little discussion today of the implications this emergence for organized anti-patriarchal politics, except for some tepid, highly-individualised, and barely-liberal calls for inclusivity.

Nevertheless, it sells, I suppose, so there has been no dearth of support for ‘intersectionality’ in Women’s Studies and other feminist academic research. Again, something that reeks of unethical, narrowly instrumental use of what should have created a more complex and diverse feminist community here. Instead we have an expanded community of those who consume feminism on social media, who champion neoliberal feminism, who are unabashed about their elitism. Scarily enough, even outright neoconservative writers can now readily identify with and work alongside mainstream feminists, all because their concern is ostensibly about a common category of people, ‘women’ and predictably, ‘sexual violence’.

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Fourthly, the recklessness with which mainstream feminism demands the use of the punitive instruments of the state against sexual violence needs some rethinking in a context in which Kerala’s welfare state gives way to a more securitised and punitive one. In a recent case, around allegations of sexual harassment against a well-known senior critic of the present government, Civic Chandran, mainstream feminists simply refused a debate. . By entering into an implicit alliance with CPM cyberthugs, they did their best to misrepresent, caricature, and muffle dissident feminist voices. It baffles me, still, why a sensible debate was not possible among feminists instead of cyberbullying of dissident voices. Of course, the deterioration of the welfare state — and actually the nepotism rampant in the state instruments for the protection of women and children is rampant, and it appears that mainstream feminists might even help cover it up!

The carceral feminism that is dominant among mainstream Malayali feminists lacks the ethics of responsibility that has constantly accompanied and tempered it in the larger Indian context. There is ample evidence here that the strong arm of punitive law in the name of gender justice falls mainly on less powerful men, and young adivasi men who marry according to tribal custom, and so on — and this is not a recent development. And the alertness of the law when the accused man is a longstanding critic of the government and with no protectors in other political parties may appear commendable but I am beset with unease when I see that it does not apply or applies in ridiculously weak ways, at all when the accused happen to be well-connected in the CPM. Mainstream feminists are only too ready to bay for the blood of the former, setting up their punitive publics online, but their rage against the latter is less pronounced for sure; the rest of us who refuse to join the bloodthirsty chorus of the former and point out the need to evoke the law in the latter are subjected to equally violent witch-hunts.

There are debates between feminists on such matters, but no one wanted a debate, they just wanted to harm and humiliate those of us who disagreed. Therefore when I proposed a debate on the relevance of restorative justice in times in which the punitive arm of the state was being wielded against its opponents almost exclusively, I was called unbelievable names. Prominent feminist lawyers mocked the idea and misrepresented it as essentially patriarchal accomodation. But when the son of a prominent CPM leader, the State Secretary the late Kodiyeri Balakrishnan himself settled a paternity suit by a woman who claimed that he married her for 80 lakhs (with no comment about the child’s paternity), there was not much substantial protest from mainstream feminists — lawyers — who had blithely mocked restorative justice! I do not believe that this is just ignorance.

If I am reluctant to attend the conference which is happening at a stone’s throw from where I live, it is only because the terrible irony that the IAWS conference which so privileges open and non-violent dialogue should be hosted by establishment feminists — who did not seem to even know what that meant barely a year back — weighs heavily on me. I hope I will be forgiven for that. I have known in life that ethical living is often a lonely path. I see that it applies in today’s Kerala to the work of producing anti-patriarchal knowledge too.

J Devika