Now that the ASHA workers’ strike in Thiruvananthapuram has entered its third week and public support for the workers is growing, the Kerala government, instead of trying to solve the issue, is resorting to an age-old tactic: of turning this into a law-and-order issue. Provoked by the sizeable support the workers have garnered from civil society, the police have issued notices to fourteen public intellectuals and activists who participated in the mahasangamam meeting two days back, which was a massive success despite all the threats. They have been ordered to appear at the police station within 48 hours, and accused of disturbing order and obstructing traffic.

Meanwhile, authorities at the local level, both in government as well as the pro-CPM ASHA organisation, have apparently been threatening the striking workers with dire consequences, mainly of dismissal. Other ASHAs who have implicitly supported the strike have apparently been told that even if the striking workers indeed win, they will be dismissed at the end of the year. We hear that the full force of the Kudumbashree and the MNREGS, both of which have been reduced to tools of the CPM in many places, are being brought against these underprivileged women at their home-bases. The threat, apparently, is not just of loss of employment, but also of permanent debarring from public life. This may not have happened everywhere and we need more evidence, but it certainly sounds like a real possibility in CPM-dominated areas where they control both local government and civil society.

Althea condemns this despicable double-move — to reduce the strike to a law-and-order problem, and to beat down the workers into submission through threats, precisely those which emphasize the precarity of the ASHAs’ employment.

The arguments that are being put forward to justify do not hold, by any criterion. But beyond such discussions, it is regrettable that the CPM and its supporters seem to be lacking in the basic empathy that would have told them that underprivileged women workers– many of them clearly unwell — would not spend more than two weeks in the pitiless heat of our failing misty season if they were not suffering worse in their ‘normal’ lives.

The CPM’s insistence that the pay hike should come from the union government also baffles one — they are either fully convinced that the BJP is a bunch of idiots or that they will not concede an inch to the workers. Even a minimal hike by the union government after a prolonged strike would be enough to convince many workers, if not all, that the BJP might be a better bet than the CPM! The more people suffer, the more a minimal concession would be valued. While the BJP is likely to gain from such a calculation, simply because they are distant, the CPM, being so near, will not gain from it. The argument that the financial crisis of the government is so intense that they cannot afford to concede the workers’ demands is completely false, as Prof K P Kannan showed so astutely the other day at the strike-site (maybe they will arrest him too). What leaves one even more astounded is that one of the demands is for the immediate payment of three months’ pending wages, and two months’ incentives. Some striking workers told me that the payments are being made mada-madaa (quickly, or actually, ‘glug-glug-glug…’) now; they believe that this is a gain that they have made through the strike. Instead of announcing the payment publicly as a response to the striking workers, the payments are probably a fire-fighting measure by the state to prevent more workers from joining the strike.

In the CPM ‘intellectual circles’ apparently the order from above is that the strike should be broken, at all costs. Their reading is that workers at the district levels are scared — and this, they hope, will affect the morale of the striking workers. But what the high CPM high-elite which is disgustingly upper class with no connection at all with the non-elite cannot see is that the matter is not merely about wages. It is about self-respect. The striking workers point out again and again in their speeches the huge contrast between local peoples’ perceptions of their work and the brutish treatment that local authorities, including those of the health department mete out to them.

Back in 2007 when the ASHAs were being recruited, many women from politically-well-connected CPM families did become ASHAs. Many of these were politically-ambitious women who mainly valued the public connect it made possible, over and above the meagre wages. Such women among them with better circumstances have left. Those who stayed back belong to three groups: those who value public life and people’s recognition over everything else, those who are well-connected in the system and the locally-powerful political party who treat the honorarium as pocket-money, and those who have no other option but to stay back. The striking workers present at the protest site in Thiruvananthapuram seem to belong mostly to the second and third groups — the most vulnerable. Losing employment is thus going to be a serious blow to many of them.

However, that loss should not be exaggerated, and the workers themselves refuse to be intimidated. Many of them have fifteen to seventeen years of field experience and all of them have received good training — it is not that they cannot all find better-paying jobs that involve field work. The workers are quite confident that they cannot be replaced without inducing chaos at the ground level. The government’s move to transfer their responsibilities to other ASHAs there is an egregious reiteration of the kind of overburdening the striking workers are complaining about.

The loss, actually, is to Kerala’s public health system itself — to the lower middle class and the poor among the Malayali population. In other words, in its hubris about breaking the strike, the Kerala government is on the path towards undermining the most brag-worthy of its achievements : public health.

We call upon development researchers, development practitioners, women’s organisations, public health organisations, feminist scholars and others to please write open appeals to the Kerala Chief Minister to desist from this dangerous path. We request women’s trade unions in Kerala, India and abroad to express solidarity with the striking ASHA workers openly and forcefully.

(Althea is the collective name taken by a group of Malayali women bound by political friendship and a desire to heal the wounds of patriarchy. We practice zero-budget feminism.)