As the ASHA workers’ resolve continues to remain unbroken in the third week of their struggle, the CITU leadership in general and the CPM cyber spokesmen in particular are losing their cool completely. S Mini is a familiar figure to people in Thiruvananthapuram in the many battles for justice that we have witnesses over the past twenty years . She is among the few women in Kerala who have embraced a full public life without desire for power, status, or visibility. The organisation she is part of, the SUCI, has long suffered ridicule. The big bully of left politics in Kerala, the CPM, has long tried to pick on them. Like all bullies, the latter keeps talking of how small they are.

Yet the SUCI has won many a match against the Goliath, and the CPM cyber bullies know that too well. The CPM nowadays is so insecure that a woman who openly criticises them and seems completely without fear in the face of their snarling and roaring is enough to drive them crazy. Mini has always been such a trigger to them, and now the CITU leadership and CPM cyber bullies seem to be running around crazy as coots.

We are proud to say that S Mini has been part of Althea since its inception. We are honoured to be working with such a brave, principled, loving, and sensitive human being.

No wonder they are running clueless like headless chicken, because none of their insults has ever touched her, even during her election campaign. Not even the CITU state vice-president’s angry yelp, that Mini is “a pest that spreads infectious diseases“. What a way to describe a woman who stands fearlessly with the women who saved tens of thousands of Malayalis during the pandemic, women who prevented epidemics after the floods of 2018, women who work tirelessly to contain threats ranging from Nipah to yearly dengue outbreaks!! Threatened by Kerala’s fearless women workers, the man is raving.

Now, insults targeting Mini have worked in the CPM’s strategy of denigrating the ASHA workers’ protest as a series of red herrings that seek to deflect public attention from the core of the issue. First, it was about her allegedly insulting the Health Minister’s husband. Mini and her colleagues who had gone to meet the Minister at her official residence was ordered to leave by a man who appeared on the upper storey-window of the bungalow, who claimed that “We” were not available. When she made the insult public, the Minister claimed that her husband was not at home, and Mini taking the man to be her husband was an insult to her (and her husband, who, according to her, does not prefer to stay at his wife’s residence!).

The CPM cyber thugs seized on this red herring to deflect attention from the rank insult of the striking workers by whoever was in the house! When this did not seem to serve the protest, they began to call Mini a liar — that the denial of the meeting never happened. However, it is Mini’s word against the Minister’s. And whatever the CPM bullies think, the lady is not anyone’s favourite, not even of those who work in the Health Department, and her word is not going to be swallowed by all in Kerala.

Then, a series of red herrings were let loose when Mini began to appear on TV debates. Liar, liar, was the CPM chorus. The other day, Arun Kumar, the comical ‘adviser’ of the Reporter channel set up a debate with a CPM acolyte (another Arun Kumar) and Mini in which he egged on the latter while forcing Mini to stay silent for the most. What he wanted to prove was her ‘lying’.

The CPM acolyte kept screeching that Mini had lied — about the government disallowing women with full-time employment from continuing or becoming an ASHA. Channel advisor Arun Kumar seemed to egg him on while Mini struggled to put in a word. This Arun Kumar whose knack seems to be to turn everything serious into some form of silly tomfoolery knows well that viewers see this not as a debate between people of two political orientations but as some sort of tongue-wrestling match in which the person who can’t shove herself into the barrage of words will be judged as a failure. No one would also notice the stupidity of the two men, either.

But it is stupid. For it is most unlikely that a woman with full-time employment, all of which surely has better pay if not lesser hours or more dignity, will hang on for dear life to the ASHA worker’s job, which is shockingly underpaid, undervalued by the authorities, with no fixed hours, and overloaded with responsibilities. So why should the government even issue an order to prevent such women from taking up additional burdens without recognition or remuneration? Does it think that all women are necessarily masochists who need to be gently prevented from such a brainless choice?

Mr Arun Kumar and his namesake with his one and only brain cell completely pawned to the CPM seem to think so! Mini desperately tried to clarify that the government’s order was about women taking up other work and especially accepting other government remuneration,like NREGS work,which sustained many ASHAs, but the two dingbats would simply not let her. The striking workers have also been saying, again, and again, the workload has grown to a point that they cannot take up any gainful work anyway. By the way, Mini has been saying this since a long time — as this News Minute article about a KAHWA protest from 2021 indicates. Also, yes, you bunch of dolts sniffing under the CPM’s table — the KAHWA did not spring up by conspiracy yesterday.

The other point around which the CPM has produced the ‘Liar’ chorus is Mini’s claim that the government order to retire ASHAs who attain the age of 62 was never frozen. Adv Arun Kumar of the single (pawned) brain cell seemed to be almost insane with glee when he shrieked and squawked (as the other A K covered him with beaming benevolence) about Mini ‘lying’ Again, Mini could not get a proper word in. She was trying to hard to point to a government communication dated 4 February, 2024 ( No. FW/408/2024-HEALTH issued by the Department of Health and Family Welfare (below) which states quite clearly that the government has decided that the retirement age of ASHAs is 62 and that it has no plans at all to withdraw it . The KAHWA was, and is, of the view that retirement benefits should be decided and announced before the age of retirement. If she could have produced this, the debate would have gone in another way, but tweedledee and tweedledum had other plans, clearly.

But the most common red herring has been that about Mini and SUCI ‘lying’ about the Asha workers’ monthly remuneration. The Health Ministers and all her minions and the entire government, their cyber thugs and scabs have kept repeating that the ASHA in Kerala is paid Rs 13,200 (13,500 according to some lately) a month, counting all the incentives. But it appears that they are the liars: this is what the latest data on the payment of incentives seems to show. Order number: DPMSU-TVPM/2249/DEO3/2017/DPMSU,Dated, 25.02.2025 contains two appendices that give us the details of incentive payments to ASHA workers in the Thiruvananthapuram district. Taking a quick look at the data for incentive payments to 2285 ASHAs is revealing indeed. It appears that out of the 2285, only forty-two have secured incentives above Rs 6000. Among them, some seven or eight ASHAs have secured sums over Rs 6000, which is likely to be a spillover from earlier months. The average of the sums is Rs 3505. The largest group of 1057 received Rs 4000-5000. The second-largest group of 776 ASHAs received Rs 3000-4000. Remember

So, who’s lying, uh? The government claims that adding up incentives and honorarium, the ASHA worker gets Rs 13,200. According their own records, at least for the district of Thiruvananthapuram, as is clear above, just 42 out of 2286 ASHAs get that amount (some may be getting more than one months’ incentive and so the number could be even lesser). The rest DO NOT get Rs 13,200 as the Health Minister keeps repeating. Yeah bring it on, Ms George. Give us the complete payments data if you are such a paragon of truthfulness.

We also found the Ilamaram Kareem, master red-herring manufacturer, was asking for an honorarium of Rs 10,000 for ASHAs to the UDF government in 2014 (below). So after nearly eleven years which have seen everything grow costlier in Kerala, is a demand for Rs 21,000 unfair? As Prof Kannan showed so clearly, the Kerala government can cough up the money if only it had the will. ASHA workers were clearly more numerous back then. What is making their numbers shrink? Is it the rising workload? Or being at the bottom, being treated as disposable? Or the pittance of a remuneration? All of it, most likely.

Lying never works,comrades, and a fallacious argument can be propped up only with further fallacies.

Althea demands that CPM apologies unconditionally to S Mini for all the misogynistic attacks that it has triggered through its mulish disdain for the voice and needs of workers.

[Althea is the collective name that we, a group of friends bound together by political friendship and a desire to heal the wounds inflicted by patriarchy, have given ourselves. We practice zero-budget feminism.]