After the undeniably successful six-hour blockade of the Kerala State Secretariat in Thiruvananthapuram today, the ASHA workers’ struggle for fair remuneration and humane working conditions enters another phase. The whole morning today when more than a thousand workers blocked the main thoroughfare in front of the Secretariat, the heat was unbearable. Eight workers collapsed and had to be hospitalised. At noon, clouds gathered and there were heavy downpours. The workers persisted with umbrellas and holding tarpaulin sheets over their heads. More than eight hundred police personnel were deployed — almost the same numbers as the protestors, some said. TV channels interviewed the protestors non-stop — each and every worker said with unambiguous determination that they intended to return home only after their demands were met.

The government and the CPM have been dipping into its sordid bags to pull out more and more dirty tricks against the workers. Yesterday, there was news that for the first time after a very long period, workers were paid last month’s incentives promptly. But none of the striking workers received anything for their work, only those who stayed away! The NHM announced a palliative care training demanding mandatory attendance (from workers who, we are told, are only volunteers. If so, they cannot be forced to attend any training against their convenience) on exactly the Secretariat blockade day. Many workers who planned to join from adjoining districts could not make it here, as they revealed to news reporters. Very clearly, the strike has much greater support among the workers themselves than the government can gauge.

And the workers are far more committed to their work than anyone can guess. During my visits to the protest site, I keep seeing workers who are calling the ASHA who holds temporary charge of their wards and discussing ongoing work. “So-and so’s daughter-in-law is in her eighth month … Let me send you the list of the babies due for immunisation…” Some ASHA workers are busy filling up forms, working on the phone with their peers back in their fields. They all know that they will not be paid for this work. This is the beauty and tragedy of care-work: the boundaries between life and work are permanently blurred. It is also the reason why these women are so fiercely committed to fight the calumnies heaped on them. It affects the very core of their self. Modern Malayali femininity has been shaped historically to wield power through care-giving; to insult that is a grave error on the part of the CPM.

Meanwhile, members of the CPM-supporting Malayali civil society, largely middle-class, are still rubbing their hands in despair, not knowing what to make of the nondescript women hitherto unknown in the middle-class comfort zone that is Facebook, women who look nothing like the confident educated well-groomed ladies of the WCC. These working class women whose confidence and eloquence have been evident in TV shows over and over again in the past month — and which have kept their TRPs high — seem like aliens to the Malayali progressive middle-class. The charge that they are puppets of the SUCI flies in the face of the energy, confidence, and knowledge they display as they fight back falsehoods, misogyny, and elitist slurs in these discussions.

It appears comical and tragic at the same time — the stunned silence of progressives — from the former Health Minister K K Shailaja (who seems to have disappeared completely into the cavernous interiors of her party) to the members of the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishat (KSSP), which describes itself as a ‘development movement’ and has built for itself an international image on the basis of this. K K Shailaja who won many plaudits for her leadership of the public health machinery during the pandemic seems to gone completely silent. It is no secret at all that the victories under her leadership came from the determined and diligent work that the ASHAs carried out at the ground level, despite everything. This is what the CPM seems to be doing to its women who show the promise of rising to the upper echelons of leadership on the wings of their own popularity. So much for their talk about being the only protector of women’s rights !

The KSSP which has prided itself on being the voice of the ‘people’ in development has also been silent. I asked a senior leader of this organisation why this was so, because it was so unexpected. To this he asked a counter-question: some people are raising a work-related dispute, why should the KSSP intervene? As someone who has kept up a steady relationship with the KSSP after my own departure from it, for both ideological and personal reasons in the early 1990s, this response came as a real shock. For the ASHA workers’ struggle is not a ‘work-related dispute’. It is about the devaluation of care work (though the ASHAs’ labour is not that alone), the informalisation of public health labour, and the gender politics of these.

I was stunned because KSSP has been claiming to be concerned about gender inequality as an important obstacle to development in Kerala, and they have been holding campaigns, workshops, public study programmes, and lectures on ‘gender’ since the late 1980s. They have been the proponents of what I have elsewhere called ‘developmentalist feminism’ and the advocates of gender mainstreaming and ‘women’s empowerment’ after 1995, which made up Kerala’s highly governmentalised state feminism. Maybe that is exactly what has clouded their eye. They have lectured so long about ‘women’s empowerment’, the sight of an actual empowered woman, someone who fearlessly points out the injustice done to her, is not afraid of demanding her rights and voicing her needs, leaves them utterly stupefied. Or maybe they have got stuck on the understanding of ‘power’ in ‘women’s empowerment’ with a teeny bit of state power that women might share in so that the work of the government gets done easily and cheaply. Naturally, when they see women who appear empowered without the state empowering them, they can’t believe their eyes!

So stuck they are in the gender mainstreaming discourse of the 1990s, they really cannot believe, perhaps, that politicizing is a way of empowering people. Women who push back against the patriarchal devaluation of their work are empowered ‘within’ and that forms a crucial condition to be empowered ‘with’. However, the progressives in Kerala have limited the meaning of empowerment to just the ‘power over’ and ‘power to’ dimensions. In the steadily deteriorating political arena of Kerala where politicians of every hue behave less like democratic leaders and more like medieval warlords, women dosed heavily on ‘power over’ and ‘power to’ can produce only models of ’empowerment’ a’ la P P Divya! Or the ‘power’ they can wield is of the milder welfarist sort meant to undergird the efficient distribution of welfare — which is a kind of labour that it enables.

Part of the reason, someone remarked, is that KSSP being informally linked with the CPM, does not want to give any ‘mileage’ to the SUCI. That may be true, and for the CPI as well. Such a caution too betrays deeply patriarchal attitudes, as the relationship between the KAHWA and the SUCI is simply not the same as that between the CPM-affiliated ASHA unions and the CITU. Over the past month, the spokespersons of the strike have been women members of the KAHWA too, not just the women activists of the SUCI who have been closely associated with them. It is quite impossible to dub them passive tools anymore, as I mentioned earlier. But even this patriarchal blind spot need not stop them from making a nuanced statement. Whatever the leadership of the protest may be, the issue it raises is very real. It would be a shame, difficult to erase in the future, for a ‘development movement’ to act as though it did not notice serious problems in the grassroots-level public health machinery that the workers are trying to raise.

This strike has become a touchstone — which allows us to see who all are capable of basic human empathy, and who are not.

Here are some videos from today’s blockade:

Interview with ASHA worker: ... we have continued to work with the people who depend on us, till yesterday. We keep working for them, but we won’t submit the reports to the higher authorities, we won’t do it till our strike succeeds. This government till now had won a lot of applause, on our sweat and tears, but no, they aren’t going to win any more awards unless our demands are conceded. We are determined to win… When we joined years back, we had to work only about two hours, four days a week … now it is twenty-four hours’ work… from a child’s inception in its mother’s womb till its death … we have to submit several field reports … not in regular intervals, but whenever the authorities ask … we have to carry these reports all the time, even when we go to a wedding or something. we may have submitted the baseline data, but they want more, and at any time. They call up and say, saar above is asking, please give, and we are frightened and quickly submit… this can be not just about families, but also about roadside eateries, hospitals,cattle, fowls, dogs, cats . The only survey that we haven’t done is about the kuzhiyaana, the ant-lion. That’s because Mr Ant-lion doesn’t make an appearance in public, saare. If he did,we’d be surveying them too! And we have been given no recognition at all in this system. If we need to go to the hospital, we go like everyone, pay cash for an OP ticket, stand in the queue like everyone else….