Yesterday, the summer rain struck Thiruvananthapuram city with the fury of thunder and lightning and wind. Those of us whose hearts are in that small protest-space in front of the State Secretariat open to the skies, where the police forbid even a temporary tarpaulin shelter, trembled as lightning tore through the skies and the skies poured, each drop a bucket. The striking workers continued to sit under the branches of old trees by the roadside. What if one of those ageing branches collapsed? What if lightning struck? The roads filled up with rainwater rapidly. The workers sat with their feet in the rushing rivulets of rainwater on the ground under the branches of great old trees, with the lightning swishing above.

Today the authorities invited the workers for ‘talks’, promising nothing, telling them that the treasury has no money and they should just go back to work. On the day of the Secretariat blockade, the government had issued an order supposedly revoking all the criteria for payment of the honorarium of Rs 7000 to the workers. But instead, the ‘fixed incentives’ of Rs 3000 are now linked to several criteria — and an ASHA worker who earned fixed incentives of just Rs 1000 a month can claim only Rs 3500 as honorarium!! So it is like the patient’s sore which was on their right leg, has been now moved to their left leg and the doctor has declared them cured! The saddest thing is how the government thinks that all of us are just a bunch of fools who can’t see through their wily moves. The authorities had precious little to say when confronted with these ugly truths.

Veena George, growing truly to be the visible face of Kerala’s Disgrace, apparently told the workers that the state had no money to pay them. This regime has been especially noteworthy for its complete voiding of development imagination — its totally inability to come up with solutions to deal with crises. During the floods of 2018, it was the fish workers who came up with the solution of rescuing people by launching their fishing boats on the flood waters, when the police and the Indian Navy just watched, stupefied. It was the ASHA workers who risked their lives going from neighborhood to neighborhood to carry out their public health duties during the pandemic, and the state lacked the imagination to even supply them with PPE kits. In both cases, the LDF government stepped in deftly to claim the credit. Someone else might have to come up with suggestions on how to use their resources better. The eminent economist Dr K P Kannan had some ideas, but the LDF government has a visceral dislike of people who combine intelligence, scholarship, and deep integrity, so they won’t listen to him.

And there is no hope that CPM activists from outside Kerala who once displayed considerable independence of judgment — say, Brinda Karat — will do any better. For it is the Kerala CPM that now calls all the shots. It appears that stopping them from tipping into the abyss of right-wing policies and attitudes is not an urgent task for the national leadership — who behave differently in their own states. The SUCI are abhorrent — is their common refrain. Well, I have been watching closely the SUCI activists over the past month quite closely. They have given their lives to fighting for those rendered powerless by the state — unlike the CITU leadership in Kerala. It is really painful, therefore, to see Com Brinda Karat toeing the line of those who are making a beeline in front of extractive and other capitalists and speaking against the ASHA workers’ strike.

Tomorrow, the ASHA workers are starting their indefinite fast. And the pouring rain and the scorching sun are not stopping them.

Still, as a privileged Malayali, I feel guilty and miserable. There are no more public intellectuals, like V R Krishna Iyer or B R P Bhaskar, who could bridge political society and civil society. Civil society that throngs the cine-festivals and literary festivals are more consumers of the aestheticised pain of ordinary people, made palatable as literature or cinema. Our writers, include those who have made a career out of selling women’s pain in middlebrow modernist and other kinds of aesthetic packaging — do not want to displease their consumer-bases, mostly CPM supporters. Our film-makers are also of the same ilk — they produce really good cinema, crafted from the pain of ordinary people, but will be mostly silent when they cry out in pain. Thiruvananthapuram boasts of the first independent union of women workers, SEWA Kerala, who are, alas, among the silent. SEWA in Malayalam is service, but it can also mean pandering to the powerful — perhaps that is what the leadership of this union is presently engaged in. And the clubs of ‘enlightened’ women mostly devoted to exchanging their mediocrity of the mind and waiting for a glance from the authorities that could mean a membership in some committee, some fellowship, some invitation to a writers’/painters’/critics’/journalists’ camp … we cannot really expect any of them to spend a day in solidarity with the striking workers. The workers have to fight entirely alone. What a fate , in a land known for workers’ struggles.

No thunder from the heavens can silence the cry for dignity and a decent wage; nor will your disgraceful neglect muffle their voices.