Finally, I am able to understand why the government of Kerala, led by a leading communist party, the CPM, is so doggedly against the demands of Kerala’s internationally-celebrated ground-level women health workers — the ASHA workers — who have been on strike since February 2025.

None of the common reasons advanced for this intransigence seemed enough. I mean, they are all necessary, but never sufficient. For instance, the argument that the government does not hear them because the strike is led by a minority union, the Kerala ASHA Health Workers’ Association (KAHWA) seemed obviously relevant, given CPM’s irrational hatred of the SUCI activists who have been supporting the KAHWA. However, that never sounded really sufficient, for several reasons. First of all, the demands and issues raised reflected the dire situation of all ASHA workers, and major ASHA unions, including those under the CITU, agreed in greater or lesser measure, with them. Secondly, given the significant public support, including from CPM supporters and civil society for the strike, the ruling government would have gained rather than lost from conceding even minimally to the demands of the workers. It would have been easy for the CPM to make the CITU-led majority union to raise some of these demands in a way that the government could address it and settle the strike pretending to be responding to their union’s demands. That is, the CPM could well have settled the strike without necessarily losing face and in ways that could have bolstered its welfarist, if not worker-friendly, image. Unless one hypothesized that the CPM leadership was psychologically unstable from the unconscious fear of the SUCI, this simply was not enough to answer the question.

Instead of settling the strike through negotiations, the government set up a committee of civil servants to produce a report on the issues raised by the strike. The Haritha Kumar Committee (HCK), set up in May 2025 and due to submit their report to the government in three months, finally turned it in by September. Then the government has been as as silent as the grave till now, while the striking union was ran hither and thither to obtain a copy of it. A copy has finally been received after much use of the RTI applications.

The recommendations of the HCR were very disappointing, to say the least. The data and the analysis are so inadequate and sloppy, that the government accepted it in this form only shows how trivial the issues of working-class women are to it and their minions in the bureaucracy. Four out of five members of the committee were female bureaucrats — and their lazy and insensitive observations remind us once again that the divides between women are not bridged by liberal feminism that lets women taste power. But, again, one wondered : are these the only reasons why the HCR proved to be such a let-down?

The answer to this question became clear to me when I read a press note circulated at a press conference held by Kerala’s Minister for Local Self-Government, Mr M B Rajesh, on 10 October, 2025. The press note announces that the Kerala government and Reliance Jio are going to ‘hold hands’ to provide jobs to 10,000 Kudumbashree women — as marketing executives, and home-based customer care workers. The workers will be recruited through the Kudumbashree community development societies at the local body level. The current wages of Jio workers employed similarly are mentioned to be ‘above Rs 15,000’. The Kudumbashree Executive Director H Dinesan exchanged an agreement/a document of understanding (dharanaapatram) with the representative of Reliance Projects and Property Management Services, the Reliance Jio Kerala Business Head, Mr Hemant Amborkar. The press note goes on to claim that Kudumbashree women are being employed ‘with very good wages’ in many private companies including Amazon, Flipkart, Lulu,and others, with a few public sector companies thrown including the LIC.

This move, I believe, represents a transition in the history of development and ‘women’s empowerment’ of Kerala. From the 1950s onwards, but more significantly from the 1990s, the governments here have steadily mobilized a large and significant feminized public care workforce — from ASHAs to the waste-collectors in the relatively recent Haritha Karma Sena and Kudumbashree workers who deliver important development and governmental services to local governments and also do public care work — besides the Anganwadi workers from the 1980s. The Kudumbashree women’s SHGs were never imagined as primarily a workforce — they were conceived as a local-level, state-centric, development civil society that would actively shape development at the hyperlocal levels. While the empowerment that this enabled had its limitations, it provided women an entry into spaces outside the familial, kin, and community circles they usually found themselves in. And this formed the core of this ‘social contract’ between relatively resource-poor women and the state — they would provide cheap development/governmental labour, in return for such openings and opportunities.

By opening up Kudumbashree women to large capital as cheap labour, the state seems to be rewriting the terms of this social contract. While Kudumbashree women certainly gained in work opportunities and resource support, their earnings have been consistently poor, and their market access was limited, often because of the state’s demands for cheap labour from them. Mr Rajesh’s euphoria seems to stem from the prospect of what seems a ‘win-win’ deal for the ruling power and capital: cheap labour for capital, the wages of which will allow the state to continue to extract cheap labour power from the women. There is nothing in the press note that indicates that the government will negotiate on behalf of the workers for better wages and working conditions.

Reading the HCR alongside this development, many of its strange recommendations seem to make better sense. The report does not call them ‘workers’, but does admit that the ASHAs are indeed skilled and their work is vital to Kerala’s public health. It also admits that their workloads are impossibly high in the Kerala context — that many of the issues raised by the workers are indeed true. However, it is extremely reluctant to recommend better pay — even as it concedes much in other aspects. For example, the report seems keen to rationalize the work ASHA workers do, to reduce their tasks; it recommends skilling them so that they may find other paid work. The committee acknowledges the struggles of ASHAs who are sole earners in their families (though the numbers they quote are very dubious) — curiously, they recommend skilling especially for this sub-group.

But if one takes the state and capital ‘holding hands’ over making available cheap female labour to the latter seriously, then this is no longer inexplicable. If Kudumbashree women are to continue to work for local governments cheap doing a second shift with capital to earn a tolerable wage, then ASHA workers can be expected to do so too! Among the companies that are already ‘holding hands’ with the government of Kerala, according to the press note, many are mega-hospitals and medical companies. Maybe they will recruit the ASHAs cheap — at the expense, of course, of Kerala’s public health!! The consequences of this for Kerala’s public health, already challenged by fresh outbreaks and new communicable diseases in the wake of climate change, are going to be dire, to say the least.

Also, though the striking workers are demanding a living monthly remuneration of Rs 21,000 (the national-level demand, supported by the CITU), the majority union has been asking for Rs 15,000 a month. Adding the recently-raised Central Government incentives of Rs 4500 to what the ASHAs receive now, the amount should be roughly around Rs 15,000 — next year, at least. It makes sense from the perspective of a government so keen to ‘hold hands’ with capital with the offering of cheap labour to keep the wages it offers public workers low. And we all know that the government has been quite keen to send the ‘right’ messages to capital, secure in its confidence in the CITU to keep workers in control.

A further clue about this emerged from recycled CPM propaganda strike-breaker academic writing on the ASHA workers’ strike. In a recent commentary piece in the EPW, Binitha Thampi and Varsha Prasad try their utmost to misrepresent, insult, and dismiss the ASHA workers’ strike and those who have supported it from a perspective entirely of the Kerala government and the CPM leadership (4 October 2025). But they also give away the game through an almost-Freudian slip. Part of the strike-breaking that they attempt is out of concern about the impacts of the strike in the context of imminent elections : “Moreover, with elections imminent, this has severe political and financial implications for the ruling government because meeting the demands of ASHA workers could compel the state to extend similar benefits to the huge reserve
army of informal women care workers, whom the state has mobilised and kept (my italics) (p 15).

Aha! The cat, then, is out of the bag. Strike-breaking academics admit that in their eyes, Kerala’s publicly-mobilized public care workforce is a ‘huge reserve army’ of labour ‘mobilised and kept’ by the state! In other words, they are revealing, unwittingly perhaps, the new political logic of the Left in Kerala — that the CPM leadership no longer recognizes Kerala’s public care workers, they are treated as ‘the reserve army’ of labour’ available cheaply for capital when demand for labour increases. It is of course rather funny that the authors who try hard to flash their left-leaning theoretical credentials seem rather worried that the state may indeed be compelled to face the masses of the unemployed and underemployed — women workers!

If this is the case, then the frustrating difference in the perception of the strike between the state and civil society in Kerala is no longer a puzzle. The civil society stood with the striking workers as they perceived the ASHAs to be a group of workers central to Kerala’s public care workforce. But to the state, and the CPM leadership in power, as well as their academic minions, they are just the ‘reserve army of labour’, which must be kept that way — cheap, that is. Hence the latter’s determination to deny workers fair remuneration, in the face of mounting opposition from civil society. Indeed, it is evident that they don’t give a shit about what civil society thinks. This cheap labour force enables the ‘holding hands’ between the ruling government and capital, and it must be kept cheap.

Dear Left-thinking readers, what more evidence do you need to see that the Left in Kerala is as much part of the economic right-wing as any other power in India? All the more reason to stand with the workers even as the strike-breakers cover themselves with the sheepskins of academic ‘neutrality’.