The Kerala government’s mulish refusal to negotiate with the striking ASHA workers is  baffling no matter what angle you may think of it. The promise of raising the ASHA workers’ daily pay to Rs 700 was an LDF election promise, part of the election manifesto — how can they call it unreasonable now? Raising the pay of ASHA workers would bring back to the well-feeling of twenty six thousand grassroots workers who are well-respected in their communities, but the CPM leadership does not bother, and the CITU studs seem determined to piss them off. In the legislative assembly, Veena George reels off breathtakingly false information, when anyone with access to the official website of the Sikkim government can read government orders that expose her.

But civil society now sees the hubris and expressions of support and anguish at the government’s apparent lack of grace and respect for life -saving labour are pouring in. I am posting here a particularly striking one, a poem by the well-known poet in Malayalam, Desamangalam Ramakrishnan. Aasha in Malayalam means a fervent wish; it also means hope. In this short poem, the poet uses the word to evoke a feeling for the crisis we Malayalis face — of hope in a system, that once swore by the values of care and social justice, intertwining it with the government’s deliberate cruelty to the striking workers. The poem is titled Aashaikku vakayundo?

Any chance of aasha?

Desamangalam Ramakrishnan

Any aasha?
– is there any hope left,
ask the mothers who wait with handfuls
to line the pockets
outside the hospital’s operation theatre.

Harassed travellers, waiting endlessly
till the middle of the night ask:
Any aasha left? Any hope
that a bus, any bus, might come?

Any aasha, hope?

Caring-women,
bringers of food,
water, comfort, tell
those who wait in terror,
locked down at home:
do not abandon hope, do not give up your aasha
even if an elephant pins you on its tusk…

Any hope?
Through steep and narrow paths
the caring-women run,
to knock on the door of a piteous scream
and drive away the sickness with love.
They say: abandon not your aasha; be not bereft of aasha,
let the humble shoots of hope sprout.

Is there hope, is there aasha?
Though it’s just a few
paltry coins,
when will it fill the waist-folds
of one’s dignity and pride?

When it writhes its last writhing
on the door step of the king of the land
who tied its tongue and left it to beg,
our pottan theyyams,
oracles, leveller-spirits,
will break their chains,
swarm out of cellars,
surely.

Or, has Power
turned the one who once
sprinted through these paths
holding aloft the flag woven from
the threads of our blood,
into a mad brute?