Dear Mr Vijayan
Yesterday, the protesting ASHA workers marched to your residence in the pouring rain, seeking to rouse you from your utterly inexcusable stupor. Yes, over the past eight months, you tried to first crush the strike, and then to kill it by ignoring it. Who does not know that the worst form of violence is indifference?
Photo credits : Shradha S, Harsh, Ashna Thambi, Santhosh Nilakkal.
How they have become arsenal for the majoritarian Hindutva forces to convert the sovereign, independent, secular, socialist republic into a Hindu Rashtra.
25 th June 2025 happened to be the fiftieth year of the internal emergency imposed by the then Indira Gandhi regime. Much has changed during all these years but till date we are still far away from a balanced review of that period.
What really prompted Indira Gandhi to declare emergency , whether drive for personal power was the key factor, as has been reiterated multiple times…..
On the other hand, whether it could be said that she correctly perceived how sinister forces in the subcontinent were hell bent on sabotaging the democratic experiment at the behest of imperialist powers , who were even found to be provoking police and security forces to pursue their dubious agenda.
No doubt such a holistic review is a need of the hour but one thing cannot be denied that the biggest beneficiary of this whole exercise has been the Hindutva rightwing forces who are keen to transform India into a Hindu Rashtra
[ Read the full article here : https://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article15924.html]
There is a huge difference between democratic struggles outside Kerala, and those which unfold inside the state at the moment. While elsewhere they strive to make democracy integral to the system, in Kerala we are struggling desperately to keep alive, at least, the traces of something that we had, a fairly democratised society and a tolerably responsive state.
Continue reading No French Revolution Lurking Ahead, Comrade Baby!The scorching sun in Thiruvananthapuram has been unrelenting. Usually, the festival day of Attukal Pongala, on which thousands of women set up temporary hearths outside their homes and on the roads of the city to cook sweet payasam for the goddess of the Attukal temple, ends with cooling showers. This time the skies were cloudless.
Continue reading Neither Angels not Devis: Pongala at the ASHA Workers’ Strike in Kerala
We request the Kerala Government to take necessary actions to end the day/night strike of the Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) workers in front of the Kerala secretariat for the last 17 days by meeting their just demands. ASHA workers were the backbone of our valiant fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. However, their work is not acknowledged by our society or our government. The honorarium they receive is paltry compared to the important work they are
doing.
Now that the ASHA workers’ strike in Thiruvananthapuram has entered its third week and public support for the workers is growing, the Kerala government, instead of trying to solve the issue, is resorting to an age-old tactic: of turning this into a law-and-order issue. Provoked by the sizeable support the workers have garnered from civil society, the police have issued notices to fourteen public intellectuals and activists who participated in the mahasangamam meeting two days back, which was a massive success despite all the threats. They have been ordered to appear at the police station within 48 hours, and accused of disturbing order and obstructing traffic.
Continue reading This is NOT a law and order problem: The ASHA Workers’ Strike in Kerala– AltheaThe Tamil Nadu Textile and Common Labour Union (TTCU) stands in solidarity with the ASHA workers of Kerala, whose strike has now entered its third week. As a women’s trade union we understand how difficult it is for women workers to step away from their responsibilities and take to the streets. It is never an easy decision, but one that becomes necessary when all other avenues to have their voices heard are exhausted.
Continue reading The Fight is Not Just About Better Pay: Solidarity with the Striking ASHA Workers of Kerala : TTCUThe ASHA workers’ strike in Kerala is entering its third week. We are appalled by the CPM-led government’s apathy and the disgusting ignorance of the CPM’s own history of trade unionism displayed by their spokespersons in the media. Maybe the forgetfulness of history is deliberate, because the CPM can no longer continue to nurture even minimally the ‘party of the poor’ image that it built in the middle decades of the twentieth century. While the ASHA workers were on strike in front of the State Secretariat and an ASHA Workers’ mass meet called by the striking association drew a very large number of such workers to the capital city, the government was busy holding an investors’ meet. Such a government cannot be expected to be attentive to the needs and rights of the workers, perhaps.
Continue reading Support the ASHA Workers’ Strike in Kerala: An Appeal to Women’s Organisations, Trade Unions, and Malayalis around the World : Althea[This is a response to many who ask me why I chose to be part of the KSSP’s ongoing Kerala Padayatra, which seeks to highlight crucial issues in development and governance in Kerala.]
Continue reading Rewriting Biopolitics? The Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishat and the LeftGR Santhosh Kumar captured the crux of the unbelievable denigration of democracy by the ruling CPM leadership who are out to defend their local level leaders guilty of the grossest patriarchy that rivals any khap panchayat misogyny. The context is the ongoing struggle by a couple, Anupama Chandran and Ajithkumar, to find their baby who was abducted by her parents, both influential local-level leaders of the CPM, last year and given away illegally for adoption. The story of Anupama’s experience of unspeakable death threats, physical violence, cheating, exposure to health risk, forced confinement, denial of vital information and means of communication, casteist insults, and on and on strips off the claims of women’s empowerment which the left in Kerala has claimed for so long. On social media, thousands of left supporters have literally rubbished women’s rights and the Indian Constitutional morality itself, even as the AIDWA in Kerala has been largely struck dumb.
The cartoon is a spoof on Raja Ravi Varma’ famous mother-and-child painting ‘Here Comes Papa’ in which an aristocratic woman dressed in a way identifiable as ‘traditional’ holds her baby and points to it the unseen ‘papa’ . Though the cartoon is captioned ‘Know the pain of the adopting mother’, an obvious reference to the cry by CPM sympathisers on social media that the child need not be returned, and that the adopting mother was fitter, and though the protagonists here are Pinarayi Vijayan and Anupama’s father, Peroorkkada Jayachandran, who he has been defending, it has layers. Ajithkumar’s dalit status and his earlier marriage has, in the eyes of CPM supporters, rendered him unfit for fatherhood — of a child by the daughter of an influential CPM family. Papa, then, and Papa’s coming, continues to be our favourite obsession.
Dear Chief Minister
Throughout the terrible times we have seen these last two years, it is the news from Kerala that has helped so many of us to keep faith in governance – that a state can be honest, open, participatory, concerned for its people, focused on health, and not play politics, all of these have been remarkable and many of us, Keralites and non-Keralites alike, have drawn valuable lessons from the Kerala experience.
Today morning we woke up to the news that the Child Welfare Committee has ordered that Anupama’s child must be brought to Kerala in five days for a DNA test.
However, the process is still overseen by the officials who directly connived to give the baby away for adoption. The family’s criminal acts are still under a very lax, lagging investigation. Anupama’s educational certificates are still in their possession and the police refuses to intervene to restore them to her.
Indeed, the evil that Prof Kannabiran identifies so excellently in this letter must still be fought, until justice is done. Just the return of the child to Kerala cannot replace justice. Anupama suffered tremendous domestic violence, deliberate endangerment, cheating, and illegal custody at the hands of her family. That cannot be papered over,
Continue reading Rise Above Traditional and Conservative Misogyny — Open Letter to the Chief Minister of Kerala: Kalpana Kannabiran… we are troubled that the state finds it hard to grant a woman the right to lead a life of her choice and to have custody over her child. These are hard won rights, and it has taken generations of struggle by women, many of whom are from your state, to secure both civil and legal acknowledgement for women’s rights to marriages of their choice, and for their right to motherhood, divorce, adoption and so on.
Continue reading Women’s Rights are Hard Won — An Open Letter to the Chief Minister of Kerala : V GeethaAnupama has committed no crime. She got pregnant. She did not murder anyone. She did not rob a bank. She did not betray the nation. She committed no terroristic threats or acts. She is not a smuggler, a thief, a rapist, or a crook. She got pregnant. Getting pregnant is not a crime. She got pregnant and decided to keep her baby. This is not a crime.
Continue reading Do not let the injustice drag infinitely — Open Letter to the Chief Minister of Kerala — Dr Gayatri DeviThe strange case of ‘honour-baby-snatching”,: involving a local-level CPM leader in Thiruvananthapuram city, Peroorkkada Jayachandran is still haunting us despite every attempt by the CPM cyberwarriors to smother it. Mr Jayachandran still feels completely justified and hundreds of left supporters, including so-called progressive women, are ready to proclaim that this dastardly act is a ‘father’s right’. Mr Jayachandran’s nineteen year old daughter Anupama fell in love with a dalit man, a leader of the DYFI, got pregnant by him, and decided to keep the child. Anupama’s parents decided that there was loss of honour in this and proceeded to perpetrate unspeakable violence on the young woman, trying to force her to abort her baby, and finally by snatching away her baby days after it was born. They twisted the entire machinery of child protection and adoption and the police to give the child away without the consent of its parents.
Continue reading Restore Faith in Kerala’s Progressive Legacy — Open Letter to the Chief Minister of Kerala: Prof Mohan RaoBefore I start, a request: Friends who are reading this, if you are close to Noam Chomsky, Amartya Sen, or Soumya Swaminathan, or the other left-liberals who appear in the Kerala government-sponsored talk series from outside Kerala, please do forward this to them? I hope to reach them.
The Left government in Kerala is gathering its international intellectual-activist support base to cash on its commendable — ongoing — success in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. This is not new — it has always been part of the dominant Left’s hegemony-bolstering exercises, especially after the 1990s, when its unquestionable hegemony in Kerala began to face a series of challenges. It has also been forced to pay attention to the oppositional civil society which relentlessly questions the dominant Left’s fundamental understanding of social justice and forces it to take seriously such ideas as freedom, autonomy, as well as identities not reducible to class. Continue reading Why does the Left in Kerala fear Rehana Fathima and not COVID- 19?
One of the effects of the pandemic in Kerala, like in most other parts of the world, is that the government’s narrative muffles all other narratives, and this is not just about the containment of the pandemic. Here the government’s narrative about the pandemic enjoys far greater legitimacy than elsewhere, and with good reason. It is true that Kerala’s greater successes in dealing with the pandemic are unique and commendable; however, to think that therefore, the government is right on everything else is probably a huge mistake. Continue reading The Limits of Public Health Management: Time to Rethink Development in Kerala
I have been reading with interest the exchange between Aditya Nigam and Satish Deshpande on the AAP’s strategy of avoiding ‘politics’ – or rather, distancing itself mostly from the polarised ideological debates while making small moves to shape for itself a space, arguably fuzzy, in the hegemonic discourse of Hindu. I am also witness to the unbelievably egregious attacks by the CPM leadership in Kerala against Islamist organizations protesting the CAA — the free reign granted to an explicitly communalised police force, the appallingly soft treatment of Hindutva offenders, even when they make open threats that warn Malayalis to ‘remember Gujarat’, the wanton attack on internal dissidents in the CPM using the worst instruments of the security states such as the UAPA, and the threat to dismantle the pandal of the Shaheen Bagh solidarity satyagraha in Thiruvananthapuram, something even Amit Shah has not dared to do (thankfully withdrawn after public outrage), and its blatant caste-elite majoritarian thrust while claiming to be the (sole) guardians of secularism. Continue reading Thoughts on the AAP’s Hindu Gestures from Kerala’s History
As we in Kerala gear up for the long struggle that can cease only when the evil of Hindutva is finally uprooted from India and Kerala, and only after the toxins that it has spewed is wiped clean from the hearts and souls of our brethren, my only request is: please do not forget Allen and Twaha. Continue reading Do not Forget Allen and Twaha as we fight the U-r-b-a-n N-a-z-i
Two massive calamities, tremendous losses, continuing signs of serious ecological destruction impending — yet all we Malayalis seem to have produced in response: two reports, and even more frenzied strategic calculation. There is little doubt that the disasters happened in the first place at least partially because of the latter, but there seems to be no rethinking. Instead, we have strategic agents refurbishing their strategies to the new circumstances.
What else explains the Kerala government’s Rebuilding Kerala Development Programme Report (RKDPR)? It popped up all of a sudden around the end of last year, after the UN-led Post-Disaster Needs Assessment Report (PDNAR), and even members of the Chief Minister’s Advisory Council were caught unawares. The economist K P Kannan, whose life’s work has been focused on Kerala’s economy, a member of the Council, remarked in a recent interview in the Sastragathy that they did not know of it until the third meeting of the council. None knew who put it together, and there is no mention of this in the report itself. It draws heavily but selectively on the PDNAR, but also perhaps on the projects that were prepared for World Bank funding – and Kannan reaffirms this impression. The draft report was made available online for comments but there is no clear idea about these experts or the public consultations. Continue reading Two Reports and Many Strategic Agents: Post-Disaster Thinking in Kerala
Yesterday’s high drama at Sabarimala told us quite a lot about the games that politicians play in Kerala. Rehana Fatima, a young woman activist who decided to take the challenge (it is now a challenge, since the trekking path to the shrine is in effect controlled by Hindutva goons heaping verbal abuse, threatening open violence, and using children as shields) had to face not only the naked threats of the so-called bhakths and the vandalisation of her home at Kochi by the same elements, she had also to swallow the Kerala Minister Kadakampally Surendran’s jibe that Sabarimala was not a playground for ‘activists’! By saying so, he hinted that only ‘pure’, ‘untainted’ women believers who are apparently by definition not activists, can be helped by the Kerala Police to reach the shrine. So much for Pinarayi Vijayan’s evocation of Kerala’s legacy of enlightened Hinduism!
This is a piece I wrote in the TOI today on the issue.
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 