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KERALA LETTER
"Gandhi is dead, Who is now Mahatmaji?"
Solar scam reveals decadent polity and sociery
A Dalit poet writing in English, based in Kerala
Foreword to Media Tides on Kerala Coast
Teacher seeks V.S. Achuthanandan's intervention to end harassment by partymen

വായന

29 January, 2019

January 30. On this day in 1948, a Hindu fanatic shot and killed Mahatma Gandhi as he arrived for the usual evening prayer meeting. The story in pictures.


The killer, Nathuram Godse, gun in hand, faces Gandhi


The deed is done. Gandhi's body lying in state



The Last Journey. Milling crowds thronged the streets to pay homage to the leader
Another view of the milling  crowds




And now listen to Jawaharlal Nehru's moving address to the nation: The light has gone out of our eyes

Priyanka tilts the balance

BRP Bhaskar

Congress President Rahul Gandhi has demonstrated his readiness to take bold steps to retrieve lost ground by inducting his sister, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, as a party general secretary and putting her in charge of half of Uttar Pradesh, the country’s largest state.

The initial response of the party’s rank and file and its supporters to her formal entry into politics has been euphoric. With her looks bringing back memories of her charismatic grandmother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, she has long been a favourite of the party faithful.

For the first time, two All India Congress Committee general secretaries will now be in charge of UP. Priyanka will look after the eastern part and Madhya Pradesh leader Jyotiraditya Scindia the western part.

If UP were a separate country, with a population of 229 million it would be the world’s fifth largest, after China, India, the USA and Indonesia, although in terms of land area it would be in the 80th position. 

UP has 80 seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament. The next most populous state, Maharashtra is a distant second with only 48 seats.

The Congress dominated the political scene in UP, a major battleground of the freedom struggle, from the time of Motilal Nehru, father of the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. He belonged to a Kashmiri family which had settled there a couple of centuries earlier. 

The Nehru-Gandhi family’s hold on the state was rudely shaken when the people, rising like one man against the Emergency excesses, threw the party out lock, stock and barrel in the 1977 elections. They rejected even Indira Gandhi and her son and heir apparent Sanjay in that election and gave all the state’s Lok Sabha seats to the Janata Party, formed by the coming together of several opposition parties on the eve of the elections.

The Janata Party government, led by Morarji Desai, collapsed in just two years. In the election that followed, Indira Gandhi took back a majority of UP’s seats. On her assassination, her son Rajiv Gandhi, riding a sympathy wave, won all but two of the state’s seats.

Thereafter the Congress began to decline. It slid to the third place and then the fourth, as the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party took turns at the top. In the last Lok Sabha elections, the party fielded 66 candidates in the state but only two, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, won.

Priyanka has stepped into the political arena even as official agencies are investigating some land deals of her husband, Robert Vadra, who is a businessman.

She is not a novice in politics. Since 2004 she has been supervising the party’s campaign in the constituencies of her mother Sonia and Rahul. She is also known to have been involved in political decision-making in the family.

Priyanka and Scindia face an uphill task in UP. For 30 years, the Congress has been just a small player in the state and the party machinery is moribund.

Rahul Gandhi’s decision to devote special attention to UP has come in the wake of the exclusion of the Congress from the alliance the SP and the BSP have formed to take on the BJP in UP. They have decided to leave out Sonia’s Rae Bareli and Rahul’s Amethi constituencies and share the remaining 78 equally.

The SP and the BSP were obviously playing tit-for-tat. These parties, which are small players in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, had explored the possibility of a tie-up with the Congress, the main challenger of the BJP in these states, in the recent Assembly elections. Hopeful of winning on its own, the Congress did not accommodate them.

As it happened, the Congress failed to get a simple majority in Rajasthan and MP and had to take the support of the BSP and the SP to form the government.

The BJP had won 71 Lok Sabha seats from UP last tie. This was a quarter of its national tally of 282. The SP and the BSP together polled more votes than the BJP in that election and the combine is in a good position to prevent a repetition of the BJP’s 2014 runaway victory.

Rahul Gandhi’s plan is a game-spoiler. He presumably expects his move to force the SP’s Akhilesh Yadav and the BSP’s Mayawati to rethink on the exclusion of the Congress from the anti-BJP alliance. If they don’t, the BJP will be the gainer. Every additional vote Priyanka draws towards the Congress may make it so much easier for the BJP to prevail over the SP-BSP alliance. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, January 29, 2019.



24 January, 2019

Judiciary in a messy episode

BRP Bhskar

India’s Supreme Court has done much damage to itself by the way it handled the case of Alok Verma, former Director of the Central Bureau of Investigation, a police establishment directly under the central government.

Verma became CBI chief in January 2017. Under the law he had an assured tenure of two years but the government shunted him off as Director of Fire Services.

He was removed on the recommendation of Central Vigiliance Commissioner KV Chowdary who was looking into certain allegations against him referred by the Cabinet Secretary.

The action came in the wake of infighting in the CBI between Verma and Rakesh Asthana, a Gujarat cadre officer who was brought in by Prime Minister Narendra Modi as Special Director and quickly became a rival power centre within it.

Even as Verma and Asthana were pursuing corruption charges against each other, Modi summoned both of them but could not bring about a rapprochement. The next day, in a midnight operation, the government sent both of them on leave and gave charge of the agency to M Nageshwar Rao with the designation of Interim Director.

The task of clearing the mess fell on the Supreme Court as both Verma and Asthana approached it as aggrieved parties. It kept Asthana’s petition aside, and took up that of Verma, who was a tenure officer. It placed curbs on Nageshwar Rao to prevent any improper exercise of power.

The court allowed the CVC to proceed with the inquiry against Verma under the supervision of one of its former judges, AK Patnaik.

Then things started going awry. Annoyed by newspaper reports about the CVC probe, which it presumed was based on information leaked by one or the other of the parties before it, the court said, “None of you deserve a hearing.”

On January 8, the court ordered Verma’s reinstatement. At the same time it asked the three-member committee authorised by law to select the CBI chief to consider the matter further.

A day after Verma resumed charge as Director, the committee met and decided by a 2-1 majority to send him to the Fire Services again. 

The Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha and the Chief Justice of India or a judge nominated by him are the members of the committee. CJI Ranjan Gogoi nominated Justice AK Sikri as his representative. He sided with Modi who wanted Verma’s removal.

There are reasons to doubt if the three-judge bench headed by the CJI had acted judiciously in reinstating Verma who was facing corruption charges and directing the three-member committee to take a call on his continuance.

The committee is a mechanism devised by law to prevent the government of the day from making appointment to the sensitive post on political grounds. Its role is limited to selecting an officer. The law does not confer on it any disciplinary control over the officer.

The CJI acted unwisely in choosing Justice Sikri to represent him in the committee as his name was under the government’s consideration for an assignment in London. Public criticism for siding with the government in the committee forced Justice Sikri to reject the assignment. 

Justice Sikri said he voted for Verma’s removal as the CVC’s report contained prima facie findings against him. However, Justice Patnaik who supervised the CVC probe told the media there was no evidence of corruption against Verma.

Alok Verma’s transfer to the Fire Services was untenable as he was a superannuated officer. He was able to stay on as CBI Director after retirement as it is a tenure post. Instead of accepting the new post, he sent in his resignation.

According to media reports, when the government packed off Verma from the CBI, papers relating to nine important cases were on his table. One of them related to the Rafale scandal in which the Opposition has accused Modi of favouring businessman Anil Ambani to the detriment of a public sector undertaking.

Another case before him related to the medical admission scam in which the name of a former Chief Justice of India had come up. 

The Judiciary needs to draw lessons from this messy episode to avoid its repetition in the interests of its own fair name.

It must give serious thought to the question of associating itself with the government outside the constitutional framework. When it is involved in the selection of the CBI chief, how can any one aggrieved by the choice approaching it for relief with confidence? This problem can possibly be overcome by amending the law to include in the selection committee a former CJI nominated by the CJI instead of the CJI or a serving judge nominated by him. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, January 22, 2018.

16 January, 2019

Bid to placate a caste group

BRP Bhaskar

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to provide reservation on economic grounds to poor persons belonging to the so-called upper castes is aimed at boosting his Bharatiya Janata Party’s prospects in the approaching general election.

The bill to amend the Constitution for the purpose had a smooth passage because few parties were willing to invite the hostility of a powerful social group which constitutes about 15 per cent of the population.
Reservation is the Indian form of affirmative action. It was introduced in the colonial period by the British in the Madras Presidency and by a few princes in their States in the wake of agitations by socially disadvantaged groups.

The Constitution, promulgated in 1950, provided for reservation only for Dalits and Adivasis, the most disadvantaged groups officially classified as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes respectively.

When a member of a forward community challenged the reservation enjoyed by other backward communities in Madras on the ground that it violated the Constitutional guarantee of equality, the court struck them down.

To protect the pre-existing reservations the government amended the Constitution to permit the making of special provisions for socially and educationally backward classes.

The amendment opened the door to extend the benefit of reservation to socially and educationally backward groups across the country. However, neither the Centre nor any of the States did any such thing.

In 1979 the Janata Party government set up a commission headed by BP Mandal to identify socially and educationally backward classes and go into the question of introducing reservation for them to mitigate the effects of caste determination.

Since there was no data on the representation of backward classes other than SCs and STs in the services, the Commission gathered information from a few Central government offices. It found that they were poorly represented.

The Commission recognised a caste or class as backward if the average value of assets of its families was 25 per cent below the State average and the number of families living in hutments and the number of households with consumption loans were 25 per cent above the State average.

It recommended that 27 per cent of the jobs in the Central services and public undertakings be reserved for them.

By the time the Commission concluded its labours the Janata government had fallen and Indira Gandhi was back at the helm. She and her son and successor Rajiv Gandhi did not act on its report.

The National Front government headed by VP Singh, which was supported from outside by the BJP and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), decided to implement its recommendations.

The BJP, which was against extension of reservation to more sections, immediately withdrew its support to the government. Its student wing launched a violent agitation which paralysed educational institutions in Delhi and the Hindi States. But implementation of the report, which survived judicial scrutiny, could not be stopped.

The idea of reservation for the poor belonging to the forward castes was first mooted by CPI(M) ideologue EMS Namboodiripad. Many saw it as an attempt to undermine the concept of reservation as a social justice measure.

Modi’s motive in pushing through economic reservation is to placate the BJP’s ‘upper’ caste constituency which has been adversely affected by his government’s failure to create jobs in adequate numbers.

The criteria the government has laid down to identify the ‘upper’ caste poor are a clear giveaway. While the per capita annual income is Rs 113,000, it has decided to treat those with annual incomes of up to Rs 800,000 and landholdings of up to five acres as poor. The intention clearly is to extend the benefit of reservation to Modi’s ‘upper’ caste urban middle class supporters.

Under a Supreme Court ruling, a backward class person with an annual income of Rs 250,000 belongs to the creamy layer and a second generation member of his family is not entitled to reservation.

As against a job quota of 27 per cent for the backward classes who constitute 52 per cent of the population, the government has proposed a 10 per cent quota for the ‘upper’ castes, who constitute 15 per cent of the population.

Another Supreme Court verdict has put a 50 per cent cap on reservations. The new 10 per cent quota will take reservations above that ceiling. Those who view reservation in terms of social justice are turning to the court to squash reservation based on economic considerations. The court may disappoint them. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, January 15, 2019. 

08 January, 2019

Science on the decline

BRP Bhaskar

In the colonial period undivided India had made a mark at the global level through the pioneering work of scientists like Jagdish Chandra Bose, who was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1920, CV Raman, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 and Satyendra Nath Bose whose name is clubbed with that of the century’s greatest scientist in Bose-Einstein statistics.

Jawaharlal Nehru attached great importance to science. A decade before Independence, addressing the Indian Science Congress, he had said, “The future belongs to science and those who make friends with science.”

Promotion of the scientific temper is one of the directive principles of the Constitution framed under his leadership. As the first Prime Minister, he initiated the nuclear programme with the proclaimed intention of using atomic energy for peaceful purposes. He set up the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and national-level research bodies in physics, chemistry, medicine, agriculture etc.

He also established Indian Institutes of Technology with the help of advanced nations. Several of their graduates migrated to the West, giving rise to concerns about brain drain. But many stayed behind and contributed to India’s development.

All through his 17 years at the helm, the Indian Science Congress invited Nehru to inaugurate its annual session. It is still the Prime Minister’s prerogative to open its session although few of Nehru’s successors have shown his understanding of the importance of science.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi created a sensation in 2014 by mouthing the pseudo-scientific claims of his Hindutva school. Addressing a gathering of doctors, he referred to the elephant-headed god Ganesh and said, “There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who put an elephant’s head on the body of a human being.”

He turned to the epic Mahabharata, which says Karna was not conceived in his mother’s womb, and added, “This means that genetic science was present at that time.”

His first address to the Science Congress also contained such wayward ideas, but in later speeches he avoided them. This year he gave the Science Congress a new slogan: Jai Vignan, Jai Anusandhan ((Victory to Knowledge, Victory to Research). It has probably come too late. 

At least two papers presented at this year’s session were straight out of Hindutva’s book in which scientific terminology and mythology are hopelessly mixed up. One of them proclaimed Newton and Einstein were wrong without adducing any evidence and proposed that gravitational force be named after Modi.

India’s recent achievements in science are a repetition of what others have done already. There has been little original contribution since the days of the two Boses and Raman.

In the list of more than 4,000 world-class researchers of 2018, drawn up by the firm Clarivate Analytics on the basis of production of multiple highly cited papers, there are only 10 names from India. The United States with 2,639 names, the UK with 546 and China with 482 top the list.

CNR Rao, Director of the Indian Institute of Sciences, Bangalore, one of the Indians on the list, told a newspaper that 15 years ago India and China were at the same level, but now China’s contribution to global science is 15 to 16 per cent and India’s only three to four per cent.

Although India is lagging behind in research, Indians are not. They are doing well in other countries. The Clarivate list contains far more Indian names under the US than under India. Names of Indians figure also under other countries like Canada, China, Singapore, Denmark, Finland and Saudi Arabia.

In the 1960s, British scientist JBS Haldane, who had moved to India protesting US military presence in his country, said science was growing slowly in this country not because people were stupid or lazy but because professionalism was weak and there was an obsession with degrees.

More recently, Yamuna Krishnan, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago, who had spent 15 years at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore before migrating to the US, identified a herd mentality and paucity of early mentorship as factors that inhibit growth of science in India.

Writing in Nature, the international journal of science, she said, “To catapult India into the top five scientific nations, the country needs enabling policies that money can’t buy.”

Those who believe that all worthwhile knowledge had been gleaned by their ancestors in the misty past cannot be expected to give scientific research the push it needs to blossom. - - Gulf Today, January 8, 2019.

02 January, 2019


Sabarimala bares Kerala’s  socio-political paradox

B.R.P. Bhaskar



Kerala, the southwestern state, which attracted worldwide attention in the 1970s by registering social development indices comparable to those of the industrialised West and has continuously topped the list of Indian states in human development since data collection in this regard began in 1995, is sending contradictory signals. 
In August 2018 the state experienced the worst floods in living memory.  Heavy downpour over several days filled the dams and, when the reservoir shutters were raised, water rose in the rivers and other water bodies, overflowing and submerging many towns and villages. About 500 people died and a million homeless sought refuge in relief camps. Setting aside political and sectarian differences, people worked with the official agencies in the massive rescue and relief effort. Fishermen from coastal districts loaded their boats on trucks and rushed to inland towns, unasked, and rescued several hundred people stranded in the upper floors of marooned houses. 
When the worst was over, officers in Kochi discovered that a young man who was with them for eight days, carrying heavy loads on his head, was K. Gopinathan, IAS, Collector of Dadra and Nagar Haveli. On learning of the devastation, he had come home to do his bit for his people.     
It was Kerala’s finest hour in recent times. It looked as though it had become “a model place where all live as brothers without caste differences and religious hatred”. The words in quotes were written by Sree Narayana Guru at Aruvippuram, near Thiruvananthapuram, in 1888 after consecrating a Siva idol, defying the Brahminical order, and setting up a makeshift temple for the benefit of those who were denied access to places of worship controlled by caste supremacists. It was the clearest exposition of the goal of the Kerala Renaissance, which had started rolling a few years earlier when at Cherthala a woman chopped off her breasts in protest against Travancore’s obnoxious breast tax and women of the Channar community started covering their breasts.    
In September 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that the practice of barring women of menstruating age from the ancient Sabarimala shrine on the Western Ghats violates the Constitutional guarantee of gender equality. The judgment was welcomed by leaders of the major parties, including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and its ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The hereditary Thanthri  (head priest) of the temple, backed by associations of Brahmins, descendants of a former feudatory at Pandalam, the Nair Service Society, organisation of a Hindu forward caste, and sundry groups claiming to represent devotees of Ayyappa, the Sabarimala deity, opposed the verdict, alleging interference  in a religious tradition. Soon, however, the local units of the BJP and the RSS, sensing an opportunity to make electoral gains in the state, which has been hostile to their Hindutva ideology, changed their stance, and vowed to block women’s entry into the temple. The Congress followed suit. The national leaderships of the BJP and the Congress allowed the state units to follow a line different from theirs. 
When the temple opened for the next pilgrim season, the RSS-BJP combine organised massive protests against the court ruling. Women gathered in large numbers at public places and chanted prayers, blocking traffic. Goons who lined the trekking route to the temple beleaguered all women seen on the path, including journalists on duty. 
The Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led state government proclaimed its determination to implement the court order and the police said it would offer protection to women devotees. However, women who reached the temple, braving the protesters and the goons, were persuaded by the police to return without entering it. The scene repeated itself every time the temple opened thereafter. 
This was a Kerala vastly different from the one seen during the deluge. The entire society, not just Hindus, stood polarised with some members of the minority communities making common cause with Hindu orthodoxy, actuated by fear of possible judicial intervention in their religious practices too. The ugly stir appeared to pull Kerala down to the level of the BIMARU states.  
To understand the seeming shift in the Malayali mood in the course of a month or two, one needs to understand how the Kerala Renaissance developed and how some of its gains were subsequently subverted. Some scholars have lately questioned the claim that the state witnessed a renaissance. According to them, what the state saw was only a set of social reforms. Since we use the term ‘renaissance’ in the context of the European experience, we can approach this issue the way foreign scholars did. They have postulated that, unlike a reform movement which addresses specific social or other practices, renaissance is a multilevel movement that extends to different fields of human activity.  Some critics have pointed out that there was no plan for a total transformation of Kerala society, as though renaissance is plotted like a revolution. 
Kerala society was divided by walls of caste and religion in the 18th century. One could determine the caste and religion of a person at a glance. The reform movements which began within the different compartments eventually spilled over and coalesced into a movement that embraced almost all. A century later it was no longer easy to identify one’s caste or religion by the clothes one wore or the way one cropped their hair. 
Vaikunta Swami, Narayana Guru, Ayyankali, Chattampi Swami, Vakkom Abdul Khade Maulavi, Poykayil Yohannan and V.T. Bhattathiripad raised many issues other than reform of their communities’ practices. A modern education was a part of the agenda for all of them. Vaikunta Swami called the Travancore rulerneech(evil) and his British overlordven neech(white evil). Chattampi Swami questioned the authority of the Vedas. Ayyankali’s attempt to put a Dalit girl in school and Bhattathiripad’s campaign for widow re-marriage in the Namoodiri community were early intimations of the demand for gender parity.
Whatever the religion, one must become a better human being, Narayana Guru declared. He also said caste, religion, dress and language should not separate man from man. He advised his followers to better their lot through agriculture and industry. An industrial exhibition held in 1905 at Kollam, along with the second annual conference of an organisation he founded, was the first of its kind in India.  Many of the so-called ‘traditional industries’  which collapsed in the latter half of the last century due to multiple factors, including trade union militancy, had come up during the Renaissance. Heeding the Guru’s advice, Kumaran Asan, a poet of renown, set up a tile factory. The Guru’s followers were also pioneers of the state’s trade union movement. 
The spirit of the Renaissance is discernible in the works of Malayalam writers who came up from the 1930s. It also found its way into the theatre and the cinema. 
When political parties emerged, the people radicalised by the reform movements looked up to them to carry the Renaissance forward. Accordingly the Congress organised the Vaikom satyagraha of 1924-25 for opening of the roads around a temple to the so-called lower castes. When the Communist Party of India came out of the Congress fold in the 1940s, large sections of the underprivileged, enthused by its slogan of equality, rallied behind it. The party’s ascent to power in 1957, just 10 years after Independence, marked the zenith of the Renaissance at the political level.   
A backlash began when regressive forces, beaten back by the Renaissance, regrouped and challenged the Communist government, angered by its two reform measures. The feudal elements resented the land reform which envisaged a ceiling on holdings and distribution of the surplus to landless tenants. The Church which dominated the education scene was infuriated by the bid to regulate appointment of teachers. The Congress and other opposition parties joined hands with them. Neither reform measure hurt the interests of the numerically strong backward Ezhava and Muslim communities but their organisations also joined the stir. The Centre dismissed the state government, citing breakdown of law and order. 
In the elections that followed, the CPI polled more votes than in 1957 but power eluded it as the other major parties had combined against it. The splits in the CPI and the Congress intensified the struggle for power and this presented the communal forces an opportunity to dig in and gain political legitimacy. The next two decades saw the rise and fall of coalition governments in which breakaway groups of both parties collaborated among themselves and with other parties, including  sectarian ones. Ideology became irrelevant. Every party could now join hands with any other. 
In the late 1970s, massive inflow of remittances from Non-Resident Keralites began and it transformed the socially advanced but economically backward state into one high up in per capita income as well as expenditure. The see-saw struggle over land reform ended during this period with the adoption of a watered down measure which did not involve any major social changes and was acceptable to all parties. In the early 1980s a stable polity with two fronts, one led by the Congress and the other by the CPI(M), emerged. They have been alternating in power since then.  Both fronts contain regressive elements. 
The two-front system was a social contract which put an end to the struggle between forces wishing to carry the Renaissance forward and those wishing to roll it back. It effectively blocked the advance of the Adivasis and the Dalits. In the 1970s both the Congress and the CPI(M) had backed a law to reclaim and return to the Adivasis their lost lands. Through the 1980s both fronts put it in cold storage while in power. In the 1990s they collaborated to scrap that law and substitute it with one providing for allotment of alternative land. Most Adivasis are yet to get the promised alternative land. The cries of the Dalits and other landless people with interest in cultivation of farm land have fallen on deaf ears. 
Kerala is media-rich and the role of the newspapers and television channels in the making of the current scenario merits attention. 
The print media had played a very supportive role during  the Renaissance. Many of its leaders had their own publications to propagate its ideals. The mainline publications went with the movement and benefited by it. There was a marked intrusion of political considerations during the campaign against the Communist government, and most newspapers still have an anti-communist undertone. Their inability to block the CPI(M)-led front from coming to power indicates the media is not a decisive factor in electoral politics. The electronic news media, with its noisy nightly debates, has not made a difference to the situation. It has merely strengthened pre-existing political preferences and prejudices. The entertainment media has made a huge contribution to the growth of regressive forces. Its serials and other programmes have reinforced feudal values instead of imparting lessons appropriate for the present. 
It is tempting to see the Sabarimala issue as one that offers an opportunity to carry forward the sabotaged Renaissance. However, it is not a social or religious project, but a purely political one. The core issue is not any temple or religious practice, as the agitators try to make out, but the right to equality. 
Temple practices in Kerala have seen changes on a continuing basis. The 1936 proclamation of the Maharaja of Travancore throwing open temples under his government’s control to all Hindus, irrespective of caste, is a classic example. After Independence, Devaswam Boards were set up to administer temples under the government’s control as the state is secular. The Travancore Devaswam Board introduced some major changes in the early years. These included abolition of hereditary rights of some families at Sabarimala and creating a fair system for appointment of priests. It also made arrangements to train non-Brahmins to perform priestly functions. Its reforming zeal ended after orthodox elements gained control of the Board with both the Congress and the CPI(M) picking persons acceptable to powerful caste organisations as its President and members. 
Changes in religious practices, as in other areas, must come about on the basis of informed public opinion. Progressive sections of society must play their legitimate part in building up such opinion.The Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad, a non-government organisation, ran several campaigns against superstitious practices in the last few decades. However, instead of diminishing, such practices grew during this period. The organisation’s failure may at least in part be due to its association in the popular mind to the atheistic Communist movement.
The venom in the social media protests is a sure indication that the campaign is political, not religious in nature. Some social forces which joined the protests on religious considerations withdrew when they recognised its political character. While the BJP can make some gains from this campaign, its hope of repeating Tripura is a pipe-dream. What remains of the Renaissance spirit in the public space is sufficient to prevent a Hindutva upsurge.  A moot question is whether the BJP will draw enough Hindu votes from the Congress and Communist camps to upset the two-front system. 

Sabarimala bares Kerala’s  socio-political paradox

     
B.R.P. Bhaskar
Kerala, the southwestern state, which attracted worldwide attention in the 1970s by registering social development indices comparable to those of the industrialised West and has continuously topped the list of Indian states in human development since data collection in this regard began in 1995, is sending contradictory signals. 
In August 2018 the state experienced the worst floods in living memory.  Heavy downpour over several days filled the dams and, when the reservoir shutters were raised, water rose in the rivers and other water bodies, overflowing and submerging many towns and villages. About 500 people died and a million homeless sought refuge in relief camps. Setting aside political and sectarian differences, people worked with the official agencies in the massive rescue and relief effort. Fishermen from coastal districts loaded their boats on trucks and rushed to inland towns, unasked, and rescued several hundred people stranded in the upper floors of marooned houses. 
When the worst was over, officers in Kochi discovered that a young man who was with them for eight days, carrying heavy loads on his head, was K. Gopinathan, IAS, Collector of Dadra and Nagar Haveli. On learning of the devastation, he had come home to do his bit for his people.     
It was Kerala’s finest hour in recent times. It looked as though it had become “a model place where all live as brothers without caste differences and religious hatred”. The words in quotes were written by Sree Narayana Guru at Aruvippuram, near Thiruvananthapuram, in 1888 after consecrating a Siva idol, defying the Brahminical order, and setting up a makeshift temple for the benefit of those who were denied access to places of worship controlled by caste supremacists. It was the clearest exposition of the goal of the Kerala Renaissance, which had started rolling a few years earlier when at Cherthala a woman chopped off her breasts in protest against Travancore’s obnoxious breast tax and women of the Channar community started covering their breasts.    
In September 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that the practice of barring women of menstruating age from the ancient Sabarimala shrine on the Western Ghats violates the Constitutional guarantee of gender equality. The judgment was welcomed by leaders of the major parties, including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and its ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The hereditary Thanthri  (head priest) of the temple, backed by associations of Brahmins, descendants of a former feudatory at Pandalam, the Nair Service Society, organisation of a Hindu forward caste, and sundry groups claiming to represent devotees of Ayyappa, the Sabarimala deity, opposed the verdict, alleging interference  in a religious tradition. Soon, however, the local units of the BJP and the RSS, sensing an opportunity to make electoral gains in the state, which has been hostile to their Hindutva ideology, changed their stance, and vowed to block women’s entry into the temple. The Congress followed suit. The national leaderships of the BJP and the Congress allowed the state units to follow a line different from theirs. 
When the temple opened for the next pilgrim season, the RSS-BJP combine organised massive protests against the court ruling. Women gathered in large numbers at public places and chanted prayers, blocking traffic. Goons who lined the trekking route to the temple beleaguered all women seen on the path, including journalists on duty. 
The Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led state government proclaimed its determination to implement the court order and the police said it would offer protection to women devotees. However, women who reached the temple, braving the protesters and the goons, were persuaded by the police to return without entering it. The scene repeated itself every time the temple opened thereafter. 
This was a Kerala vastly different from the one seen during the deluge. The entire society, not just Hindus, stood polarised with some members of the minority communities making common cause with Hindu orthodoxy, actuated by fear of possible judicial intervention in their religious practices too. The ugly stir appeared to pull Kerala down to the level of the BIMARU states.  
To understand the seeming shift in the Malayali mood in the course of a month or two, one needs to understand how the Kerala Renaissance developed and how some of its gains were subsequently subverted. Some scholars have lately questioned the claim that the state witnessed a renaissance. According to them, what the state saw was only a set of social reforms. Since we use the term ‘renaissance’ in the context of the European experience, we can approach this issue the way foreign scholars did. They have postulated that, unlike a reform movement which addresses specific social or other practices, renaissance is a multilevel movement that extends to different fields of human activity.  Some critics have pointed out that there was no plan for a total transformation of Kerala society, as though renaissance is plotted like a revolution. 
Kerala society was divided by walls of caste and religion in the 18th century. One could determine the caste and religion of a person at a glance. The reform movements which began within the different compartments eventually spilled over and coalesced into a movement that embraced almost all. A century later it was no longer easy to identify one’s caste or religion by the clothes one wore or the way one cropped their hair. 
Vaikunta Swami, Narayana Guru, Ayyankali, Chattampi Swami, Vakkom Abdul Khade Maulavi, Poykayil Yohannan and V.T. Bhattathiripad raised many issues other than reform of their communities’ practices. A modern education was a part of the agenda for all of them. Vaikunta Swami called the Travancore rulerneech(evil) and his British overlordven neech(white evil). Chattampi Swami questioned the authority of the Vedas. Ayyankali’s attempt to put a Dalit girl in school and Bhattathiripad’s campaign for widow re-marriage in the Namoodiri community were early intimations of the demand for gender parity.
Whatever the religion, one must become a better human being, Narayana Guru declared. He also said caste, religion, dress and language should not separate man from man. He advised his followers to better their lot through agriculture and industry. An industrial exhibition held in 1905 at Kollam, along with the second annual conference of an organisation he founded, was the first of its kind in India.  Many of the so-called ‘traditional industries’  which collapsed in the latter half of the last century due to multiple factors, including trade union militancy, had come up during the Renaissance. Heeding the Guru’s advice, Kumaran Asan, a poet of renown, set up a tile factory. The Guru’s followers were also pioneers of the state’s trade union movement. 
The spirit of the Renaissance is discernible in the works of Malayalam writers who came up from the 1930s. It also found its way into the theatre and the cinema. 
When political parties emerged, the people radicalised by the reform movements looked up to them to carry the Renaissance forward. Accordingly the Congress organised the Vaikom satyagraha of 1924-25 for opening of the roads around a temple to the so-called lower castes. When the Communist Party of India came out of the Congress fold in the 1940s, large sections of the underprivileged, enthused by its slogan of equality, rallied behind it. The party’s ascent to power in 1957, just 10 years after Independence, marked the zenith of the Renaissance at the political level.   
A backlash began when regressive forces, beaten back by the Renaissance, regrouped and challenged the Communist government, angered by its two reform measures. The feudal elements resented the land reform which envisaged a ceiling on holdings and distribution of the surplus to landless tenants. The Church which dominated the education scene was infuriated by the bid to regulate appointment of teachers. The Congress and other opposition parties joined hands with them. Neither reform measure hurt the interests of the numerically strong backward Ezhava and Muslim communities but their organisations also joined the stir. The Centre dismissed the state government, citing breakdown of law and order. 
In the elections that followed, the CPI polled more votes than in 1957 but power eluded it as the other major parties had combined against it. The splits in the CPI and the Congress intensified the struggle for power and this presented the communal forces an opportunity to dig in and gain political legitimacy. The next two decades saw the rise and fall of coalition governments in which breakaway groups of both parties collaborated among themselves and with other parties, including  sectarian ones. Ideology became irrelevant. Every party could now join hands with any other. 
In the late 1970s, massive inflow of remittances from Non-Resident Keralites began and it transformed the socially advanced but economically backward state into one high up in per capita income as well as expenditure. The see-saw struggle over land reform ended during this period with the adoption of a watered down measure which did not involve any major social changes and was acceptable to all parties. In the early 1980s a stable polity with two fronts, one led by the Congress and the other by the CPI(M), emerged. They have been alternating in power since then.  Both fronts contain regressive elements. 
The two-front system was a social contract which put an end to the struggle between forces wishing to carry the Renaissance forward and those wishing to roll it back. It effectively blocked the advance of the Adivasis and the Dalits. In the 1970s both the Congress and the CPI(M) had backed a law to reclaim and return to the Adivasis their lost lands. Through the 1980s both fronts put it in cold storage while in power. In the 1990s they collaborated to scrap that law and substitute it with one providing for allotment of alternative land. Most Adivasis are yet to get the promised alternative land. The cries of the Dalits and other landless people with interest in cultivation of farm land have fallen on deaf ears. 
Kerala is media-rich and the role of the newspapers and television channels in the making of the current scenario merits attention. 
The print media had played a very supportive role during  the Renaissance. Many of its leaders had their own publications to propagate its ideals. The mainline publications went with the movement and benefited by it. There was a marked intrusion of political considerations during the campaign against the Communist government, and most newspapers still have an anti-communist undertone. Their inability to block the CPI(M)-led front from coming to power indicates the media is not a decisive factor in electoral politics. The electronic news media, with its noisy nightly debates, has not made a difference to the situation. It has merely strengthened pre-existing political preferences and prejudices. The entertainment media has made a huge contribution to the growth of regressive forces. Its serials and other programmes have reinforced feudal values instead of imparting lessons appropriate for the present. 
It is tempting to see the Sabarimala issue as one that offers an opportunity to carry forward the sabotaged Renaissance. However, it is not a social or religious project, but a purely political one. The core issue is not any temple or religious practice, as the agitators try to make out, but the right to equality. 
Temple practices in Kerala have seen changes on a continuing basis. The 1936 proclamation of the Maharaja of Travancore throwing open temples under his government’s control to all Hindus, irrespective of caste, is a classic example. After Independence, Devaswam Boards were set up to administer temples under the government’s control as the state is secular. The Travancore Devaswam Board introduced some major changes in the early years. These included abolition of hereditary rights of some families at Sabarimala and creating a fair system for appointment of priests. It also made arrangements to train non-Brahmins to perform priestly functions. Its reforming zeal ended after orthodox elements gained control of the Board with both the Congress and the CPI(M) picking persons acceptable to powerful caste organisations as its President and members. 
Changes in religious practices, as in other areas, must come about on the basis of informed public opinion. Progressive sections of society must play their legitimate part in building up such opinion.The Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad, a non-government organisation, ran several campaigns against superstitious practices in the last few decades. However, instead of diminishing, such practices grew during this period. The organisation’s failure may at least in part be due to its association in the popular mind to the atheistic Communist movement.
The venom in the social media protests is a sure indication that the campaign is political, not religious in nature. Some social forces which joined the protests on religious considerations withdrew when they recognised its political character. While the BJP can make some gains from this campaign, its hope of repeating Tripura is a pipe-dream. What remains of the Renaissance spirit in the public space is sufficient to prevent a Hindutva upsurge.  A moot question is whether the BJP will draw enough Hindu votes from the Congress and Communist camps to upset the two-front system. 

MODI’S YEAR OF RECKONING

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

The Bharatiya Janata Party is due to seek a fresh mandate this year. When Narendra Modi led it to power with a stunning victory in May 2014, it looked as though he was there for a long haul.

He campaigned hard and brought the BJP to power in State after State and it displaced the Congress as the country’s premier political party. In the process, he acquired an air of invincibility.

Modi’s pet theme was the alleged lack of progress under the Congress which had been in power for most of the seven decades of freedom. His favourite target was the Nehru-Gandhi family, whose members had served as Prime Minister for 47 years, especially Jawaharlal Nehru, who had held the Hindutva forces at bay during the 17 years he was at the helm.

It was the sprawling Hindi region and adjoining Gujarat and Maharashtra that had hoisted the BJP to power at the Centre. The party’s loss of power in three States of the region in the recent Assembly elections shows that the popular mood there is not the same any more. It also showed that the Congress was on the rebound in the region and that Rahul Gandhi can give Modi a run for his money.

The election results encouraged the Opposition to accelerate the efforts to face the BJP unitedly. MK Stalin, leader of Tamil Nadu’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagm, declared Rahul Gandhi the Opposition’s prime ministerial candidate. Stalin made the announcement presumably to stymie the prospects of regional leaders with prime ministerial ambitions. His statement upset many, but no one seriously questioned it.

There were rumblings against Modi from leaders like former Union Minister Yashwant Sinha who had dropped out of the BJP after he seized control of the party. Some who are well regarded in the party like Union Minister Nitin Gadkari also made critical remarks.

Just as leadership claims credit for successes it must own up responsibility for failures, Gadkari said in an allusion to the recent electoral reverses. Some small parties which were the BJP’s partners in the National Democratic Alliance pulled out.

While the Opposition has reason to be happy over the turn of events, it is too early to write off Modi. He may not have risen up to people’s expectations but he is not a spent force.

As the Chief Minister who had presided over the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat, Narendra Modi’s name was in the mud when the BJP, at the instance of its ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, named him its prime ministerial candidate. He overcame the disability, projecting himself as a votary of development.

Some observers suspect that Nitin Gadkari may be voicing the RSS’s disappointment with Modi’s performance. But there is nothing to indicate that it is ready to dump him and pick someone else.

Early in his prime ministerial days, Modi had conveyed the impression that he was capable of making India a major economic power. However, lack of due diligence in the implementation of key measures, like demonetisation of high-value notes and introduction of goods and services tax, resulted in deceleration of economic growth. Although there is scepticism over official figures, the economy does appear to be back on track. However, it has failed to generate jobs in sufficient numbers.

Lately he has come under widespread criticism over his priorities. Questions have been raised over the huge expenditure on his foreign travels and projects like the Statue of Unity in Gujarat. Modi’s standard practice is to ignore such criticism in campaign speeches and concentrate on running down critics.

Polarisation on communal lines has been a part of the BJP’s poll strategy since long. The raking up of the Ram temple issue and the induction of a Hindutva leader of Gujarat with a dubious record to oversee the campaign in Uttar Pradesh, the State with the largest number of Lok Saba seats, indicate that this strategy remains its mainstay.

A new element in this year’s campaign is a movie based on “The Accidental Prime Minister”, a book on Manmohan Singh, who had headed the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government for 10 years. Its author, Sanjay Baru, was Singh’s Media Adviser.

The film makes use of Baru’s references to the role played by UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi to damn the dynasty. The new Congress government of Madhya Pradesh has rejected calls to ban it. The film is unlikely to yield the dividend the BJP is looking for. -- Gulf Today, Janiary 2, 2019.