Kerala faces several serious challenges, which political parties seldom focus on as objects of resolution and include in their propaganda. Coming together under two coalitions in the State — the Left Democratic Front and the United Democratic Front — these political parties attribute issues of misrule, financial corruption, and nepotism against each other. While the ruling Front puts up proof of achievements in development and people’s welfare, the Opposition brings up charges of financial corruption and development failures against the ruling Front. Probing, rarely, any of the genuine challenges (often due to their own conflicting interests and goals within the front), the Opposition creates a politically disengaging environment. I would like to briefly focus on some of the crucial political challenges awaiting the new government.
Full coverage | Kerala Assembly Elections 2021
Sustenance of social security
Compared to the other States, Kerala has been concerned about the development consequences and is committed to resolving them by combining growth with equity. Severely hit by the severe cyclonic storm Ockhi in 2017, floods in 2018 and 2019, and the novel coronavirus pandemic lockdown now, Kerala’s growth rates that were above the national rates are currently under downward pressure. Inflation hovers around 8%, worsening the situation. But the State provided commodities at fair prices through cooperatives such as SupplyCo (Kerala State Civil Supplies Corporation) and ConsumerFed (State Cooperatives Consumers’ Federation). Likewise, it could tide over the crisis of the pandemic lockdown by ensuring food security through its extensive Public Distribution System network. With a governmental restructuring of the economy into an equitable alternative for extending goods, services and credit to people, it could reverse the capitalist redistributive functions. Similarly, the long-term sustenance of the State’s health sector is a big task. It must be noted that the State’s health sector has been globally celebrated for retaining gains in indices such as high life expectancy, infant mortality rate, birth rate, and death rate, for containing the Nipah viral outbreak in 2018 and 2019, and COVID-19 now and has already been transformed through the Aardram mission, the State Health Insurance Agency 2020, and the Karunya Arogya Suraksha Padhathi 2020 besides multiple health insurance schemes.
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Building an ecologically sustainable and resilient New Kerala is a big problem too. Projects such as the GAIL pipeline and City Gas are praiseworthy. Transport infrastructure development through the construction of roads, bypasses and highways is great. So does the expansion of the Kerala Highway Research Institute as a Centre of Excellence for innovation in design, construction, maintenance, quality assurance, and safety of roads. Making all this effort towards rapid urbanisation (which involves land diversion, wetland reclamation, and deforestation) to be environmentally sustainable is too difficult. It should go well with the State’s move to invest tremendously in agriculture, livestock, fisheries, forestry, and the traditional industries. A major engagement is the opening up of ecologically sustainable alternative development paths leading to systemic change in the economy. Adding to this, climate change-induced disasters (though they hardly ever spread panic unlike the pandemic), need special emphasis to make sure that planners do not overlook them in future development.
Knowledge economy
With the distinct understanding that investment in knowledge and human capital guarantees long-run development, Budget 2021-22 leapfrogs into the knowledge economy. It is for the first time in the country that a State Budget has recognised new knowledge, a crucial non-finite resource and democratisation of its benefits, as the key driver to future productivity-growth and equitable social development. It quite realistically envisages various schemes for boosting accumulation of knowledge-based capital through higher education institutions and provides for the growth of hi-tech industries, innovative start-ups, expansion of the service sector, and the opening up of avenues of self-employment. Universities are called upon to fill their curricula with the latest science-tech hybrid fields of knowledge as current in the developed world. Indeed, it is important that higher education institutions develop the necessary competency to create and transact new knowledge for the growth of the State’s intellectual property.
However, people, who generally glorify the knowledge economy, seldom realise the fact that it is techno-capitalism, the latest version of capitalism dependent on technology and science, for the production and exchange of marketable knowledge. Organised into corporates, capitalists have globally established huge research centres for the generation of knowledge in various science-tech hybrid fields, which as intellectual property and patents (intangible assets), have unimaginable rates of exchange value. Deploying thousands of youth they confiscate their intellectual property by cleverly blurring the actual relationship with its author through the phenomenon called fetishism of both the commodity and capital. But the struggle lies in gaining precedence of critical knowledge over the production, consumption and exchange of marketable knowledge. An uncritical promotion of the knowledge society means only augmentation of knowledge-consuming people, who only buy it rather than creating it. The call has to be understood as an apposite political response to the fast developing techno-capitalist global economy that demands that youth acquire innovative expertise and rare work-space skills in science-tech hybrid fields.
Also read | Plan to create knowledge society
Decline of democracy
The decline of democracy and secularism and the rise of communalism (a global and national threat), pose a big question to the state polity. In India, caste divisiveness adds to this degenerative process which involves the loss of the foundational spirit of the country’s Constitution and the political quality of the citizenry. Communal beliefs feigning to be traditional knowledge find a place in all national policy papers including the Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy document. Traditional beliefs are being distinguished as indigenous science, without knowing that science is universal unlike beliefs, and which always improves itself through scientific proof. Beliefs obfuscate independent inquiries, undermine the credibility of research establishments, and curb the curiosity of youth.
Kerala has been untiringly opposing communal obscurantism and fascism to champion the cause of secularism and democracy. But in recent times, the play of deadly sentiments, false identities, and obscurantism has set in, thereby harming humanism and scientific temper. A State that awe-inspiringly demonstrated oneness during the recent crises of floods and disease in the sharing of prayer halls and worship spaces across religions soon showed the face of divisiveness too. An upper caste identity crisis and patriarchal prejudices spread obscurantism to block the entry of women to Sabarimala and the casteist organisation could misuse the sentiments for political gains. Similarly, obscurantism of two rival Christian factions could block the implementation of a Supreme Court order using the threat of religious strife. Kerala’s polity is increasingly facing an impairment of democracy and secularism as an ever intensifying threat due to politicians nibbling at the jigs of votes on the anglers of religious and caste heads.
Confronting global economy
Like any other State in India, a major political problem before Kerala lies in addressing the local consequences of the global economy that reaches everywhere in search of cheap labour, low tax, and a least regulatory environment. Its reckless accessing of natural resources through networks of worldwide communication, decentralised extraction, production, and exchange affects life even in the recesses of villages. Any local situation today owes its stress to the global process that makes the national economy fragmented and entangled in the process of world economic development. Developmental consequences range from a loss of employment and livelihoods, forced displacement and relocations, health hazards and disabilities and even suicides and democides. Indirect developmental consequences by way of ecological destruction, climate change, and natural disasters affect people in the same way too.
Making the government through the process of electoral contests is hugely expensive for the nation as well as political parties. Most parties generate income through questionable means when they are in power, for what they mobilise from the clientele is insufficient in managing the electorates. A transnational class that manages the global economy decides which coalition should constitute the government, be it national or regional, and for what priority. They manage it through a mutual relationship of exchange — exchange of money for access to natural resources under the control of state power to enhance capital gains. This is inevitably an exchange at the expense of social justice, democracy and environment. How to confront the global economy through a feasible type of upheaval is a huge challenge for a genuine democratic government.
Rajan Gurukkal is Vice Chairman, Kerala State Higher Education Council
