K.G. Kumar
Last Thursday was a very important day for Kerala since it marked the golden jubilee of the first government to be elected in the State after it was unified under the States Reorganisation Act of 1956, which reorganised the boundaries of India's States along linguistic lines. Fifty years ago, after the first general elections held in February-March 1957, on April 5, 1957, the first Communist Ministry was sworn into office in Kerala, with E.M. Sankaran Namboodiripad (better known as EMS) as the first Chief Minister of a new State.
The commemoration date is also historically indelible for, with that electoral exercise, Kerala etched itself into record books as among the first to let communists grab control of a State through the ballot, and not the bullet. (Historically, the technical honour of being first goes to San Marino in southern Europe, an enclave in central Italy and once the world's smallest republic, that officially holds the record for the world's first democratically elected communist government, which held office between 1945 and 1957.)
LASTING LEGACY
Whatever be the political turmoil that followed the election of that first communist government - the EMS Ministry was dismissed on 31 July 1959 by the Union government - its legacy has long lived on in the socio-economic and industrial policies that subsequent governments have followed. What is being commonly and rather glibly labelled these days as the "Kerala model" of development owes much of its hoary germination to that first State government.
If Kerala's citizens enjoy high material quality of life achievements despite slow economic growth and low incomes, the reasons are not far to seek. They lie in the policies that took roots with the first government led by EMS and later coalesced into the main elements of the "Kerala model", namely, (as articulated by academics Richard W. Franke and Barbara H. Chasin): a land reform initiative that abolished tenancy and landlord exploitation; effective public food distribution that provides subsidised rice to low-income households; protective laws for agricultural workers; pensions for retired agricultural labourers; and a high rate of government employment for members of formerly low-caste communities.
QUALITY OF LIFE
Kerala, with a population the size of Canada, today boasts human development standards that, in some cases, can match the North American region's. Consider some of the following Quality of Life Indicators for 2000-2001: adult literacy rate: 91 per cent, compared to 96 per cent for the United States; life expectancy for males: 68 (74), for females: 74 (80); infant mortality per 1,000: 12 (7); and birth rate per 1,000: 17 (16).
According to Richard Franke, "With a few important exceptions such as unemployment and suicide rates, Kerala leads the rest of India and all low-income countries of the world on just about every indicator we can come up with: wages and working conditions, nutritional status, overcoming caste discrimination, providing social security for the elderly, helping workers in the informal sector, increasing gender equality.
Kerala enacted India's most successful land reform, its best enforced worker protection acts, and the most effective school lunch programme for the poorest children."
Franke traces the main factor for Kerala's superior developmental status to the "democratic activism of the State's people, exerted over a century of protest marches, petition drives, letter-writing, mass meetings, union organising, underground activities (when the British ruled India), and election campaigns that brought poor and ordinary people and their strongest supporters into the government.
In fact, unions and peasant associations have been able to pressure even conservative ministries into making some improvements in the lives of the poor."As Kerala celebrates the golden jubilee of its first elected government, it is perhaps only appropriate that both politicians and the State's citizens rededicate themselves to furthering the path of development that began in 1957. True, times have changed and the new realities of liberalisation, globalisation and market-led growth call for the abandonment of dogma and ideological tenacity. Yet, much of the fundamental people-centred perspective that heralded the birth of a new democratic Kerala in 1957 is still paramount to the modern goals of socio-economic and industrial development with equity. The writer can be contacted at >kgkumar@gmail.com
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