Valson Thampu

With the head-on collision between the Governor and the Government –the head at loggerheads with the body- Kerala has entered an unprecedented stage of ill-health. It is an additional problem, not a solution of existing problem, when it is assumed that issues can be sorted out only publicly enacted confrontations. In this process the subtle distinction between stemming the rot and sensing opportunities in the rot becomes blurred.
The road to this has been paved and prepared by the moral bankruptcy of the political class in Kerala, as unmasked in the Sarita and Swapna affairs. In both cases, the pattern is the same: political deception laced with moral turpitude. Keralites are left wondering: how come certain women have excessive influence on centres of power? Why do they enjoy ready access to ministerial spaces that the best minds and distinguished members of the public cannot approach?
The political culture of Kerala now stands degraded and criminalised to an extent unimaginable half a century ago. The level of our political discourse is often disappointing, even alarming at times. The road to electoral victory lies via discrediting the rival coalition, whose demerit alone is my merit. This reduces voting to a ritual that is meant to lead to nothing in particular. We know, even as new ministers are sworn in and they air their pious sentiments, what not to expect.
It is against the air of disenchantment spreading through the state regarding the two coalitions that we need to see the unmatched activism of the Kerala Governor. What the Kerala BJP as an opposition party is unable to achieve is being accomplished single-handedly by the Governor. Notice the clear shift. Till recently, it was the opposition that remained busy resisting the government. But the people of Kerala paid little heed to their rhetoric of attack for the reason that they distrusted the moral indignation showcased. The Kerala wing of the BJP has failed miserably in taking advantage of political opportunities. This is because its leaders lack the moral and political credibility to convert popular disenchantment, which is mounting, to its electoral gain. It is in this respect that the Governor is a significant asset. When the Constitutional head turns Quixotic against the State government it is at once novel and credible.
Now consider the struggle for survival on the part of the project-affected fisher-folk in Trivandrum, pitted against the Almighty Adani. The issue here is not whether or not there should be a port in Vizhinjam. The issue is if the Constitutional rights of the affected people should apply or not. It is the law of the land, for example, that before a person is evicted from his residence for project-related purposes, it has to be done after alternate accommodations are readied and the people concerned duly resettled. But in our country, which law should apply depends, not infrequently, on who are affected. As of now it is a national dogma, often endorsed by judicial wisdom, that the basic rights of the project-affected people should not be allowed to hinder economic development labelled as ‘national interests’. As it happens, the scope of national interests is of wide amplitude. Those who are crying horse against the anti-national perversity of the protesting fisher-folk, would not have even an inch of their land taken over in the name of development. This is not speculation. It has been in full display in the spirited resistance put up against K-rail project. What was laudable in that context is now anti-national for reasons that are too obvious to need elaboration.
Adani already has the Trivandrum airport in his deep pocket. Once the Vizhinjam port becomes operational, his stranglehold on Kerala will increase several fold. Railways are a Central concern. So, mass mobility in respect of Kerala will be out of the control of the state. The Farm Laws were designed to facilitate Adani gaining control over food supply in the country. Communication is an Ambani prerogative. Corporates’ control of the mass media is now virtually complete. The tentacles of corporate control, perceived as the neural metastasis of national interests, now covers the whole of India.
So, the outcome of the fishermen’s struggle is wholly predictable. It will be crushed. Neither the court, nor the media, nor the State government, nor the people of Kerala will stand with the wretched of the earth to any effective measure. To alienate them from public sympathy altogether the issue is being communalised as Christians vs. Muslims by those who had been already active in this respect. If many birds can be killed with one stone, why not?
Hannah Arendt incurred the wrath of the Jews –herself a Jew- by pointing out, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, that the Jews contributed to the advent of the Holocaust. To her, their near-total racial extinction resulted, in part, from their moral and spiritual decay. Truth-telling has never been a profitable business. She was accused of re-victimising the victims. Human beings ill-endure truth. The strange thing is this. Though we have no value for truth we lament, at the same time, that we are the victims of post-truth politics.
Kerala stands in urgent need of spiritual-ethical-cultural regeneration. Freedom of choice, a foundational democratic good, becomes a snare when citizens become self-centered and morally calloused. Our basic problem is not political. Political decay is a symptom. Our malady is ethical and spiritual. We are less than what we need to be. As Aristotle argued, how can you thrust freedom on those who do not merit it? Some people, he said, are fit only for slavery. I don’t endorse the class-bias in Aristotle’s view; but I do believe that meriting freedom through the acceptance of its mature responsibilities is an irreducible democratic duty. It is true, after all, that a people will get the leaders they deserve. Remove the ethical warp and woof of democracy, nothing will save it from eventuating into elected autocracy.
I don’t think this reality will be contested as of now. But, the all-important question is: who will bell the cat? After a lifetime of reflections on this issue, I am settled in my conviction that human regeneration, if it is to be possible at all, must begin in the sphere of religion. It is via a people’s religious formation that they become oriented either to democracy or to dictatorship. Those who mistake their bondage as freedom, are unfit for democracy. Individual freedom is most suspect in the religious domain, where habitual conformity is the norm. You can’t have religious formation accomplished in the mould of authoritarianism and assume yourself to be ready for egalitarianism. But, do we believe that religion can be democratised? Good God, no! But there was one man who thought otherwise.
He went by the name of Jesus.