Laughing Gas

Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram turns philanthropic in his fifth budget. Well, general election is round the corner.

US Presidential Election Hot News in Kerala

The Mahatma has been an inspiration, says Obama: A cartoon in Thejas daily, Kozhikode.


SUPER TUESDAY was big news in newspapers across the world. The ongoing process of selection of the presidential candidate especially in the Democratic Party where a white woman and a black man are fighting it out for the first time in US history, has evoked considerable excitement all over the world.

But the Malayalam media seems to have gone many steps forward, as Super Tuesday and the subsequent victories for Barak Obama has been major news items in the regional papers for the past many weeks. The US contest is now keenly watched by the Malayalam media, especially the newspapers from the northern belt that serve a predominantly Muslim population.

In fact, compared to other south Indian regional language newspapers, Malayalam edia had played up the US elections to such an extent that it needs a serious study of the politics and sociology of the region to understand the phenomenon of the keen interest in an election taking place so far away from their homes. On Super Tuesday, among the dozen Malayalam newspapers that I read, I found almost half of them prominently displaying the news on front pages. The coverage, in comparison to Tamil and Kannada newspapers, was much more elaborate and extravagant, as I found in a quick survey.

The phenomenon of such a huge public interest in the US elections, at such an early stage in the long drawn process when even the candidates are yet to be decided, needs a thorough understanding about the social and political situation in a State that is keenly tuned to international developments. The Kerala media seemed to follow up the Hillary Clinton-Barak Obama battle as if they were candidates in a local election.

There are many aspects to this unusual interest in the global affairs. First, Kerala has always been a place that was more international in its outlook and contacts. Its Communist traditions partly account for it, as in the past every development in Soviet Union and China had set off serious debates within the State. Its literature is replete with references to these countries and their people and there has always been an interest in the global confrontation between the capitalist west and the socialist east. The Communist parties had, in their conferences and meetings in which large number of ordinary masses attended, made regular references to the international developments.

A second factor is that Malayalees have, for generations, strayed out of their narrow strip of land on the banks of the Arabian Sea for a livelihood, and they have such a massive diaspora in every part of the planet. The migration has been a regular phenomenon, dating back to pre-Independence days, and a 2007 December study conducted by the Thiruvananthapuram-based Centre for Development Studies (CDS) has found that the migration levels of Kerala had remained almost constant at around 25 percent in the past five years. This is one of the highest migration levels among all states in India. The survey also found that almost 26 percent of the households in the State have at least an NRK(non-resident Keralite) as a member, whether stationed outside or returned, while foreign remittances contributed to around 20 percent of the State’s total NSDP(net state domestic product).

Another interesting point revealed in the study is that Muslims have the highest number of NRKs, consisting of 50 percent of all NRKs from the State. In fact the largest migration levels are reported from the northern districts of Malappuram, Kannur and Kasargode, all with substantial Muslim population. The highest level of NRK concentration in the district is in Malappuram, with 71 percent of the households having an NRK member.

The NRKs are generally concentrated in the Gulf region, which has become a centre for global political confrontation between the West and the Muslim countries of the east. Perhaps, this explains the unusual interest the newspapers run by Muslim community in Kerala has been showing in the US election. In Kerala, there are as many as five major mainstream newspapers that cater to the Muslim community, a religious minority that comes to around 22 per cent of the population. As a community, Muslims in Kerala, mainly living in the northern Malabar region, are now showing a vigor unseen in the past. Just two decades ago, they had just one newspaper, Chandrika, run by the Muslim League, but recent years have seen a massive growth in the Muslim media. From the city of Kozhikode alone, five morning newspapers are coming out targeting the Muslims readers while there are around a score other publications including weeklies and magazines. Madhyamam, Chandrika, Siraj, Varthamanam and Thejas are the five major Muslim dailies and among them all but Thejas, launched only two years ago, have editions in various Gulf cities.

And reading their pages, one realizes that they are more international than any other major national newspapers which give scanty coverage to international affairs. The Bush administration’s attack against Iraq and its aftermath, Israel’s aggression against Palestine, the Iran nuclear imbroglio, etc, were followed up as eagerly as any local event by these newspapers. In fact unlike other mainstream newspapers, Thejas and Madhyamam, two leading Muslim newspapers, devote full pages for international affairs.

The fact seems to be that global events, especially attacks on the Muslim community everywhere is as avidly followed up by editors as well as their readers as any other local event. That explains the keen interest in Hillary-Obama tussle, as people here expect that an Obama victory would have a tremendous impact on the United States’ Iraq policy. There is also a hope that a saner attitude to the Muslim community would be pursued if Obama comes to power.

The same message is what one gets reading the letters to the editor columns in these newspapers. In a place where there are umpteen number of issues to write to the editor about, like the huge rise in rice price to the lack of employment to the increasing menace of mosquitoes in cities, one finds that almost half of the letters in the Muslim media are about global affairs, from the hanging of Saddam Hussein to the plight of the Palestinian children in Gaza strip.

(Courtesy:www.thehoot.org; cartoon courtesy:Sudheernath, New Delhi.)

Ayyankali & the Missing Chapters in Kerala History

Remembering the Dalit fighter on the centenary of his historic struggle for entry to Dalit children to schools in Kerala.

By N P Chekkutty

Ayyankali, the legendary Dalit fighter from Kerala, seems to be caught in a trap of history: On the one side his name is evoked by left-wing extremists who have christened themselves as the Ayayankali Pada, or the Fighters of Ayyankali, and on the other it was Sonia Gandhi who came to inaugurate the centenary celebrations of his historic struggle for the right to education to Dalit children.

Ayyankali was a fighter who took on the powerful upper caste elite as they prevented Dalit children by force from entering the school in his village. But paradoxically, the Naxalite group in Kerala who calls themselves the Ayyankali Pada stopped a European woman scholar and her Dalit associate from conducting an academic research work among the tribals in Iritty in north Kerala. The same hypocrisy can be seen in the traditional attitude of the Congress party towards the concerns of Dalits in this country.

Still, the question to ask today is why Ayyankali remains such a powerful symbol, for forces as inimical to each other as the left extremists and the Congress party? Perhaps, the great Dalit leader from Venganur in Travancore, who came to eminence in the Malayalee public sphere in the first few decades of the 20th century, represented both these trends: He was a fighter and an anarchist revolutionary at one level; and at another, a social reformer and institution builder who made use of the established pillars of society for seeking the right to education and social equality for his brethren who were the ones severely ostracized in our society for many centuries. Ayyankali was the leader of a band of Dalit youths who themselves called Ayyankali Pada and he was also the first Dalit member in the Travancore Praja Sabha, the Maharajah’s nominated Assembly.

This year marks the centenary of the year-long strike of agricultural workers that he had organized in various parts of Travancore in the early years of the last century. Of course there are differences among historians about the actual dates of the Pulaya farm-hands’ strike in the princely state, whether it took place in 1907-08 or earlier in 1904-05, the time when Travancore Dewan first gave permission for Dalits to enter public schools amidst stiff resistance.

Let the dispute among historians stay. Let us look at what happened in our history. What we confront here is a deafening silence of the mainstream historians, as precious little has been written on this critical part of our social history. It is a fact that even E M S Namboodiripad, veteran Marxist who wrote a people’s history of the land of Malayalees, had said very little about Ayyankali and his band of Dalit fighters acknowledging that he knew little about those developments.

Surprisingly, even after a century, Ayyankali remains a figure whose contributions are not properly studied or understood by the mainstream school of historians. Even the liberals in his own time, like the famous editor Swadeshabhimani Ramakrishna Pillai, who was deported from Travancore for his critical writings against the dewan, failed to appreciate his effort to get Pulaya kids into public schools. This is how Ramakrishna Pillai looked at the Pulaya demand for common education: “We don’t find any reason to support those who demand complete equality in customs and manners and on that basis seek admission to schools without taking into account the respective caste merits. To provide admission to those from castes cultivating land on a par with those castes cultivating knowledge is worse than tying a horse and a buffalo under the same yoke to make them plough…”

Ramakrishna Pillai was a man who was familiar with liberal and even Communist ideas in those days preceding the Russian Revolution. In fact he was one of the first Indian journalists to write on the life of Karl Marx, in his 1912 monograph on Marx which appeared in Malayalam. The only other article on Marx, in an Indian publication, was published in Calcutta’s Modern Review, note P C Joshi and K Damodaran, veteran Communist leaders in their book on the origins of Indian left, Marx Comes to India. But neither they nor any of the recent historians of the Indian left movement who traced the origins of working class agitation in India, give any reference to the historic agricultural workers strike that Ayyankali launched in 1907-08, almost a decade ahead of the Russian Revolution. Nor do they ever mention about those frail and weather beaten farm-hands like Thaivilakkathu Kali and Moolayil Kali, Pulaya women who were in the leadership of the SJPS who led the historic agitation to a success conclusion a century ago.

That leaves the difficult task of reconstructing Ayyankali and the Dalit struggles he led a century ago, to a new generation of historians. This is no easy task. Ayyankali and his comrades had no initiation to the world of letters and the media of their times had largely ignored them. What we have today is largely the negative references in some publications of those days and the anecdotes in oral history passed through generations.

But the main facts remain largely uncontested: The Travancore rulers had issued orders permitting Dalits and other outcasts into the schools run by Government following severe public pressure. But the upper castes were firmly opposed to this and they used violence to stop lower-caste children from entering schools. That led to violent confrontations between these two forces. Such confrontations had been reported on a number of occasions, mainly during 1904-05, 1907-08 and 1913-14, according to historians like Dr M S Jayaprakash and T H P Chentharassery, biographer of Ayyankali.

The first of these clashes took place in 1904-05 when the Government first gave permission for Dalits to enter schools. The resistance from upper castes was fierce and the Dalits fought back. Since none of the Dalit children were allowed to enter schools, Government allowed them to start their own schools called Kutippallikkootam to teach Dalit children.

It was then Ayyankali launched a school in his village, Venganur, for Pulaya children. His task was daunting. He knew no reading and writing and so had to find a teacher for the school. No teacher was available as the upper castes threatened anyone willing to take up the job. Finally, Ayyankali succeeded in persuading a Nair youth to work in his school, but as the teacher entered the school with his Dalit bodyguards, he found the place burnt down.

It was in 1907 that Ayyankali and his friends launched the Sadhu Jana Paripalana Sangham (SJPS) on the lines of the Sree Narayana Dharma ParipalanaYogam (SNDP) started by the followers of Sree Narayana Guru, among the more progressive Ezhavas of south Kerala. The SJPS primarily worked among the Pulayas and its activities spread soon in most parts of south Kerala. The SJPS demanded that the Pulayas who worked in farms be given a weekly off day and all the members were advised to meet every Sunday to discuss their common problems.

The SJPS gave Ayyankali a powerful forum to address the Dalit question in Travancore: In 1910, as Dewan P Rajagopalachari and the director of education department, an Englishman named Mitchel, issued orders permitting Dalit admission to schools, Ayyankali went to the Uruttambalam school in Balaramapuram seeking admission for Panchami, a Pulaya girl. The headmaster refused, and that set of a series of clashes between Nairs and Pulayas in various parts of Travancore. According to one set of historians, it was then Ayyankali called for the farm workers strike that lasted almost one year, forcing the land owners to sue for a negotiated settlement.

These efforts did have a positive impact on the education of Pulayas and other Dalit groups in Travancore. According to the census figures in 1875, among the 188,916 Pulayas in the state only 183 had been marked as literate. But between 1913 and 1916, there is a five-fold increase in the Pulaya enrollment to schools. According to figures published in Mitavadi, a local newspaper, the admission of Pulaya children to school was only 2.01 per cent in 1913. But it had risen to 10.91 per cent by 1916. Still they were way behind the Nairs with 99.50 per cent children going to schools, and Ezhavas with 45.43 per cent. Another interesting point this statistics brought out was the comparative fall in Muslim enrollment during this period: They were 4.85 per cent (much higher to Pulayas) in 1913 but in 1916, their enrollment of 9.55 was lower than the Pulayas’s 10.91 per cent. Still, all these efforts together put the state on the road to its record of near total literacy by the end of the 20th century.

Illustration courtesy: Raghavan Atholi, Kozhikode.
(An edited version of this article is available at www.indiatogether.org)

Laughing Gas

Laughing Gas will appear every weekend.

A River Returns to Life: The Story of Chaliyar

Walking on the banks of the river Chaliyar is a pleasant experience these days. The river that takes its life in the Western Ghats and meanders through the interior and backward villages lying between the districts of Kozhikode and Malappuram in north Kerala, is today full, its clean water a source of life for dozens of panchayats and the city of Kozhikode. On normal days one can see scores of fishermen in small canoes on the river, looking for a good catch.

As tourism industry is booming in Kerala, the banks of the river are now turning into a tourist spot in Malabar with resorts and pleasure boating yards coming up, giving a new lease of life and income to the people in these villages.

It is a wonderful transformation, because a few years ago Chaliyar was a stinking pool of dirty and blackish water highly polluted with chemical effluents and hazardous material like mercury that took the lives of hundreds of people in the villages around it. Often, large groups of fish could be seen floating upside down, as the effluents discharged into the water was practically exterminating the fish population in the river. Chaliyar turned poisonous as a highly polluting industrial unit, the Gwalior Rayons (Grasim Industries) was set up in on its banks at Mavoor, early in the sixties. When the factory started its production in 1963, there was no awareness about the harmful effects of industrial pollution. The industrialists freely polluted the environment leaving the poor people around with no ways to stop them as there was neither legislation nor any effective mechanism to stop industrial pollution.

Thus when the factory started its work, the people in villages like Mavoor, Vazhakkad, Vazhayoor and Areekkode, on both sides of the river, were at the receiving end. Those who visited Mavoor and other places in those days inhaled a highly noxious air, and the thick dark clouds hovering above the skyline was a regular feature burning one’s eyes and congesting the lungs.

Within one year of the operation of the factory, the villagers started protesting though it was yet to take an organized form. In the early sixties an action committee was formed with people like K Chathunni Master, a senior Communist leader, E K K Muhammed, a Muslim League leader, and others in it representing to the Government to take measures to control the air and water pollution in Mavoor. But instead of taking measures to control the factory’s pollution, the Government allowed the management to start a new division in 1972 that intensified pollution and the public agitation. It was in this phase that local people like K A Rahman, who later succumbed to cancer after almost three decades of relentless struggle against pollution, took over the leadership. As the agitation took a more aggressive turn, the Government started negotiations which led to a temporary settlement in 1974. As part of this agreement, it was decided to measure water and air pollution levels regularly for taking stricter action to control discharge of effluents into the river and air. As a result of this agreement, known as Ramanilayam Pact, the Kerala State Pollution Control Board was set up in 1974, one of the first such bodies to come up in the country.

But pollution did not stop and the public agitation became quite aggressive and even threatened to take a violent form. In December 1998 around 8000 villagers marched to the factory gates demanding its immediate closure. They also pulled down a bund that was built in the river at Elamarom, to enable the factory to take unpolluted water upstream for its use.

By the time, the environment movement had become strong in the country and there were stricter laws against polluters. Activists from all parts of the country like writer Arundati Roy came to Mavoor to join hands in the struggle of the local people. At the same time, the technology used in the factory had become obsolete and there was pressure from all parts on the Government and the management to take urgent steps: Either upgrade the technology that would ensure zero pollution level, or close down.

There was a hectic pace for the debates and discussions within the public at large and within the Government itself about the future of the Gwalior Rayons factory, owned by the Birlas, at Mavoor in the late nineties. All over the world a strong environmental movement had become very powerful and within the country the hapless villagers at the receiving end of pollution were being supported by powerful groups of concerned intellectuals and academics who had amassed a wealth of information and scientific data to prove the harmful effects of industrial pollution. From the seventies, the villagers and gram panchayats like Mavoor, Vazhakkad and others were raising complaints about rising incidence of ailments like lung diseases, cancer, etc, which had been abnormally high in these villages. According to the figures available with the Vazhakkad gram panchayat, which suffered the maximum pain because of the river pollution, there were 10 cases of cancer deaths in the village in 1993 which rose to 32 by 1998. Even the most important leader of the environmental movement, K A Rahman, a Vazhakkad peasant who had to sell out most of his properties for conducting court cases against the factory management and for frenetic public activities, was suffering from acute cancer to which he succumbed very soon. A survey conducted by the same panchayat in 1998 had found that during the period from 1993 to 1998, there were as many as 245 cancer patients in the village, undergoing treatment at the Kozhikode Medical College.

The going was getting tough for the management and finally in 2000 they chose to wind up shop and shift their operations elsewhere as they had set up more modern factories in places like Madhya Pradesh. Thus came to a successful end to the relentless struggles of the masses for almost four decades, who suffered immensely in those years.

Now, life is back in the river and in its environs. The fish life is once again plenty, and the traditional activities like fishing, collection of items like clams, etc, is thriving. The doctors in villages like Mavoor and Vazhakkad say that there is a drastic decline in chronic ailments that once haunted these villages.

Laughing Gas

Laughing Gas will appear every weekend.

What Keeps Me Worried These Days...

Here is a post I made to the WASHINGTON POST’S POSTGLOBAL discussion forum recently:

N P CHEKKUTTY, CALICUT, INDIA:

What kept me worried this week has been the way the Indian legal system revealed its weaknesses and elitist bias, through a series of judicial orders that went against the oppressed classes in Indian society like the dalits and the tribal population. The court says that the creamy layer, those who have a decent income in these sections, shall be denied access to the government postings through the system of reservation. But the fact is, in educational institutions and government posts, there are often less number of qualified people from these sections to fill the vacancies that belong to them. Now when those who may stand a chance to enter these offices are kept out because they are economically well off, it would mean the Indian administrative system will be filled by the upper caste sections.
Surely a recipe for disaster because already the backward classes are on the brink of revolt. They have taken up arms in many areas.

N P Chekkutty


And there were some responses like the following:

IF YOU ARE TRYING TO PAINT INDIA AS BEING A GOOD PLACE TO BE FROM:
I suggest that you turn your tone to honesty.
as right now you look more primitive than those you attempt to stain with your bile...
at least I shoot at ugliness, you're like a cholera infected child.

(www.newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal)

Interesting, isn't it?