Challenges to Kerala’s Democracy: A Conversation with TM Thomas Isaac (Part I)
V Santhakumar speaks with TM Thomas Isaac
V Santhakumar (VS): It may not be entirely incorrect to say that Kerala is the most democratised state in India. Whether it is in terms of mobilisation of the poor or the working class or in terms of the competition in democracy, not only at the state level but also at the local level. So, some of my questions will be related to the advantages and challenges of this democracy in the state over a period of time. I know that you have written a lot about the mobilisation of the poor and the working class. What is your take on the democracy in Kerala?
Thomas Isaac (TI): Democracy, per se, is under threat not just in Kerala but in the other states too. And, I think, it is the union government that is responsible for this. There is a need to pay attention to this danger. For the first time, we have a political party in power that does not accept the diversity of India – diversity in terms of religions or regional aspirations. So, I think Kerala’s democracy has been contextualised in this specific national situation. And Kerala’s significance arises from the fact that this is one state in which this ideology [that perpetuates religious and regional divides] has failed to take root, where secular traditions are upheld uncompromisingly.
So, the starting point of my analysis is this ‘national situation’, which will lead us to Kerala’s vision and conditions and the need for preserving the larger democracy in India. My second point is that Kerala’s great advantage is that there is a vibrant local government; the state government has to share the power with the local governance of different political parties. You will find that even today 45 percent of the local governments are controlled by the opposition. This adds strength to democracy within Kerala. Thirdly, this democratisation at the local level allows not just political parties but also other interested individuals and formations to act in a democratic space. This is something that is not there in any other state. So, I am very positive about the survival of democracy in Kerala.
VS: I understand the external threat and maybe the national situation, however, do you feel that the BJP is going to create an internal challenge for the state’s democracy?
TI: The national situation has changed so much. The kind of approaches, which in Kerala, would have not at all been controversial earlier, like the rationalist positions in political affairs of the state, a former chief minister stating that if Sabarimala temples were burnt down there would be so much less superstition, or someone else saying that the Vedas should be burnt (I don’t agree with these) – these statements, at that time, did not create any problem but can you make such a statement in Kerala now? The change in the overall situation also affects Kerala; we need to be vigilant of the challenges that may follow.
VS: I think I am getting into a little more specific point. We have talked about human development achievements and the role of caste reform and class movements that contributed to human development achievements. But can we also say that the intensification of competitive democracy also facilitated the process? I am implying, for example, that even the Congress-led governments are somewhat compelled to follow similar social sector policies, so can you say that the competition also contributed to human development?
TI: Kerala’s specific characteristics have been that there is a left ideological hegemony in society (even if the leftists are not in the government) so much so that everybody will have to take cognisance of the fact that there is a certain egalitarian approach. So, it has to be recognised by everybody that Kerala politics has also evolved. The fact that there is competition, makes different forces stay vigilant, which, for sure, has been a positive impact. But there have also been negative impacts because competition is also influenced by various caste, religious, and parochial considerations which may work against realising the potential of development.
Let’s take the case of the 1957-59 government – today if we debate the issues that were the causes of the agitation, I do not think there would be any difference in the agitation. Or the land reforms implemented, if we had implemented these at that time, it would have been so much better for Kerala. Also, regarding the decentralisation of schools – now everybody has agreed on that. Let us take the education policy of that government. The control of management could be controversial, but it is not just controlling management, it is providing compulsory education, free textbooks and food for children who are studying in all schools. So, the dismissal of the government, one may say, is competitive politics, but, in a very undemocratic manner. The last government left in 2001; if five more years could have been given to them for the continuance of the people’s plan campaign, the scenario would have changed tremendously. Because we totally underestimated the time and the local transformation at scale. The new government came and though they could not roll back what has been achieved in terms of the basic structure and evolution, in many other things that were attempted, like transparency, deliberative participation and beneficiary committees, there was a regression.
So, I would say, competitive democracy has certain positive aspects, like keeping us vigilant. Unquestioned control lowers the guard. But at the same time, the result is not perfect competition. The result of 1957 is due to the ganging up of castes and everything together. So, the competition is not perfect in the sense of the economic term ‘perfect competition’. Though I would accept the importance of competitive politics and of having alternatives, the competition should be fair and free not through manipulative ways as has happened at times in Kerala. This, I think, is very important.
VS: But now, as a social scientist, what is your observation or what do you think are the major reasons for this change in government every five years? Is there some kind of class issue at play?
TI: To me, it is the result of the fact that there have been serious impediments to the advancement of the left. Left positions are based on a certain perspective on class and programmes. These are mainly: one, that the left has not been able to find an answer to the agrarian question post the land reform. We have a peculiar situation in Kerala where landowners do not work on the land because they are employed elsewhere. And they are not landlords because they own very small landholdings. But we have, therefore, agricultural labourers to do this work and their wages have been increasing and rightfully so because prices are increasing. This has resulted in the absence of a commensurate increase in productivity which led to many changes, such as political deterioration, erosion of the traditional land and water management institutions and withdrawal from labour-intensive crops. At the same time, the landlords continue to keep the possession of land because land prices are rising. As a result, jobs and employment have been declining. So, the conflict between the smallholders and agriculture labours intensified. Now, in the normal left framework of thinking, there should be no conflict between the smallholders and agriculture labourers but that is not the reality in Kerala and this can be bridged only by evolving new agrarian institutions which bring them together, increase the productivity and share the higher productivity between smallholders and labourers. This complexity of the situation was fully understood but reforming the agrarian institutions has been very difficult. And so, if you mobilise agricultural labourers, you lose the support of the landlords. If you give concessions to them, you will lose the support of workers. This is one major issue.
Secondly, the left influence among the Muslim and Christian minority communities has been much below –28-29 percent – the overall share of support. This is because of the kind of social psychology that was created as a result of the anti-communist struggle of 1959. A mental block has led to the limited new recruitment from the minority communities, which was not the case in the Kerala of yore. A lot of the communist Keralites were Christians and Muslims and the Communist Party had a close relationship with the people of Malabar. So, they had this challenge to overcome. And, then there is the question of the emergence of the middle class. The Left movement has always been based on the lower classes in Kerala. The number of agricultural labourers, and traditional workers have been shrinking in absolute numbers. And the middle class have been rising. So, these are the problems that prevented the Left from acquiring a stable majority within Kerala. The difference between the Left and the Right has been very narrow – two- or three-person points. I have presented this data since 1981 in my forthcoming book. People’s demands have been very high so, there will always be anti-incumbency. And if you have some manipulative strategies involving caste etc., there can be a turnaround. This has been the background of the competition, which, in certain specific cases, has been very detrimental to the progress of Kerala.
VS: The actual change in government need not be the only indicator of the competition. Even if there is a fear of loss, that itself can serve as a good accountability mechanism.
Let me focus a little bit on the Congress – the Kerala Congress, and also the Muslim League or the parties in the Congress-led front. There is an elite capture of these parties, everybody will agree, and over a period of time, certain other vested interests also started controlling these parties. It could be the bishops or other religious heads or caste leaders etc. I would say that there were tendencies to misuse the system for their narrow interests but that did not create that much social damage, primarily, because of the pressure from the opposition or the media. Let me specifically mention a case that actually got me thinking for a long time, the Abhaya case. You can see that there is quite a lot of manipulation by the system to delay justice. I would think the leaders of the church and the Congress facilitated that. My point is that the continuation of a Congress-led government can have a lot of detrimental effects. If they feel that the people are not vigilant, if the opposition is not strong or the media is not raising issues, there is a possibility that certain kinds of socially harmful effects can take place and can persist. So, for the time being, if I am not seeing you as a representative of the Left, will you agree with me that a chance for the Congress-led government to continue in power can be harmful?
TI: See it happened between 1960-81. So, it has been there and since then, this change of government began.
VS: Let me correct myself – do you see a strong opposition playing a role in correcting the elite control of the Congress and other parties?
TI: In a democracy, there will be and there should be alternatives before the people. But I don’t agree with the fact that competitive politics demands that the ruling party keeps on changing every five years. It has proven to be detrimental to people’s interests. If the party in power is able to perform well based on the expectations of the people, it should be rewarded, otherwise, there is no incentive for it to function. Their thinking would be `any way we are going to lose this time, therefore, why should we perform’? So, I agree with you that in a democracy, there must be alternatives before the people and functional opportunities. In India, given the federal structure, there is no question that the option would be unavailable in Kerala. And today, more than in the past, I see threats from outside to the functioning of competitive politics in Kerala.
VS: I agree with you. My point is that let us try to see this competition working at the local level. For example, a citizen must have access to a political party or a political representative, but for some reason, that relationship is not good or not working, the citizen should have another option, and the presence of that option makes democracy a lot more effective and functional. If you think about a typical village in any other state, this option may not be there even though there is competition at the state level. For example, a Dalit in a village in UP may not have access to the politicians of the Samajwadi Party. Because of that, there could be some kind of limited access to politics or options. I fully agree with you that the competition need not reflect in the change in government every five years, but even if you take a village, each citizen should have access to more than one political option if they want it.
TI: Absolutely, nobody would dispute that there should be political options in a functioning democracy. Now I am a political activist, it is not my responsibility to ensure that this fellow functions or that fellow supports. But one should not create structures which prevent them from functioning. That should be fair, and they should be given the democratic right to function. Anything working against this should be criticized and prevented. But it is up to the parties to function effectively. I, as a political worker, will try to tell my party people, ‘Look here, when a person approaches you, don’t look at what their politics is. If the person is from your area, you should help and more so if he is not from your party, because it is they who have brought you into the party. That’s how I will engage. But I would definitely critically examine if anything is structurally wrong which makes it impossible for them to function, or curbs their rights to functioning. That’s all. The rest is up to them.
VS: I am getting into a slightly difficult part of this; I am talking in general, about the internal democracy of political parties. Because, for a citizen, democracy functions in two ways. One is the competition during elections but there will also be a kind of competition or a kind of democracy within political parties. For example, we know that in the United States, the parties select leaders based on internal democracy. So, when I am looking at it from the internal democracy point of view, the Congress Party does not have an internal democratic structure. But it has a certain kind of loose structure as a whole. That means a loose structure is creating certain kinds of personal interests and aspirations to be in public life. How do you look at the democracy playing out in the Congress party?
TI: See, there are certain rules of the ‘game of democracy’. There is a way of testing the majority on the basis of which the power shifts. The same should apply to the internal activities of democratic parties. The Congress has not had an election in years. It became customary to have nominated leadership. There is no internal democratic process at all. You can claim that the structure is loose, therefore, also internal group political manipulation takes place and that is competition. But this is not democratic functioning. A party, like the Communist Party of India (CPI), has an organisational structure that is very different from the Congress, and it will continue to be so. I don’t expect this democratic system to be always in place. We have come through eras where we have had to adapt to situations on the ground. Therefore, we have an organisational structure that can be utilised to meet the challenges when they arise. There is a discipline that we accept. We didn’t ask anybody to; we are not trying to impose that organisational discipline on democratic politics. The proof is that though we follow democratic centralism, we have the most vociferous activists for bringing democratic decentralisation into governance. So, this is an organisational discipline of party members, which is here in every district. But we are not saying that the Kerala government should be organised on democratic centralisation principles. Our organisation has certain democratic principles and very systematic periodic organisational elections.
There has been factionalism in the party. But factionalism started from an ideological point. Whether you should have a decentralised government in Kerala, or it is a deviation or so forth. So, it is a fiercely contested point within the party. And then, despite the contrast and everything, there is a democratic principle of the majority position, and that majority position can be proven. Once a decision is made, then, all members have to act on the decision. So, I agree with you that our organisational principles have a centralisation, but it is still democratic in its functioning and the centralisation principles become necessary. We don’t impose this at all on general politics. We, in fact, act in the opposite manner.
When the decentralisation took place in 1996, a major issue was raised by many well-meaning left people. We are giving 40 percent transfers to local government, 50 percent of which is a UDF, why should we do that? So, there is a concept of the importance of the local democracy or sharing power with people who are outside and when elections come, you fight with each other. But at other times, you also share power and work together. Whether the roads should be built or teaching in schools should be improved – why should we have a political fight over that? This is a new political culture. This is a democratic political culture that we stand for.
VS: I think that is a very good articulation of your position but let me add a little more to that. Do you feel that the internal democratic structure of the CPM [Communist Party of India (Marxist)] is capable of controlling excesses of narrow personal interest? I am not asking this question from a global perspective.
TI: See, the democratic structure, or practices within the party, have resulted in so many changes in the leadership and has been so furiously contested but definitely, there will be a majority opinion and democracy gives it the right to choose. So, I don’t find any reason but there will be individual lapses, excesses, undemocratic behaviour and so on, which is not specific to any one organisation; it is there in every political party. I would say this is much less in the Communist Party. Can anybody change the mechanism in the Congress leadership? Is there any democratic process by which this can be settled in the Congress? No, there is nothing.
Travancore Mathew Thomas Isaac is an Indian politician and economist, who served as Kerala’s Minister for Finance and Coir and a central committee member of the Communist Party of India. He represented the Alappuzha constituency in the Kerala Legislative Assembly.
V Santhakumar is Professor, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru.
Featured photo by Nature Photographer on Unsplash
