KERALA – what have I learned from her?

Kerala is a lesson to all of us, should be the lesson! First to Keralites who escape Kerala and come back with a foreign capital to build tourists resorts, and all of those who cannot stand relative equality; to Kerala’s plantation owners who have cash-crops and only cash-crops on their plantations, who do not feed their local community, who use the relics of casts and feudal and/or colonial system to exploit their workers just as some owners of resorts. The lesson to Keralites who would like to see religious tensions, because they think that their Hindu, Muslim, Christian, or Another rite is the proper one; to those who disagree with gender equality – Kerala is a ‘homework’; to some who want to have there the second Babri Mosque (demolished by Hindu in the 1992, after 700 years of its history), yet I hope that Kerala will win over radicalism and discrimination.

Secondly, Kerala is the lesson to the Indian government in New Delhi – as explains Dr. Usha Ramanathan, an independent law researcher and activist, in her talks, which I had chance to attend in India; as well as Arundhati Roy describes in her book Field notes on Democracy – India is being rotten by nationalism, religious intolerance, women discrimination, thoughtless privatization of the public goods and commons, structural adjustment programs that in many ways decrease social development, ‘wild’ capitalism, or even “state terrorism” – all of these not well-represented in Kerala can be healed by applications of Kerala Model to the Indian ‘Model’. Yet politicians and the new generation of people who became enriched on neoliberal ideology do not want to see Kerala in their ‘backyard’. It is easier to them to not see working policies of empowerment of the workers and the poorest; they do not know that change brought by current modes of development affects only small number of people immensely, and gives the leftovers to the rest.

Lastly, Kerala should be the lesson to all of us. It teaches, as Bhutan (that refused to measure the Gross Domestic Product - instead measures Gross National Happiness), that real achievements can come not always from the economical growth. The civil society, awareness, and ability to take own fate into own hands are what we need the most – those after all are the symptoms of alive democracy. If we believe that by giving our future and our lives in someone else’s hands either if those are hands of insurance companies, politicians, or economists… we are mistaken. After studying in the United States where so much is private and so little is public – I learned that the biggest freedom is in public education and in public health care, just as it is in Kerala, or in some European countries. We are told by neoliberal capitalism and social adjustment programs that those are ‘unnecessary’ spending in the national budget, that they ‘limit’ our choices and freedom – Kerala shows that freedom means that health care and schooling are public goods, not the privileges. That the biggest freedom is not living in a beautiful villa with a swimming pool, and a limousine in a garage – but in living with ability to comprehend lack of freedom that those give to us. Lukasz W. Niparko