A model with contradictions

Kerala with its ambitious many-sidedness, gives a utopian picture of what is possible in the country, with a few sobering lessons

Vikram Bedi Delhi

On my recent trip to Kerala I had chance encounters with two differently positioned resident-outsiders who took wildly divergent stands on the famous ‘Kerala Model.’ One, a Bengali construction worker, was emphatic in his praise for Malayali employers who, it seems, respect the dignity of labourers and always pay well and on time. He admired Malayali workers for their sense of self-respect, for all being educated, and for their lack of hostility towards guest workers like him. He, having previously worked in Delhi, found the Kerala government’s effective provision of public goods and services hard to square with his experiences back home. While claiming to be staunchly opposed to the CPI-M in Bengal, he ungrudgingly admitted that he admired the comparatively honest, non-violent and principled character of the same party’s Malayali avatar. He said he found Kerala peaceful, pleasant, beautiful and very lawful.

The other, a senior Tamil corporate executive was equally – no, more – clear in his denunciations of Malayalis in general and workers in particular. It appears that they are “extreme egoists” who have “false pride”, best expressed in their “hyper-consumerism”. They have been “ruined” by the communist movement and are acceptably hardworking and honest only when they are outside the communist-infected intellectual and political ecology of Kerala. The state’s world-famous social welfare achievements, rather than producing a modulation of his critique, seemed only to be fuelling his animus. It was as if India’s most civilised state had to be scorned in direct proportion to its social advancements – how dare they sacrifice the economic, political and status privileges of the rich and middle-class higher castes, he seemed to be demanding.

That the ‘Kerala Model’ can plausibly provoke such divergent evaluations is testimony to its complexity, and therefore its contradictions. Clearly, they are both right albeit unequally – our Tamil businessman is surely guilty of protesting too much. Yet, he seems to have a very valid point that deeply felt insecurities and unhappiness-es are rife in Kerala. He would seem correct, too, in his suggestion that this was most obviously revealed in Malayali ‘hyper-consumerism’, a phenomenon that is undeniably strong. But there are class biases at work here along with upper-caste Hinduist ones, biases starkly exposed by the dissenting perspective of the Bengali migrant worker.

Contrary to the myth, Kerala is not nearly economically dysfunctional – Kerala’s state GDP has grown, over the last ten years, at rates well above the national state average. Malayalis have, on average, been both eating the private investment/consumption cake and having the public goods/services one as well. The former could be much better in quantity and quality, but it is present. The ‘model’, then, said to be doomed a decade ago (because of fiscal and economic unsustainability) is, if not absolutely healthy, then at least relatively so. And the ‘model’ isn’t just about public and private economics. It is about all of the different dimensions of democratic civility – it is low on communal hate and violence, inclusive (economically and not just politically), relatively caste- and gender-just, endowed with an assertive and pluralist civil society, and, yes, prosperous but without the callousness towards the poor that is the Indian norm. Notable, too, is the relative cleanliness of political personnel and the quality of public debate. All of this while remaining recognizably Indian.

There are many, complex historical causes for this relatively healthy outcome. But, the key to the continued (and surprising) viability of the model is, surely, migration, of Hindus and Christians as much as Muslims. Not all to the gulf countries, either. The Malayali diaspora’s strong presence in all of the big Indian cities and, increasingly, in western countries tends to get ignored in the face of the phenomenon known as ‘Gulf money.’ To the outsider Malayalis appear to be on the move, en masse. It is not just that every other Malayali male seems to be either home on a holiday, planning and trying to leave, or returned from a long work-stay outside Kerala. This sense one gets of a people in perpetual motion is exaggerated when you see and travel by Kerala’s superb public transport system on its very good and dense road network—most intercity buses, despite being so frequent throughout the day and all night, are full. To-ing and fro-ing seems an essential and taken-for-granted fact of life. In this respect, Kerala is not so much a province as a giant, albeit green, continuous urban agglomeration, especially along the coast. Malayalis, perhaps, more than most of the rest of us seem to live mobile, multi-sited lives.

With such levels of spatial and therefore social/cultural mobility come little tragedies that, perhaps, add up to collective unhappiness. The tragedy of being left behind—not just the famous ‘gulf wives’ or ‘gulf parents’ but all those, like most of Kerala’s left front-supporting dalits who are relegated because they don’t have the financial means to access that high-paying, if menial, job in the Gulf. Or, the pain of being a younger or even elder brother being subsidized in his unemployment by the labours of his sibling as he waits his turn or has to stay behind to look after the parents. The deeply felt stresses of migration-induced intra-family (inter-generational, inter-sibling, and gender) politics present another example. The frustration, too, of the returning migrant worker with the capital and the will to invest in a small business who is forced, instead, to become a petty rentier because the ‘Kerala Model’ isn’t all that hospitable to the entrepreneur. Most crucially, also, the huge increase in the degree of difficulty for all Malayalis, migrant or not, of the status game, now that remittance money has led to a consumerist revolution in the authoritative status codes of self-worth and grandeur.

The life of the migrant worker in the Gulf is, from all reports, barely tolerable. But there are small benefits to migration, as well, to go along with the big ‘income-status’ one: a cosmopolitan familiarity with other types of Indians, a diffusing of any regional chauvinism or linguistic resentment of the national prominence of English and Hindi, for example. Finally, there is research to show that migration has some major empowering effects on ‘Gulf wives’, as they are forced or, rather, enabled to take on more ostensibly masculine (that is, public and financial) roles and tasks.

So yes, both the Bengali worker and the Tamil businessman are right in their own, partial ways about their host state. The ‘Kerala Model’ both enables the well-being of all citizens (if unequally) and, given the centrality of, for example, migration, produces unhappiness. Something of both these aspects of the model is reflected in the fact Kerala is second only to Punjab in per capita consumer spending and yet it remains a state where left parties and thinking enjoy widespread, if often disavowed, support and agreement.

Kerala should not be scorned for these contradictions. The greatness of the model lies precisely in its ambitious many-sidedness, its full-menu of public/collective expectations: private prosperity and effective public provisioning by the state and NGOs, status distinction and equality of dignity, the celebration of private life and avid public involvement, conspicuous religious piety and modernism, equality for women and gender conservatism, and so on. All this while retaining regional-cultural distinctiveness and authenticity. With such complexly diverse systemic goals it is no wonder that inadequacies abound and therefore discontent and dissatisfaction are so acute.

While Kerala, with its very peculiar history, cannot and should not be copied in any literal way, the visitor from BIMARU North India cannot help returning home with some weakly utopian sense of what is viably possible in other parts of the country too. But, equally, there is surely also a more sobering lesson: we may all have to do without happiness/satisfaction as a paramount evaluative criterion of public or private ‘development.’ Full-menu, real-world ‘social development’ is almost certainly contradictory to happiness.