Kerala's Communists Balk at U.S. Stores -- and U.S. Jobs [image: backpack.jpg] A highway or a river? On the road in Kerala, India. It's raining so hard the highway looks like a river and the windshield wipers can't move fast enough to clear the glass. But Reji Shokla, my fearless driver, races on past a woman swimming to her house, a grove of battered coconut trees, a Western Union billboard and a poster of Che Guevarra. Was that a cow with blue horns mooing at me? Welcome to Kerala.
At the southernmost tip of India, this diverse state is grappling with change -- and resisting, as well as it can. Citizens have mounted campaigns against liberalization, globalization and Westernization, while benefiting from them as well. I've talked to a lot of different people over the past few days, and what I hear is: change brings good and bad; but when bad comes, America is most often the face of it. First the good: Kerala has the highest literacy rate (for men and women), life expectancy and standard of living in India. It has a religiously mixed population of roughly 55% Hindu, 25% Muslim and 20% Christian, and is relatively peaceful (though there is evidence of mounting extremism in the north). The economy is driven largely by remittances from overseas, which account for about one fifth of the state's income. Kerala educates workers who go abroad as nurses and technicians and send cash home. Now the bad: Kerala has relatively high unemployment (20%), domestic abuse, alcoholism, and suicide. Tourism creates a somewhat unstable economy that, for example, was badly shaken by September 11, 2001 and by the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. Farmers are losing their livelihoods to competition. Remitted money is often spent on huge houses for lucky individuals with relatives abroad rather than on infrastructure development for the community. Mohammad Sajid sees it as his "duty to resist neo-imperialism" and American aggression. He is the leader of Solidarity, the youth wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, India's offshoot of the religious and political organization started in Pakistan. His current fight is against a phenomenon sweeping India today: the retail boom. Mohammad has spent the past year organizing students to protest the arrival of retail stores in Kerala. He says they'll bankrupt local businesses and exacerbate consumerist culture. "I'm going to stop American cultural imperialism." Though this retail boom is largely driven by big Indian businesses like Reliance, an American company is the focus of protests: Wal-Mart, which is teaming up with Bharti, a leading telecom service provider. Mohammad gives me an extensive litany on Wal-Mart's abuses. Before this latest effort, Mohammad was involved in protests against a Coca-Cola plant which depleted a village's water supply and polluted what was left. I plan to visit the site in a few days. In both cases, American corporate interests were seen as diametrically opposed -- or at least indifferent -- to the goals of average citizens. Mohammad voted for the Communists, not the Muslim League, because he believes the former is doing a better job resisting Western encroachment (more on the Muslim-Communist alliance in forthcoming posts). Reji Shokla, who is driving me, tells a different story: "there are no jobs here." Reji is 29, short, with a mustache and a big smile. He has an engineering degree and a girlfriend who's training to be a nurse. But he can only find work as a driver, and she's worried too. They're desperate to go to the Persian Gulf. He blames the Communist Party of India Marxist (CPIM), which is in control of the state government now, for driving away foreign businesses, and supports the Indian National Congress party instead. I asked M.A. Baby, the Communist Minister of Education, if America really affects Kerala and what his party should do about it. "Resist neo-imperialism," he said quickly. But longtime Kerala journalist M.G. Radhakrishnan helped me look beneath the rhetoric: "There is a clash between old world ideology and slogans and new world needs [within the CPIM.]" Reformist communists worry about being labeled "Gorbachevians" if they appear too pro-West or pro-liberalization by their central party. So, Radhakrishnan tells me, "they pay lip service to old ideologies but slip in reforms through the backdoor to create jobs that keep them in power." Reji hasn't seen the jobs. Mohammad doesn't think foreign jobs would be anything other than exploitative. But, oddly enough, both seem content to educate themselves and then travel abroad to the Gulf, Europe or America to earn a living and send money home to Kerala -- until sustainable, indigenous development occurs. http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/america/2007/07/bush_aids_communists.html -- Deepak P http://deepakp7.googlepages.com/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ greenyouth mailinglist is the activist support mailinglist for kerala To post to this group, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
