[What remains today are five nominally communist nations. In Cuba, the revolution survives mostly as a decrepit museum piece. The communist parties of China, Vietnam and Laos preside over largely autocratic forms of runaway capitalism. In North Korea, communism has become a nuclear-armed cult of personality and police state.]
By
Greg Jaffe and Vidhi Doshi
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Lenin's image is
reflected in a mirror in Pinarayi.
(Vivek Singh/For The
Washington Post)
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ALAPPUZHA,
India — On a recent morning
in southern India, one of the world’s last true-believing communists rose to
speak in a place where communists can still whip up the masses and win
elections.
Thomas Isaac, the finance minister for
the state of Kerala, gazed out at a crowd of hundreds who had gathered to honor
the founding father of Kerala’s Communist Party, a man killed by a snakebite
while organizing farmworkers whose dying words were reputed to have been:
“Comrades, forward!”
A row of hammer and sickle flags
fluttered in the wind. People raised clenched fists in a “red salute” and
chanted “Long live the revolution!”
“We are trying to build our dream state
in this fascist India!” Isaac began, and in so many ways it was still true.
A century after Bolsheviks swarmed the
Winter Palace in Petrograd, Russia (now St. Petersburg), the Indian state of
Kerala, home to 35 million people, remains one of the few places on earth where
a communist can still dream.
The Bolsheviks, inspired by Karl Marx’s
“Communist Manifesto,” had set out to build a new kind of society, a workers’
paradise in which property and wealth would be owned in common. That revolution
began in the fall of 1917 and gave rise to the Soviet Union and a movement that
would sweep across one-third of the world, inspiring new followers, erasing
borders and filling gulags. Eventually, it would be undone by stagnant
economies, pressure from the West and the alienation of its own people.
What remains today are five nominally
communist nations. In Cuba, the revolution survives mostly as a decrepit museum
piece. The communist parties of China, Vietnam and Laos preside over largely
autocratic forms of runaway capitalism. In North Korea, communism has become a
nuclear-armed cult of personality and police state.
But in Kerala — far from the
high-stakes maneuvers of the Cold War and nearly 2,000 miles from the Indian
capital of New Delhi — history has taken the most unexpected of detours.
Instead of ossifying into an autocratic
force, Kerala’s communists embraced electoral politics and since 1957 have been
routinely voted into power. Instead of being associated with repression or
failure, the party of Marx is widely associated with huge investments in
education that have produced a 95 percent literacy rate, the highest in India,
and a health-care system where citizens earning only a few dollars a day still
qualify for free heart surgery.
This modern incarnation of communism
also has produced one of the stranger paradoxes of the global economy: millions
of healthy, educated workers setting off to the supercharged, capitalist
economies of the Persian Gulf dreaming of riches and increasingly finding them.
And that has raised an existential
question for Isaac and Kerala’s other 21st-century communists: Can they survive
their own success?
India’s integration
The story of communism in
Kerala did not begin with a revolution, the storming of the capital, or even
Marx. Instead, its beginnings in 1939 were far more idiosyncratic, rooted in
resistance to British rule, a commitment to land reform and opposition to
India’s caste system.
It was also intimately
tied to a traveling musical, “You Made Me a Communist,” about peasants who
banded together to fight an evil feudal landlord. The play premiered in 1952,
drew big crowds and helped the party win its first election five years later.
Another decade passed before the “Communist Manifesto,” Marx’s account of the
contradictions of capitalism, was even translated into Malayalam, the local
language.
And while Kerala’s
communists borrowed the symbols of the Soviet Union — they read Soviet Land
magazine, followed the march of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and sent rice to the
Cubans — they also embraced their own local heroes and followed their own
distinct path.
Unlike communists in
China, Latin America or Eastern Europe, party leaders in Kerala never seized
factories — the “means of production” in the words of Marx — or banned private
property. Instead, they competed in elections with the center-left Indian
National Congress party, winning some years and losing others.
Communism became for many
a piece of their identity. In the 1970s and 1980s it wasn’t uncommon for
parents to name their children “Lenin,” “Stalin” or, in the case of one girl,
“Soviet Breeze.” Pictures of early Soviet leaders like Vladimir Lenin and
Joseph Stalin were hung on the walls in party offices alongside Indian heroes
such as the party’s founder, Krishna Pillai.
In the Soviet Union, the
Communist Party had been something remote — “a mysterious and implacable
external power,” as one scholar put it. In Kerala, the communist party is made
up of people like Isaac, the finance minister, whose iPhone was now ringing.
“Yes, comrade,” he
answered.
‘A better life for
people’
He had finished his
speech honoring the party’s founder and was now in his government van heading
off on yet another 14-hour day in the life of a local politician tending his
base. His driver pumped the horn in a nonstop staccato to clear a narrow path
through streets clogged with smoke-belching motorbikes, dented cars and
puttering rickshaws.
Isaac often describes his
decision to join the party in the early 1970s as an act of rebellion. His
parents were devout Christians who owned a modest textile factory, and before
joining the party, Isaac had been a seminary student. Among his first acts as a
communist was to organize a strike at his father’s mill.
“If you don’t negotiate with these workers I
will be with them on the picket line,” he recalled telling his father.
He is 64 now, and still very much an idealist.
He owns no land, having given away a small parcel of property that he inherited
from his parents. His two daughters, who moved to the United States 20 years
ago, after Isaac and his wife divorced, worry sometimes about their father’s
lack of savings. He had been unable to contribute to either of his daughters’
college educations and visits to see them in the United States have been rare.
Only in the last few years has Isaac allowed himself a handful of luxuries,
like a personal car, the iPhone and an iPad that he uses to check the day’s
cricket highlights and update his Facebook page.
His first stop was a ribbon-cutting at a
family-owned driving school. Then he made a two-hour drive to the village of
Kollam, where a party leader had asked him to stop by his son’s wedding.
Isaac, who became an atheist when he joined the
party, posed with the newlyweds under a statue of a pale, gaunt Christ on the
cross, because in Kerala the communists had never sought to stamp out religion.
Soon he was back in the van rushing down a narrow, potholed road past makeshift
tea stands, coconut sellers and clusters of simple, cement homes, each one with
electricity and indoor toilets. Kerala is one of the few states in India where
this is true.
“This is what it means to make a better life
for people,” Isaac said, pulling on a neck pillow for a quick nap.
As he approached his home town of Alappuzha the
road widened and Isaac’s minivan sped past a mural of Che Guevara, the ageless
hero of the Cuban revolution, and a billboard of Colonel Sanders, the ageless
hawker of capitalist fried chicken.
Near the city’s edge, Isaac’s van stopped at a
state-supported cooperative that manufactures coir, a bristly fabric used to
make welcome mats sold in hardware stores across the United States. There he
greeted the 100 or so older women who had gathered in a mosquito-infested palm
grove and assured them that they would not lose their jobs as the industry
mechanized.
“Make whatever quantity of coir you want and
the government will buy it,” he said as the women in orange, green and gold
saris applauded. Then, he promised to double their salaries to about 300 rupees
or $5 a day.
Isaac estimated that the government would have
to subsidize the workers’ salaries for about 10 years, until they retired and
their jobs probably disappeared.
He knew such subsidies were only possible
because of the decidedly un-communist lives that the younger generations are
pursuing. Increasingly these young workers are fleeing Kerala’s low-wage
economy for the booming states of the Persian Gulf, leaving Isaac to oversee an
economy unlike anything Marx ever imagined — one fueled by global demand for
Kerala’s healthy, educated workforce. Even with the Gulf money, Isaac is still
running the largest deficit of any Indian state.
As finance minister, Isaac dreams of building
new highways, bridges and industrial parks that might make it easier to attract
high-paying jobs to Kerala — “the best physical and social infrastructure in
all of India!” he often said.
But, for now, his government has more pressing
priorities: expanding Kerala’s four international airports, each of which
offers nonstop flights to the Gulf, and adding a fifth.
Prosperity
from the Gulf
In the 1980s and 1990s Kerala’s migrant workers
found work building highways and skyscrapers in the Gulf. These days their
better-educated successors fill jobs overseas as accountants, nurses, lawyers,
doctors and mid-level civil servants. More than one-third of Kerala’s gross
domestic product last year came from remittances.
These migrants are remaking Kerala’s culture.
One of the most popular programs on local television is “World of Expats,” a
reality show that helps distraught family members find relatives who have gone
missing in the Gulf.
They are also remaking the state’s humble
landscape. Kerala is a place where big, gated homes — “Gulf houses” in the
local lingo — sit next to simple houses. Many of the big homes also sit empty
for much of the year, while their owners are abroad working. One government
study from 2011 estimated that there were nearly 1 million empty or partially
occupied homes. Meanwhile, Isaac worries about a shortage of housing for the
poor.
Less than one mile from the spot in the village
of Pinarayi where the party held its first clandestine meeting, Prasanth
Cherambeth, 40, and his wife, Saniga, 36, had just arrived from Abu Dhabi,
United Arab Emirates, and were celebrating the opening of their six-bedroom
home.
Hours earlier, dozens of workers had been
laying sod and tile by flashlight in a race to complete it. Now friends, family
and a few curious villagers were walking up a red-carpeted driveway and into
the home draped in garlands of marigolds. They took in the indoor fountain
under the stairs, the marble floors, the glass-tiled swimming pool and the
kitchen full of stainless steel appliances that Cherambeth’s aunt was saying
were “all from Dubai.” On the second floor, porch chandeliers flashed red and
blue.
At the center of the party, propped on a chair
and draped in white flowers, was a picture of a communist: Cherambeth’s
recently deceased father, who had been a party stalwart and longtime employee
of the state bus company.
In a few weeks Cherambeth and his wife would
drain the pool, lock up their new home and return with their three young
children to Abu Dhabi, where they had spent much of the last 15 years. Someday,
when their work visas expire, they plan to return to Kerala permanently. For
now, Cherambeth, a mid-level administrator at a nuclear power company, was
going to enjoy his new home.
“It’s a dream,” he said as guests swirled
around him.
The future for Indian communism
Despite all the changes, the party’s loyalists
kept the faith. At a recent party-sponsored class for the public in the city of
Kannur, a professor named K.N. Harilal was insisting that true communism would
only come with the catastrophic collapse of the global economy.
“The deterioration of capitalism is an
inevitability and it’s happening fast,” he said. “Humans cannot be so
narrow-minded and profit-oriented forever.”
Ceiling fans circulated humid air and a few
dozen mostly middle-aged students scribbled notes in party-supplied workbooks.
“How will we know when the permanent crash
finally comes?” a student asked as the class stretched into its fifth hour.
“What will the signs be?”
“Nobody can predict it,” Harilal replied.
A big reason for the Communist Party’s survival
in Kerala has been its ability to adapt to the demands of electoral politics
and accommodate different and even contradictory views. As a result the very
meaning of communism in Kerala has become a subject of debate.
For many, especially the young, communism today
is more about the ideal of equal opportunity than the ideology of Marx or
Lenin. “We believe all people are the same class and should have the same
chance in life,” said Shigin Pradeesh, 20, a university student and son of a
low-wage coconut picker, who was waiting by the front desk of the party
headquarters in the village of Pinarayi.
“I am not a selfish person,” he said. “That’s
why I am a communist.”
In Kerala the communist idea often survives in
the most parochial of ways. When the party decided to open a worker-owned
amusement park cooperative, some party officials complained that the proposed
name — “Malabar Pleasures” — was misguided. Pleasure, after all, is a
“bourgeois” concept. The name was changed to “Incredible Park.”
Ultimately, communism in Kerala has remained
Indian. At a time of rising Hindu nationalism, the party’s classes for young
children — a communist version of Sunday school — emphasize a secular Indian
identity.
“We are not Christians or Muslims or Hindus,”
sang a group of barefoot boys and girls in Kerala’s capital of
Thiruvananthapuram, near the southern tip of India. “Hunger is the same for us
all; pain is the same for us all. Our blood has the same color; our tears the
same taste.”
Nearly 70 years after the traveling play, “You
Made Me a Communist,” introduced communism to Kerala, a popular movie offered a
new account of the movement.
Director Amal Neerad’s “Comrade in America”
opened at theaters in Kerala, Abu Dhabi and Dubai on May 5, which also happened
to be Marx’s birthday. In the film, Neerad’s communist hero fights for the poor
and falls in love with an American woman visiting family in Kerala. When she
returns to the United States, he risks his life sneaking across the
U.S.-Mexican border to win her back.
The film gently pokes fun at self-important
communists and their long-winded speeches about revolution. In one of its many
whimsical moments, the lovesick hero drinks too much and hallucinates a
conversation with Che who tells him that the “best lovers among us are
communist comrades. Those who don’t have anything to hide can create revolutions
and love deeply.”
In the end, the hero’s love chooses capitalist
America over him. One film critic described Neerad’s lead comrade as a “losing
man.” To Neerad, a former party activist, this was too bleak. “He’s a losing
believer,” the filmmaker said.
This was perhaps one more way to think of
communism in Kerala at a time of growing inequality and religious division in
India and around the world.
“It’s a failed dream,” Neerad said. “But it’s
our only hope.”
Isaac had been reluctant to see a movie that
makes fun of his party, but his daughter, who was visiting from New York,
pressed him to go. “She found it to be a hilarious take on us,” he said.
Isaac’s views were more complicated. “We should
be able to joke about ourselves,” he said.
He paused and thought some more. The aging
communist had never been prouder of the party’s achievements or more worried
about its future. One hundred years after the birth of the first communist
state, the movie’s heroes — its “losing believers” — seemed “very familiar,”
Isaac said. “They feel true.”
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