Kerala in a league of its own

In a highly significant political development, which could alter the contours of Kerala politics, the Nair Service Society (NSS) and the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana (SNDP) Yogam have decided to bury the hatchet and up the ante against the Congress-led United Front (UDF) Government in the state.

The hardening of the NSS and SNDP stance is a direct sequel to the Oommen Chandy government’s policy of unabashed minority appeasement and total surrender to the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), the second largest constituent of the UDF, in policy matters.

The latest manifestation of their anger against the government  came in the Neyyattinkara by-election , which saw an astounding  five-fold increase in the vote share of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – from a mere 6000 odd votes in the 2011 state assembly elections to over 30,000 votes in the by-election. A clear mandate by the voters to the ruling government.

To put things in prespective a little background. Panakkad is an obscure village deep in the bowels of Malappuram, Kerala’s only Muslim-majority district. In September, Kerala state government will showcase 22 proposed projects here, totalling an investment of Rs 2,000 crores. Reason? Panakkad houses the most prominent spiritual leaders of Kerala’s Muslims and that is where the president of the Muslim league hails from.

League an ally in the ruling United Democratic Front(UDF)  who holds 20 seats in the Kerala assembly, and excercises almost total control over Kerala’s Muslims, the state’s second largest community with 25% of the population. Empowered by the community’s economic and demographic growth, the League has grown steadily in strength. Muslims are the largest beneficiaries of foreign remittances, that totalled Rs 50,000 crores in 2011 according to a study, sent by its two-million strong diaspora in the Gulf. According to the 2001 census, while Hindu and Christian populations showed a decline, by 1.48 per cent and 0.32 per cent respectively, the Muslim population went up by 1.7 per cent.

League has wrested several privileges from the present government: Five cabinet berths, free land in the Calicut University campus, special privileges for Muslim management schools, and Muslims recruited to raise awareness about little known minority scholarships in the community. Chief Minister Oommen Chandy has faced much flak from all around-including his own party-for succumbing to the League’s pressures. Keeping their differences apart, the Nair Service Society (NSS) which represents Kerala’s 14 per cent upper caste Nairs, and Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam (SNDP), which represents the state’s largest Hindu block of 24 per cent of Other Backward Caste (OBC) Ezhavas, have decided to jointly fight this ‘appeasement’.

While NSS general secretary G. Sukumaran Nair and SNDP general secretary Vellappalli Natesan are up in arms against the government, many groups within Kerala’s prosperous Christian community are also peeved at what they say is a Muslim monopoly of privileges meant for both minorities.

There are critics in the league within Muslims too. New Muslim organisations such as Popular Front of India (PFI) and Jamaat-e-Eslami which the League calls “extremists”  are weaning young men from them and eroding their claim as the sole representative of Muslims.

But why is there a new consolidation on caste and religious lines? Many blame it on “appeasement” by political parties. Both Congress and Left now choose candidates by caste and religion. Many cites the growth of a “parasitic” middleclass, that shows all signs of modernity but has a feudal mindset.

Interestingly NSS and SNDP have always had differences about reservation. Both the organizations have vowed that they will not ally with BJP who could not find a foothold in the state. It is also worth noting that neither of the community had any legacy to claim for the development of the state. How many would recall, in order to enter politics the NSS briefly formed National Democratic Party in the1970s and not to be left out, in 1972 SNDP formed the Social Revolutionary Party. Sadly, neither parties could make an impact in the Kerala political front.

Many view that owing to contradictions within the communities, the consoldiation will soon collapse. Just as the moderate League and the militant PFI will not be together, Nairs and Ezhavas will fall out over reservations. Let us wait and watch.

Kerala, a land of boozers?

As Kerala awaits anxiously to welcome the festive season of Onam, tipplers in the state are queuing up at the state owned Beverages corporation to break another record in the consumption of alcohol. Any occasion in Kerala is an occasion for booze. Be it a wedding, a funeral or any social gathering.

In a state of 3.3 crore people, Keralites gulped down a whopping Rs 7,860 crores (US$ 1.4 Billion) worth of alcohol in the fiscal year ending Mar 2012.

Welcome to boozer’s own country. 

The state government holds a monopoly over liquor sale in the state, after the state banned foreign liquor shops, through the government owned.

The government applies the highest state tax on liquor (around 120%). This earns it high revenues. It has the highest per capita consumption in the nation, overtaking traditionally hard-drinking states like Punjab and Haryana. Also, in a strange twist of taste, rum and brandy are the preferred drink in Kerala in a country where whisky outsells every other liquor. Alcohol helps in giving Kerala's economy a good high - shockingly, more than 40% of revenues for its annual budget come from liquor sales.

That's not all. There are some 600 privately run bars in the state and more than 5,000 shops selling toddy (palm wine), the local brew. There is also a thriving black market liquor trade.

The young men in kerala are drowning in alcohol and inviting slow death. They are in hospitals, ravaged with pancreatitis and liver diseases. In the peak of life, they are battling alcohol withdrawal syndromes in de-addiction centres. Meanwhile their parents drown in tears, their wives struggle to keep afloat and children are adrift.

Amost 95 per cent of vehicular accidents involve people who are driving after having consumed alcohol in some form or the other. And these do not happen only in the night. Alcohol-related accidents have no time of the day now, as the crowd throughout the day outside any beverages outlet will show. Alcohol has replaced water and tea as the favourite drink of Keralites.

In an attempt to curtail the menace, The Kerala high court suggested recently that sale of liquor should be allowed only after 5pm. Would the government listen to this and take appropriate steps? Would Kerala ever welcome king mahabali in a sober state?

Time to celebrate this independence day

For a country with a population of about 1.2 Billion people, half-dozen medals won in the London Olympics may not be a tall feet by any standards. However the 6 medals represent India’s best ever result on the biggest sporting stage in the world. The fact that the country had won just seven individual medals in the Olympics since Independence should help put the latest achievement in perspective. The absence of a gold medal, in contrast to the Beijing effort, is certainly a dampener and so too the overall slide in the medals ranking from 50 to 55. For a country with an annual sports budget of just over Rs 721 crore, where bureaucrats and sports administrators test the endurance of athletes even before they qualify for the Olympics, the London show should be considered encouraging even if it failed to live up to the hype created by over-ambitious official agencies and fanned by the media.

While Indians may not come close to the achievements of  U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps’s all-time record Olympic medal haul of 22 and Usain Bolt’s unmatched brilliance in the sprints where he completed a back-to-back sweep of three gold medals,  going forward, India has the potential to win gold medals in the fields of archery, boxing, shooting and hockey.

Indian medal winners — Gagan Narang, Vijay Kumar, Saina Nehwal, Mary Kom, Yogeshwar Dutt and Sushil Kumar — deserve all the accolades, including substantial cash awards that have been announced. That the country plunged to an all-time low in hockey is a matter of shame and no time should be lost by the goverment in overhauling the faction-ridden administration or in preparing a blueprint for the grassroots-level development of the game.

On this independence day let us cheer for our Olympic medal winners and hope that a lot more will be achieved in the years to come. Let us also use this opportunity to salute again the achievement of Abhinav Bindra, the only individual Indian to ever win a gold medal in Olympics.