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.
In the book Paths to a Green World, The Political Economy of to The Global Environment, authors: Jennifer Clapp and Peter Dauvergne, describe different approaches to the protection of the natural environment: first of market liberals who claim that economical growth is a solution for everything, of ‘institutionalists’ who see the fixation of problems in the global institutions, structural adjustment etc., bioenvironmentalists who do not neglect problems, yet try to solve them on a way of dialog next to a round table, they postulate renewal of the world system e.g. creation of the world government, and the last ones are social greens, neo-Gramscian, neo-Marxian, radicals postulating far-reaching revolutionary change, alter-globalists. The same ‘groups’ of today’s world players in environment we can ‘ascribe’ within spheres of economy and politics – yet, Clapp and Dauvergne omit the last group, the group essential in both environmentalism and social change; essential in its passivity – for some they are known as ‘sofa-potatoes’, for others as consumers who ‘do not ask about politics or economy until they have beer and steak’. They are very profound in the developing world, on the opposite side from them, are those who also do not ask, who ‘do not think’, nor rise their voice; because they are marginalized, silenced by violence militias and fascists-like governments, they are not educated beyond the basics or not educated at all. Those two groups will be a deciding force in the future, ergo there should be a rally for all of us believing in the possibility of social change and real social development ‘to make them our aware and ready for change allies. Moreover, every day we have to examine ourselves looking in the mirror to check if suddenly we have not became either silenced by fascism objects of someone’s rule or mild potatoes who care only about themselves. The XIV Dalai Lama tell his followers that “Every day you are born again” – we can paraphrase his words, not only to tell the Buddhists, but the world-wide community – everyday you have the chance to make a difference, first by asking who are you? And on which side of your local world you are? Then, on which side of the global world you stand? How your actions are affecting people around you? And who are they? If they or you are passive or are limited to only one rhetoric – there comes the need for change, change that can be born with you every day. That is what I learned in Kerala in the summer of 2011.