|
|
|
|
|
Author: C P Surendran
Publication: The Times of India
Date: May 20, 2007
Introduction: The CPM in Kerala is going through one of its most intellectually fallow periods
Recently, in Kerala, a writer and cultural activist K C Umesh Babu was expelled from an organisation called Purogamana Kala Sahitya Sangam (Progressive Arts and Literature Society). Or PUKASA in short. PUKASA is run by artists and intellectuals officially approved by the state CPM leadership. Normally leadership means a collective. In CPM-ruled Kerala, as always happens to language under thought censorship anywhere, collective means the opposite. It means One: Pinarai Vijayan.
The leadership till the recent past used to be a collective of two: Vijayan and the state chief minister V S Achuthanandan. Since neither of them is a particularly great thinker, the collective of Two did not add up to much. VS has been effectively emasculated of late, thanks to Vijayan's political maneuverings. As a result not even the least murmur of a discussion takes place within the Party. Things are growing quiet in Kerala. Quiet as in a place that has just been cleared of people after a violent brawl. Politics here now happens in an intellectual vacuum. Clearly, the more power you amass, the more the silence surrounds you. Which is why when an emperor enters the hall, silence follows him like a cloak.
The CPM in Kerala is going through one of the most intellectually fallow periods since its formation in 1964. In the recent past, not one meaningful position paper or an original analysis on contemporary class formation has come out of any of the CPM think tanks in the state. The last-and perhaps the first as well?-intellectual that the party had in the state was EMS Namboodiripad. In the days he was alive and well, he was the Collective. But he was at least well informed. You couldn't say as much about the present leaders and their cohorts whose idea of Revolution dangerously resembles Gangland Supremacy stories. Their efforts towards this end are guided by a kind of nostalgia for an old, rather familiar Monarchic future.
In the La La Land of Mallus, those few who would not buy into that Future, rebelled against the Collective and floated a magazine called Janashakthi. Umesh Babu wrote a poem, Fears, in two sections and had them published in a recent issue of Janashakthi. The poems are not great works of art (see box). The verse is overly rhetorical and drives home the point of a "leadership" which classically sees all issues in terms of bourgeoisie conspiracies, and escape thus from self-criticism and change.
Babu says he didn't have Pinarai Vijayan in mind when he wrote the poems. He is emphatic though that the poems are "social critiques". But anyone familiar with the political landscape of Kerala can easily make out that the subject of the poems is the power-paranoia of Pinarai Vijayan.
Expulsion from PUKASA is no big deal, really. There have been earlier instances of veteran members, sacked from the party for "perusing constantly bourgeoisie newspapers" or for ironically observing that the computer screen savers in the Party Headquarters in Thiruvananthapuram all look like Prakash Karat.
Babu is a civil engineer by profession and works for the state government. His job is not in danger-yet. So all that the expulsion means is that he doesn't get to go to a particular room on a particular day of the month and have tea with a bunch of people with similar noises in their heads, which in the end need not mean much in a self-satisfied, semi-literate place that doesn't give a damn so long as the Western Union doesn't close down, and the petro-dollars keep flowing in from the Gulf.
But there is another side to what happened to Babu. And that prospect chills the spine. If Pinarai Vijayan really got a chance to play Stalin to Kerala's (former) Soviet Union , Babu's poems might have easily earned him a one-way trip to Siberia. Under the circumstances Vijayan did to a dissident what was possible in a free country. There are only degrees separating the Exile and the Kingdom. Like all powerful people Vijayan would have all think alike. Power transmission is best when minds wear uniform. Babu has chosen to wear casuals. If Kerala was another country and Vijayan its leader, a naked Babu would be now watching hoarfrost growing white over his toes.
 |
|
|
