DAWN - International; 21 February, 1998
Indian state that cannot be fooled by politicians
KAINAKARY (India): Four bright-eyed boys in navy blue shorts and light blue shirts smile shyly as they head back from school. The tallest is busy rowing their boat.
Roads don't exist, and doctors and drinking water are still a problem in this speck of a village in the backwaters of the southern Indian state of Kerala.
But the schoolchildren hurrying past dense coconut groves bear witness to the province's proud achievement - literacy levels that match the best in the world.
And as the lush-green state joins the rest of India in voting for a new parliament beginning on February 28, politicians know full well that they must answer to a highly literate voting public that is not easy to fool."You can't fool this society at all," K.N. Raj, a leading economist, told Reuters in Trivandrum, the state capital.
"Everybody is a political and social animal here. They want to know what is happening in their districts, the latest and the nearest," said K.M. Mathew, chief editor of the Malayalam-language daily Malayala Manorama.
Millions of readers avidly lap up every detail on an array of subjects ranging from religious conflicts, sex scandals and school admissions to the local hospital. A dozen political parties use these to keep the election pot constantly boiling.
"The average northern Indian politician cannot survive here because people expect too much," Mathew said in his office at Kottayam, a key centre of education in the state.Mathew's 98-year-old newspaper is India's largest circulated daily, with its seven editions pulling a circulation of more than a million in a broadsheet market of 2.5 million copies.
More than 90 per cent of Kerala's adults can read and write, far more than the national average of around 52 per cent. Some 86 per cent of Kerala's proud women are literate, more than twice the national average of around 39 per cent.
Fishermen on the Arabian Sea coast, rubber plantation workers in the Western Ghat mountains and millions of farmhands in the long, narrow strip of land flush with coconut trees discuss politics with the same passion as white-collar office workers in the state's cities.
Kerala's literacy is manifest in animated chatter in the village tea shop. "I read all Malayalam newspapers. Only my English is weak," said Puthangalam Kalyani, a 65-year-old woman who earns her living by drying and pounding raw paddy into rice. Kalyani lists her election demands. "We could do with a bridge," she says.
But fisherman Palikkal Mathai is cynical. "If one party does something, the other does something to stop it," he says.
Politics is decidedly tough here. The communist-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) and the Congress party-led United Democratic Front (UDF) have for decades accepted coalitions governing the state as a way of life. There are at least three parties representing Christian interests in Kerala, and two representing Muslims. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is increasing its presence. Small leftist groups and oddball independents can throw up surprises.
Election officials say elections in Kerala are characterized by tough contests, but are usually violence-free unlike in many parts of India where paramilitary troops often guard voting stations to prevent rigging.Analysts say Kerala's citizens have not encouraged movie stars in politics, unlike the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu, because literacy has helped the state separate glamour from substance.
"There is some pride in Kerala that no film star has made it," said Mary Roy, mother of Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy.
Kerala is noted for its high voter turnouts and narrow winning margins in elections.
"Whenever there is a three-cornered fight, elections become unpredictable," Mathew said. "Even a five per cent swing in votes can result in a sweeping majority (in terms of seats)," he said.
Historians in the state attribute the high levels of literacy to a number of factors, including the spurt of trade and commercialization of agriculture in the 19th century.
The benevolence of local maharajas and the spread of Christian education by British missionaries during colonial rule that ended in 1947 aided the process, they say.
The advent of communist rule in 1957, and the leftists' intense competition with the Congress party, spurred still greater educational development.
"The commercialization of agriculture created a desire or demand for education for all the families of land-holding middle castes," said Michael Tharakan, historian at the Centre for Development Studies, a think-tank based in Trivandrum.But there is a flip side to such high literacy, Roy said. Hundreds of thousands of Keralites have found jobs in the Middle East and there is less respect for physical labour, she said.
Often, Kerala's industries have to use migrant workers from Tamil Nadu state because the locals demand high wages or are not interested in hard physical work.
"The literate friends are too involved in their literacy," Roy said.-Reuters