THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Kerala’s scourge has been the absence of a strong civil society concept. People let political parties decide on their behalf as if in a perpetual bondage. The Malayali exhibited this caved-in mindset by accepting the Emergency 1975-77 lying down. Those 21 months basic freedoms remained suspended. But the United Front ministry in Kerala, comprising CPI, Congress, Kerala Congress, Muslim League and RSP, ruled as if it was all hunky dory. Not a whimper of protest. Only when Emergency was lifted did the rulers and the ruled realize the horror that was over.
Says civil rights activist K Venu: USSR president Leonid Brezhnev lauded the Emergency in Parliament. CPI, which had strong links with the Soviet Communist party, did not find it odd to support a regime that trampled on basic human rights. Even Marxist ideologue E M S Naboodiripad initially supported Indira’s 21-point programme for national reconstruction. He calls this the Emergency mindset, which has not changed much even after four decades. The polity has not been able to liberate itself from the stranglehold of partisan politics and congregate as a civil society to pursue common interests.
Civil society, comprising NGOs, cherishes fundamental rights and freedoms. Civil society lives independent of the establishment and the bureaucracy. It does not tolerate hegemony of any type, even the dictatorship of the proletariat. But the irony is that when Communists deride “bourgeois democracy”, even Congress leaders aspire to follow the democracy prescribed by the former. Congress leaders are content to meekly follow the Left brand of democracy. In 1991, Finance Minister Manmohan Singh met with the strong protest from the Socialist brigade in the party against his liberalization moves.
Mr Venu says: “We are more pretenders to democracy unlike masses that heeded Jayaprakash Narayan’s call to uphold fundamental rights during massive country-wide agitations against Indira’s authoritarian rule. Emergency’s excesses were more in the north, which gave them a direct experience of its draconian nature. But that does not absolve us of our partisan loyalties that override basic democratic tenets”.
