Monday, Jul 14, 2003
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Kerala
By C. Gouridasan Nair
Some of the criticism has come from within the State unit of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), from sections that fear that the party is on the path of social democratic "deviation". The controversy erupted when an article published in a non-mainstream journal over a month ago found its way into a major daily newspaper. There were both serious and farcical elements to it, the latter manifesting in the charge that those who spearheaded the People's Plan Campaign were `agents' of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The article was noticed because both the journal and the CPI(M)'s literary weekly, Deshabhimani Vaarika, have the same Editor, M.N. Vijayan. For some time now Vijayan has been critical of the State CPI(M) leadership, and he owned responsibility for what appeared in the non-mainstream journal. The criticism is directed at the CPI(M); its State secretariat member, T.M. Thomas Isaac, who was a key figure in the decentralised planning initiative; and the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP), which had drawn on its long experience in local level development initiatives to play a pivotal role in the campaign. (Dr. Isaac has since spoken out in defence of the approach adopted in the campaign.) The People's Plan Campaign, which had put meaning and substance into the Constitution 73rd and 74th amendments, has had some critics within the CPI(M) for some time now. From 1996, when the campaign was launched, till its end in 2001 and even later, there has been criticism both within and outside the CPI(M) with regard to its content and methodology. Despite the reservations of a section of party persons, it fired the imagination of many within the party and public-spirited individuals outside. It had also resulted in several local level development initiatives and the creation of assets worth crores of rupees. At the political level, however, it faced resistance from some allies of the CPI(M) such as the Communist Party of India as also sections of the bureaucracy. The one party that took real advantage of the campaign was the Indian Union Muslim League and, as was to be expected, the party has not joined the current tirade. If the Plan Campaign could make headway despite many within the LDF adopting a lukewarm attitude to it, that was only on account of the unflinching support that E.M.S. Namboodiripad gave it. Whenever the campaign seemed to flag or waver, Namboodiripad helped put it back on the rails using his moral authority. But, with his death in 1998, that source of guidance and support vanished. This fact, coupled with the crunch faced by the State exchequer, left the campaign floundering to an extent. The campaign leaders also received a shock when in the local body polls in 2000 the Left Democratic Front fared badly in most of the panchayats where the campaign had been a success. With the LDF getting a drubbing in the 2001 Assembly polls, the Plan Campaign also began to be seen as an experiment that misfired. The Plan Campaign and the associated State interventions had many shortcomings, but the HDR makes it clear that it was a major experiment in social and political engineering, one that followed the mostly Left-led re-distributive policy interventions of the 1950s and 1960s. Besides standing the planning process on its head, the Campaign also sought to shift the responsibility of Plan implementation to the local leadership. Where it probably failed was in preventing the deeply entrenched politician-contractor nexus from worming its way into the new system. This caused harm to the entire process. The sudden infusion of funds into the administrative structure at the grassroots level added to the difficulties. The urban population largely turned its back on the campaign, thereby adding to its non-visibility in places from where opinion-makers and the mainstream media operate. Still, it is widely accepted that the campaign had, and still has, several important lessons for Kerala. The most important of them concern the need for local level community initiatives to solve the immediate problems of the local population and chalk out projects that serve local needs. The current spate of critical comments about the Plan Campaign, despite the questions of ideology that it seeks to address, have overlooked all these pluses and minuses and acquired the dimensions of personality-bashing and delegitimisation of an organisation like the KSSP. Dr. Isaac having co-authored a book on democratic decentralisation in Kerala with Prof. Richard Franke of Mont Claire University in the U.S. and Prof. Franke's presence in Kerala both during the campaign and later, have been cited as "proof'' of the foreign origins and links of the campaign. Since the Dutch Government-funded Kerala Research Programme on Local Level Development (KRPLLD), implemented through the Centre for Development Studies (CDS) here, had played a seminal part in the formulation of the campaign initiative, the CDS has also been dragged into the controversy.
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