The state’s sham moralism

A little over six decades ago, there was this stormy petrel of Kerala politics and journalism, K. Balakrishnan of the RSP, a famous bacchanalian who got elected to the state assembly from the Ambalappuzha constituency, handily defeating his main Congress rival, who was a Gandhian of sorts. There were several hard-drinking communist leaders, like V.K. Rajan and Kaniyapuram Ramachandran, who were popular politicians. Even E.M.S. Namboodiripad could admit without qualm that he had a glass of Chinese rice wine to raise a toast to Mao Zedong on a fraternal visit to Beijing. But things have changed in this tourist paradise.

No ethnography or sociology of this shift to hypocrisy of the Kerala political class is available. All we know is that suddenly, there is a premium on truthfulness in the male Malayali politician’s milieu. That the present raging moral and public posturing on alcohol consumption in the state is itself the product of a vulgar show of personal oneupmanship between a pompous KPCC president, V.M. Sudheeran, and a manipulative Congress chief minister, Oommen Chandy, speaks volumes about the sharp deterioration in the quality of the ruling political elite as much as the fall in standards of bars, the ostensible reason for all this high-decibel brawl.

“The utter hypocrisy of it all,” as film maestro Adoor Gopalakrishnan described it the other day. And Adoor retains an impeccable Gandhian pedigree, in spite of enjoying a drink in the right company. His was the lonely voice of courage, honesty and sanity in the din of grandstanding or deafening silence from the state’s cultural leaders. Not even a murmur of protest from writers or artists, except from short story writer Paul Zacharia, who by now is a regular maverick for the vast Malayali reading and drinking public. Not a tear was shed at the loss of a certain trace of geniality and good-spiritedness that a drink or two offered in the otherwise ersatz social life of the consumerist state.

Adoor stands out among Kerala’s crony public intellectuals. And, but for the

awe that Adoor’s name inspires, the ruling politicos, including opportunist Christian church leaders and fundamentalist Muslim and Hindu organisations, have not branded him an agent of the abkari lobby — a common category to which one questioning the Chandy government’s move to close down all foreign liquor bars except 20-odd ones in five-star hotels, and enforce total prohibition in Kerala in 10 years, is confined these days.

Remember, the apostle of prohibition, Sudheeran, is reported to have given up the joy of an occasional drink for medical reasons rather than the call of any inner moral voice. And he has not denied the fact that his chief patron in his home district of Thrissur, in the early years of his political career as a student leader, was none other than a leading liquor baron. And Chandy, who announced the antediluvian liquor policy merely to spite Sudheeran, drew his political support from Christian-dominated central Kerala, with the highest density of liquor outlets.

Few remember now how Sudheeran had no problems with drinking as a health hazard when he was the state health minister. Chandy and K.M. Mani, the Kerala Congress supremo and state finance minister, as well as other top UDF leaders, had no qualms in licensing bars and toddy parlours freely till Sudheeran tried to outsmart them with his thunderbolt of prohibition. Shilpi Rajan, a well-known sculptor from Thrissur, hit the nail on the head when he asked, “Where was Sudheeran when genuine Gandhians, like professors, G.Kumara Pillai and M.P. Manmadhan were putting their heads on the block campaigning against alcohol?”

That there are no more open libertarians or practising anarchists in Kerala is not a good thing in itself. All you get now are fossils or caricatures of the original bohemians of the1970s, like filmmaker John Abraham, playwright and actor Surasu or film activist and documentary-maker Odessa Sathyan. And, unlike those days, drinking in “God’s Own Country” has increasingly become an exclusively male domain, with all its negative cultural fallout.

But more disquieting than this lack of originality is the total lack of public resistance to state-sponsored sham moralism. There has been no voice of dissent to state Home Minister Ramesh Chennithala’s announcement that Kerala will soon have another special police force, the “Prohibition Police”, to supervise the implementation of the new liquor policy. This, in a state with a redolent history of leaders seeking truth from facts and heroic movements and struggles for individual rights, social reform and political liberation.

The most painful sight is the ordinary, self-respecting, working Malayali, waiting in the long queue in front of state-owned foreign liquor outlets of the Beverages Corporation, hiding his face in shame from the TV camera that seeks him out for a soundbite on Chandy’s liquor policy, which pretends to save his soul and his family budget from the evil of drinking. Deceit and self-deception going hand-in-hand in a land with its mythical past of plenty under Mahabali, the plebeian ruler, where there was neither prohibition nor runaway drunkenness.

But all is not bleak. There is some light at the end of the tunnel of hypocrisy. Shobha is an MGNREGS worker from Sudheeran’s own Thrissur district. She is the wife of Appukuttan, the last remaining manual labourer on land in the locality, and the mother of two married sons, who work as construction labourers. She is one among the lakhs that Sudheeran and Chandy hope to impress by their competitive populism on alcohol. Her reaction to the policy move was spontaneous, and even stoic, flowing from her real-life experience. “So now, it’s once again time for hooch,” she said.

For the time being, Appukuttan might not go back to hooch and his two sons may not have to take to it. There are those 750-plus state-run outlets for all kinds of cheap liquor that include “Jawan” rum, the most popular brand of rum in the state. So popular is it for quality and value for money that stocks run out in no time and the outlets display the board, “No Jawan”. Any idea who manufactures this magic brand? Who else but the Kerala government at the Thiruvalla Sugars and Chemicals Ltd (TSCL). Not a single voice in the state has questioned the morality of the ruling political class that is busy shutting down budget bars and planning to close down beer and wine parlours and toddy shops by 2015 and still keep its public-sector distillery running to full capacity to make windfall profits. Jai Jawan.

The writer is a former resident editor of ‘The Indian Express’, Kerala