Malayali mind in permabandh

Eleven bandhs in as many months, besides innumerable district and moffusil ones cannot but be an agonising experience even by Kerala standard. But that, in effect, had been the fate of the hapless people of the state ever since the Marxist-led coalition came to power. Not that the scenario was delightfully different during the earlier regime. The two fronts have been the tweedledom and tweedledee of Kerala politics.

Even so, the crucial question remains: why did it require a judicial pronouncement for the public to articulate against bandhs and bandh promoters? Why did the literate Malayali acquiesce in the terror tactics of bandhs and hartals instead of taking up cudgels against a patently disgusting practice?

Evidently, there is more to the willing acquiescence than the commonly believed collective fear complex. True, for all his radicalism, a typical Malayali, save the political variety , is vociferously critical only in the cosy comfort of his drawing room. In public he is deafeningly silent.

Unsurprisingly, his public reticence is matched only by his private fury. The reversal of the mood is hard to come by, given the Malayali mind-set.The proverbial profile of the peripatetic, hardworking Malayali ever in search of greener pastures does not exist in the local context. Back home, like the Chinese, he is less enterprising with an unconcealed zest to get the best of his rights than his duties. The absence of a work culture inevitably promotes an ubiquitous class of “job shirkers.” The wiling acquiescence to bandhs and hartals is the logical extension of thisMore importantly, to the the absence of entrepreneurship in a Malayali. The perceived profile of a typical Malayali is the one with a red flag in one hand, mouthing vituperative slogans in defence of his rights, real and fancied, to the sways of the other hand in front of the factory which provides him and his family their daily bread.

What has, however, been overlooked is that the mantle of the rebel a Malayali often dons has a lot more to do with his reluctance to take risks than to any addiction to slogan-shouting or striking or gheraoing. Wherever there had been any exception a classic example being the conversion of vast tracks of the hilly terrains in north Kerala into blooming gardens of spices, coconut, coffee and so on by the Christian migrant labour from central Kerala the results had been no less scintillating than any of the rags-to-riches story of many a laterday industrialists in the north.The migrants’ success story, however, which has by now become part of the Kerala folklore, raises yet another question. Why did this impressive enterprise demonstrated by these central Travancore Christians evolve and blossom into industrial entrepreneurship? Had it been properly harnessed and nurtured, would it not have at least given us a new cadre of managers, not to talk of a new class of entrepreneurs?

In fact, around the time of independence, the southern states had a more or less similar economic scenario with entrepreneurship largely confined to trading and banking, particularly in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Fifty years later, the scenario is awesomely different with Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh fast pushing the traditionally advanced states of Maharashtra and Gujarat behind in industrialisation. This has been possible because the entrepreneurial classes in these states graduated themselves into aggressive industrialists, while their counterparts in literate Kerala were content with being where they were five decades ago. Intriguingly, the Malayali genius for enterprise has stopped short of anything that involves risk-taking.

With his disposition being mainly political, he missed the first wave of industrialisation. Tragically, he is likely to miss the ongoing second one as well.