Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was used as the BJP's star campaigner in Kerala, was being trolled on Twitter today for comparing the coastal state to Somalia in a recent election speech.
The notion that non-Hindus can live together with Hindus with dignity and in harmony with the majority community is at odds with the RSS-BJP project to redefine Indian nationhood as Hindutva and to reduce non-Hindus to second class status. The temptation for Sangh ideologues to denigrate Kerala is perfectly understandable.
There would be some Malayalis who take umbrage at the implied insult to Somalia as well. After all, it is one of the many places in Africa and
with which Malayalis have had civilized interaction, commercial as well as cultural, for millennia. You don’t like being insulted; nor do you like your friends being insulted.
It would be superfluous to dig up statistics to prove Modi’s claim wrong. After all, the literacy rate among the scheduled castes of Travancore, today’s southern Kerala, was already the same as the literacy rate of the general population of United Provinces way back in the 1940s.
But Modi was right on Kerala’s unemployment rate being high; but not quite in the manner in which he implied. Unemployment is a sign of a society having risen significantly above the levels of subsistence. In underdeveloped parts of India even today, to be unemployed is to be dead. Only when a society produces a degree of surplus and has mechanisms in place to distribute the surplus to people not contributing directly to generating that surplus can anyone afford to stay unemployed. So, Kerala and Tamil Nadu would have higher levels of unemployment, as compared to say, Bihar or Orissa. But this means not that Kerala or Tamil Nadu suffer higher levels of poverty and want as compared to Bihar and Orissa but just the opposite.
That said, Kerala needs to overcome the political prejudices that have held back economic opportunities in the state. With a population that has been literate for five generations, and life expectancy comparable to those of rich countries, Kerala should have been a powerhouse of innovation and enterprise, like, say, South Korea.
But to overcome the political prejudices that have held Kerala back, ignorance and prejudice will not help and that is the puerile combination that Modi offered the state’s people, when he compared Kerala to Somalia.