Yesterday was a day of great strength, solidarity, and remembrance of women workers’ historic struggles for rights and against tyrants. Support for the striking ASHA workers poured in from civil society — cine artists Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Rima Kallingal, and Jolly Chirayath, writers Arundhati Roy, Sara Joseph, and Rosemary, feminist academic researchers Nivedita Menon and Janaki Nair, filmmakers Leena Manimekalai and Paromita Vohra expressed solidarity with the workers. Paromita Vohra inaugurated the morning’s meeting. A cross-section of Kerala‘s civil and political society spoke in solidarity. Representatives of feminist groups spoke. The Dalit Human Rights Movement conducted a solidarity march led by their leader Reshma K. Gomathi, of Pomblai Otrumai, spoke about what lay ahead for the striking workers, based on her experience of confronting the CITU during the Munnar tea garden workers’ strike. Representatives of the United Nurses Association took out a solidarity march and their leader spoke in the meeting. Hundreds of ASHA workers and representatives of ASHA worker unions from Tamil Nadu and Karnataka were present.
The workers welcomed all, but also spoke their mind. When the Siva Sena — a group of men — arrived, they were politely asked to vacate centre stage and make space for a woman from their ranks. The representative of the national federation that the KAHWA is affiliated to declared in completely non-ambiguous words that the fight was against the Union government; she welcomed support from members of the NDA but told them that their support was crucial not in Kerala but in Delhi. We expect you to offer the same support when we approach the union government, she said. And also noted: no political party, including the Congress, will take up the issues of the ASHAs wherever they are in power .
Meanwhile, the voice of the national CITU, A R Sindhu, continued to repeat the Kerala CITU male leadership’s ‘silly little sheep’ hypothesis about the striking women workers, and the much-flogged conspiracy theory against the SUCI, using the same bunch of fallacies deployed by the CPI(M)’s fallacy-peddlers’ union workers ( a union that is still a future possibility, but a real one) led by the likes of K K Shahina. Sindhu speaks like the Kerala CITU’s B Team, even though she calls for talks to end the strike. B team because outright strike denigration seems to be the privilege of the Alpha males in the CITU.
What is truly appalling about her long essay in the Malayalam online magazine Truecopy is its chilling lack of empathy. V T Bhattatirippad, the social reformer, once remarked about the CPI(M) leader EMS Namboothirippad that he was the kind of person who, when faced an urgent call for help with a woman in labour desperately thrashing about in pain, will respond with long analyses about the terrible lack of health care facilities, the bad roads in the country, the need for more doctors etc. He was right about these of course, but that cannot replace an empathetic response.
A R Sindhu and Veena George respond in this way — without empathy. The ASHA workers are striking because the CPI(M)’s election manifesto promise of Rs 700 a day for scheme workers is expiring soon. They are desperate with delays and the sheer impossibility of surviving in Kerala where the cost of living is relatively high. The workers’ strike is actually out of desperation, but the CPI(M)’s last leaders meet it with a bunch of cold bureaucratic reasons that are all already well known: central funds are insufficient, they are delayed, you are merely scheme workers, we pay you more than x,y, z… And when they persist and continue to talk about their crisis-ridden lives, Veena George loses her cool, and dons a true kochamma tone — what a load of bother, she stomps her little foot in impatience. Go away, go ask the Union government! Her Royal Highness’ guard rush to her aid at once, trying to shoo the beggars away, while the CITU male leadership aim poison tipped arrows of misogynist insults at them.
However, whatever the monarchical imagination of our rulers, we still think ourselves as the citizens of a democratic country. Sindhu is miffed that certain academics and intellectuals are on the side of the striking workers. C’mon, Sindhu! Your government in Kerala has a whole menagerie which has an entire collection of cosseted intellectuals.
I ask you, send them out against these ‘untamed’ intellectuals! We untamed creatures deserve some fun too, I tell you.
Photos: Santhi Rajasekhar
Jayakumari Devika is a Malayali historian, feminist, social critic and academic from Kerala. She currently researches and teaches at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram.
This article was first published on Kafila.