The Kerala Model in Deepening Democracy

The capacity of a state government to serve the people in the way envisaged by the Constitution depends on the health of federalism in the polity, and the willingness of the Centre to heed federal principles

- Pinarayi Vijayan

The invitation to write this piece on "the path on which the Republic should journey in the coming years" described the Constitution as "a remarkable visionary document that guarantees individual rights, social and economic justice, freedom of speech and expression, the right to practice one's faith of choice, [and] protection of minority rights (linguistic, religious, ethnic, and gender)." I ask: Is there a secular democrat in India who is not deeply distressed by the current attacks on these basic principles of our Constitution, and by the human misery caused by the subversion of basic economic and political democracy? It is in this situation that the government of Kerala has dedicated itself not only to securing justice, liberty, and equality for all citizens, but also to giving life to the Directive Principles of the Constitution.

Kerala got a land reform Act six days after its first government came to office in 1957. The reform overturned the old relations of production in agriculture, changed the conditions of unfreedom of rural working people and laid the basis for further social and economic change. Kerala was the first state to establish, in the 1990s, universal school enrolment. In the last nine years, the state government has further strengthened public school infrastructure, including digital infrastructure, and worked to establish modern scientific syllabi at all levels. There has been increased state plan investment in higher education. Kerala's higher education policy has also been shaped to meet the felt needs and demands of its people, particularly its youth. Teacher training has been enhanced, from the primary to post-graduate levels. The state government emphasises the inculcation of the scientific temper in school and university syllabi at a time when obscurantism is overrunning education at the Centre and in many states.