In almost all human capital development indices including the Education Development Index of NIEPA University, Delhi and UNDP’s Human Development Index, the picturesque southern state of Kerala (pop.35 million) is invariably accorded high praise. This is because during the past seven decades since independence, the state has attained 99 percent literacy. The high status accorded to Kerala is enthusiastically propagated by Left academics and intellectuals as validation of communism, which has struck deep roots in the state. Way back in 1957, the people of Kerala elected the first communist government of post-independence India. Since then, Kerala has routinely elected CPM (Communist Party of India-Marxist) governments. This despite communist ideology decisively rejected in Russia, China and most famously in West Bengal where the CPM-led Left Front ruled uninterruptedly for 34 years (1977-2011).
Nevertheless, despite the obsolescence of communist ideology, in the legislative assembly election of April 2021, the country’s most literate electorate returned a coalition headed by the CPM to power, clear proof that there’s a wide gulf between literacy and intelligence.
The plain truth is that Kerala’s high literacy is not the outcome of communism or its faux intellectuals, but of the Roman Catholic Church whose missionaries established a vast network of primary schools across the state over two centuries. These schools have in effect been nationalised and transformed into aided schools (teachers and staff salaries are paid directly by the state government) and heavily infiltrated by CPM party cadres recruited as teachers and employees. This lot has been brainwashing children with class conflict ideologies and anti-free enterprise sentiment for decades, transforming the state into a hotbed of militant trade unionism which has provoked capital flight creating a chronic unemployment problem and forcing millions of Kerala’s youth to emigrate to Middle East and Gulf autocracies where they have to endure cruel working conditions and human rights violations.
True Kerala is India’s most literate state, but its people are ill-educated. If they were enlightened, they would have seen through the regressive Marxism of CPM and its elites who have scared away domestic and foreign investment, forced millions of youth to emigrate abroad, and lumbered it with a snowballing unemployment crisis.
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