Appam or Dhokla?

Kerala or Gujarat? Which model of governance is better? Pranay Kotasthane correctly says that such questions are a proxy for the left v/s right debate in India. He analyzes this topic in Missing in Action and concludes that neither the Left nor Narendra Modi can claim the credit for either state. Let’s see why.

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In Kerala, in the age of the royal states of Travancore and Kochi, the Christian missionaries began to attract lower caste Hindus. Further, their schools were open to all. The royal family responded in 1817 not with force but by announcing free education for all.

 

The royalty also began to focus on public health and vaccination – the Queen of Travancore had herself and her family inoculated publicly to show it was safe and desirable. By 1879, vaccination was made compulsory for government servants and those dependent on the state.

 

Long before independence, landholding was privatized and commercial crops were introduced, all with positive economic consequences for the state. And as the state grew richer, its expenditure on public health and education grew. A virtuous cycle had been set off.

 

The freedom struggle movement didn’t catch on in Kerala; and that space was taken instead by social reform movements. Political rights for all, education for girls, freedom to enter temples, liberation from caste oppression – those were the areas Kerala focussed on in the period leading upto independence.

 

Post-independence, it was against this backdrop that communism rose in Kerala. Successive communist governments continued to focus on those areas. In addition, the communists were suspicious of free markets and corporations. This aversion scared away industries and investment. That then created a peculiar situation – a hugely educated population with few jobs in the state. Inevitably, people left the state to work elsewhere in India and abroad, and sent back remittances. Today, over 14% of the state’s GDP comes from remittances.

 

Thus, as Kotasthane points out, the positives of Kerala started long before the communists came along. It was always better than most Indian states on education, health and social matters, but barely counted on economic ones.

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Next, he looks at Gujarat. Its princely states, other than Baroda, were not progressive. Nor did Christian missionaries take hold in the state. The triggers that set off Kerala on the health and education path were non-existent.

 

Gujarat was always a trading post. Enterprise was a constant need in such a setup. New opportunities arose to enrich oneself. Historically, this was a place which looked at commerce, corporations and industrialization as positives.

 

Inevitably, a rich trading community needed to be sensitive to political activities. Not surprisingly, from such a region arose Gandhi, Patel and Jinnah. While political awareness was very high in the state, it was never about social reforms.

 

After independence, a basic aspect of Gujarat remained unchanged:

“The middle-class route to prosperity remained through enterprise or commerce instead of education.”

The Gujarati who went to East Africa, UK or the US set their own businesses and settled there and hardly sent any remittances back home.

 

Gujarat then was always ahead on economic matters, while it didn’t bother about education or public health. A pattern that continued post-independence.

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Kotasthane sums it perfectly:

“The Gujarat and Kerala models, as we like to see them, have been existence for over two centuries. The current outcomes of these models owe more to the history and evolution of multiple social and political trends in these societies than specific policy decisions over the last few decades.”