Standing Protest versus Kiss of Love

Kerala is a land of many interesting things: drinking alcohol is not a crime, but coco cola is; having more than one wife is acceptable, but going out with your wife in the park or town will certainly invite questionings from ‘morality police’ and so on. I will tell you one more example which will show this contradictory nature of Kerala society.

As the after effect of the failure of the promises which the Kerala Govt. under A.K. Antony gave to the adivasis of the state during the time of Muthanga riot in 2003, the adivasis in Kerala recently proclaimed ‘standing protest’ in front of Kerala Secretariat in 2014 under Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha. Though the agitation started months ago, none of the main stream political parties, or media persons gave much attention to the issue. They have been standing in front of the Kerala Secretariat or Kerala conscience, but nobody took notice.

At the same time, another public protest has stolen the hearts and minds of the people of Kerala. A group of youngsters in the Facebook have decided to conduct a campaign against moral policing (enforcing a code of conduct through force) in the state. They have decided to conduct ‘Kiss of Love’ protest, kissing in pubic as a reaction. Maybe because of its sexist nature, it got wide coverage. It ultimately attracted public attention and reaction.
Why certain struggles manage to capture the attention of the people whereas some fail? You may say that there are no specific reasons, but simple people support causes which they have to face in their day to day life. But this would be a simplification. The reason for a lack of public interest in the adivasi strike is because Kerala is still under the hegemonic power of the upper caste people. For most of the people in Kerala, tribal people are a threat: merely eating up govt. money without much benefit to the wider community. They feel that undue support is given by the authorities to them, which in other words should have been gone to the public. Whereas the condition of adivasis in Kerala is pathetic. Child death is common (not just in Attappadi), adivasi women are facing sexual harassment from men, and many other atrocities are being faced by them. The general reaction to their problems is that of indifference. In my point of view, they should conduct strikes against this attitude of the people.

‘Kiss of Love’ became a huge success in Kerala not because of public sympathy towards the cause. In order to understand the reasons behind the masses who gathered in the protest venue, we need to understand the nature of Malayalis: they are voyeurs, always stare at women without any decency (that is why in Indian English we have a new word “Eve-teasing”). Those who gathered in the venue were interested in the prospect of watching an ‘event’, which they don’t want to miss. They took photographs, shared it in their FB pages and supported publicly (but didn’t take part in it).

The moral of the story is this (sorry, we need to ban all entries of words beginning with ‘moral’ from the dictionary): we need to conduct a serious social surgery to the society, otherwise the genuine problems of the people will be sidelined.