Date: Sat, 17 Feb 1996 11:52:50 +0100
From: Luciano Dondero <DOND001-AT-IT.net>
Subject: Re: Kerala


At 17.55 16/02/96 -0500 Jeff Booth wrote:
>
>Is it just me wondering about this?  Where's Kerala?

It is a state that form part of the "United States of India". It is located
in the South-Western part of the Indian subcontinent, and is one of the four
states (out of 15) that speak a language from an entirely different kind of
those spoken in the rest of India - it is Dravidian and not Indo-European. 

Another one of these Southern states is Tamil Nadu, opposite from the island
of Ceylan, and heavily involved in the bloody situation over there, where a
part of the population also belongs to the Tamil nation.

Within and around the Stalinist CP's in the 1960's there was a lot of
interest for Kerala, because the local CP had managed to win the elections
and get control of the state. While for Americans, Kerala is relatively
small potato (it must be about the size of a regular US state), for
Europeans it loomed a bit larger, being roughly the size of a regular
European country.

In more recent times another Indian state where the local CP's got into
power was Bengal, capital city Calcutta, in the North-East of the country,
toward the border with China.

In India there have been for several decades various CP's. The CP of India
and the CP of India (Marxist) came out of a split in the early 1960's having
something to do with the Soviet Union-China rift, but very quickly the CP(M)
stopped being in any meaningful way "Maoist", and that led to another split,
which gave birth to the CP(ML), loyally Maoist and involved in some kind of
guerrilla warfare.

Both the CPI and the CP(M) are large mass parties - probably they are the
largest parties in the world still claiming some kind of allegiance to the
notion of a "World Communist Movement" (in other words, they are Stalinists
and proud of it, but these words are not uttered...) - and have a
significant influence in various trade unions around the country.

Let's keep in mind that India, with over 800 million people is "the largest
bourgeois democratic country of the world", as they point to you if you
mention the US, and things having to do with India (as well as with China)
belong to a different size category that what we are used to deal with both
in America and in Europe.

Hope this throw some light and brings in a few more questions.

Comradely,

--Luciano Dondero--



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