Thursday, October 05, 2006

Reply from Election Watch Kerala

Dear Abhishek,

I am a sorry to say that Election Watch Kerala is somewhat in the doldrums at the moment without sufficient volunteers for work. The demise of our Chairman Prof M.N.V.Nair has weakened us. The members are still keen on the work except that each is busy in his or her own work and unable to provide the kind of time and effort that we managed to put in during the 2004 election. We need fresh blood to take our work forward.

As far as the 2004 data base is concerned, I shall be happy to check out its availability and share the data with you. I think we did have information on how many had cases against them due to agitational politics. This was significant in the case of Communist party candidtaes who have come through the ranks (DYFI, SFI, etc.) and their 'graduation' process involves proving their capabilities through such agitational politics.

I agree with you that the agitational politics has become somewhat meaningless and is a block for Kerala's growth. However, a lot of the problems stem from the image such agitations create rather than any real difficulty. It is worth nothing that the last two decades have seen very few workers strikes and agitations, especially for wages or working conditions. The agitations are mostly political in nature and related to percieved injustices of various policies (education, globalisation, etc.). Kerala is probably the only state that has at least one bandh every year against generic issues like 'globalisation".

Will get back to you on the data base issue.

Regards,

Vivek

V.Vivekanandan

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Abhishek,
Good job. Will be looking forward to hear your study on agitational politics in Kerala and its impact.

What are you doing now? Economics?

10/06/2006 12:18 AM  
Blogger abhishek said...

@alex

No...I'm a Finance Analyst. I did major in Economics from Dartmouth though in 2004.

12/11/2006 11:56 AM  

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