"But in Kerala — far from the high-stakes maneuvers of the Cold War and nearly 2,000 miles from the Indian capital of New Delhi — history has taken the most unexpected of detours.

Instead of ossifying into an autocratic force, Kerala’s communists embraced electoral politics and since 1957 have been routinely voted into power.

Instead of being associated with repression or failure, the party of Marx is widely associated with huge investments in education that have produced a 95 percent literacy rate, the highest in India, and a health-care system where citizens earning only a few dollars a day still qualify for free heart surgery.

This modern incarnation of communism also has produced one of the stranger paradoxes of the global economy: millions of healthy, educated workers setting off to the supercharged, capitalist economies of the Persian Gulf dreaming of riches and increasingly finding them."