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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, reading this article, it's not making Kerala-style communism sound bad. What's more, they appear to have pivoted when they'd achieved their aims into making people richer. It's a classic "invest, then profit" story, only for an entire state.

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The article is co-written by a member of Kerala's Planning Board and heavily oversells the state. I'd say Kerala is nowhere near rich so even the title is technically incorrect.

When COVID was spreading around china the state govt was putting out public announcements about this disease and what symptoms to watch out for. I remember that even in the month of Feb 2020 there were public announcements in train stations. There is a lot of emphasis on education and health in the state. Granted it may not be rich as other states but it leads other states in a lot of other markers

Kerala is rich by Indian standards, but its GDP per capital is still only around $3500/year, making it nowhere near rich by world standards.

Even by Indian standards, it’s #11 by GDP per capita among 27 Indian states. I guess top third is not bad, but not exceptional either.

That may be but the topic of the thread is how rich Kerala supposedly is, not how super awesome their public train announcements are. The claim is not just false, the article is outright propaganda given how one of the co-authors works for the state government.

I guess my main point is that a communist type govt was not exclusively bad for Kerala since they took a lot of effort to improve education and public health.

You can look at other sources to see how good kerala is doing wrt other states but I do agree the article over emphasised the good parts without any hint to it's bad parts

To put this in context, during Covid, hundreds of bodies were being dumped in the Ganges river, buried in shallow graves on the sandbars in states like Uttar Pradesh. The state govt took an active role to remove the grave markers so that an accurate estimate of the numbers could not be ascertained. These were covered by local bloggers, vloggers and news channels.

Kerala is one of the few states that managed medical supplies of Oxygen pretty well. In many other states many died because hospitals ran out of it.

Is that because of the communist government, or simply because the state has a lot of money from the Middle East?

Spending money to remove grave markers is a choice. It's not about how much money you have, it's whether or not you care about the people in question.

In India atleast, 'communism' or 'Marxism' in the names of political parties that actually run a state is just a name that has stuck. These entities and people have to be a lot more pragmatic. This is in contrast to those who are arm chair think tanks that you would find in advisory boards, universities etc. These would be people who do not run for elections.

Now, as for Kerala's handling of Covid, that was funded by state govt coffers. So Middle East money had a negligible contribution. What made a difference though is a history of preference for investing in social safety nets and basic infrastructure for people, such as schools, nutrition, hospitals.

What really happened was that the health authorities in Kerala were prepared for an outbreak because Kerala has had a history of past outbreaks and a health system with very well trained doctors and health professionals to handle it. See the 2018 Nipah virus outbreak in Kerala that was handled really well, there was even a popular movie about it (Virus) that came out the year after.

It's the same story in east Asian countries where they had the SARS outbreak in early 2000s and so they were prepared for new outbreaks.

To be clear I'm not saying Kerala is particularly bad by regional standards, it's not. But compare Kerala and India as a whole with other parts of Asia, they're not doing well. Look at China vs India in the 1970s vs 50 years later. Compare India/Kerala and Thailand in the same time frame. Kerala and Korea, etc etc. South Asia as a whole is doing worse than many other parts of Asia. Kerala government excels at what many socialist governments are good at: Praising themselves. In reality is has made little difference.

India has a lot of other issues, I grant you that the socialist ideology probably had a positive influence in some ways other than economics, particularly socially. But no offense, if you've ever walked the streets Trivandrum and other cities you know there are much more pressing issues.

Socialism with Kerala characteristics? I'm a bit skeptical of that, people often point to the Scandinavian model as especially successful but when you look into the data, that actually combines redistribution (funded by higher taxes) with a lot of economic freedom and a light-touch attitude from government that are all ideologically counter to "communism" or "socialism" of any kind.

This is a no true Scotsman argument. If you define socialism as purely being policies that don't work, of course socialism doesn't work. If you accept that you can stick to your principles whilst being flexible about the implementation strategy, socialism seems to work out pretty well in some places.

Portugal also has a similarly active communist party. I think what distinguishes Portugal and Kerala's communist parties from other communist parties is that they were (and are) first, and foremost, democrats.

A capitalist dictatorship will be every bit as horrible as a communist dictatorship.

That's how "communism" is in India. Two states (West Bengal and Kerala) are run by "Communist" parties. But these parties are quite different from what people typically mean by "Communists".

Have you read the Communist Manifesto? It also makes Communism sound like a good idea. Nevermind that Kerala doesn't have a particularly high GDP per capita even by southern Indian standards. It's not rich by any rational measure, not in median income or otherwise. There is a lot of poverty, slightly better compared to some of the northern states but then South India in general does a bit better than the north so there isn't anything particularly noteworthy.

Btw, for some historic context this part of India used to be extremely rich in the past by global standards, centuries ago. They became rich with international trade. Modern India is nowhere close to its wealthy past, the subcontinent as a whole produced the largest percentage of the world's GDP during Late Antiquity, surpassing China and all others!

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