# Ajayan | The grand old adage, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” straight out of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, was the go-to war cry for Marxists whenever they needed to sound profound. One can safely assume that even the seasoned Marxist trade unionist Elamaram Kareem, at some point in his long-winded political sermons, has dutifully quoted from this sacred text - his Quran – for after all, wasn’t it during the recent Lok Sabha elections that he gleefully embraced the moniker Kareem Ika? A rebranding exercise, perhaps, but one that ended with the electorate delivering him a poetic verdict, an unceremonious rejection.

But that is ancient history. The present is a fascinating spectacle where history sheds its skin, morphing into something altogether more convenient. Enter Kareem, now unburdened by the weight of Marxist righteousness, promptly discarding his red robes like last season’s fashion. The very struggle he once romanticized has become an inconvenience. The ASHA workers' demands are nothing more than a nuisance best ignored, or worse, ridiculed. Dialectical materialism can take such flexible dimensions!

One cannot be too harsh on ‘poor’ Kareem. After all, he is merely a product of his environment, one where the CPI(M) has undergone a metamorphosis over the years, especially after scripting history by clinching a second consecutive term with a thumping. The party has clearly graduated from its old-school class-struggle rhetoric to the more sophisticated art of selective amnesia.

ASHA workers, the tireless foot soldiers of Kerala’s healthcare system that has been hailed as a success of the Kerala Model, dared to stage a protest in front of the Secretariat, their voices ringing through the State for over 20 days. And what was the crime that Kareem saw? Asking for a modest raise from their paltry ₹7,500 monthly earnings, an amount that wouldn’t even cover a week’s expenses in today’s Kerala. Ironically, even the government-mandated daily wages put their pay to shame. Let one not get started on their working hours, which far exceed anything labour laws would dare permit.

Kareem is merely echoing the enlightened priorities of his party and the government it so benevolently leads. After all, why lose sleep over such trivial  matters when there are “far more pressing” concerns to maintain a carefully curated image of progress while sweeping inconvenient protests under the rug?

And so, in a display of rhetorical acrobatics, Kareem likened the ASHA workers' struggle to the Pembilia Oruma (Women’s Unity) strike in Munnar a decade ago, branding it as anarchic and apolitical. A convenient narrative, except for one minor oversight or selective amnesia: the only living founder of his own party, the indomitable VS Achuthanandan, had stood firmly with the Munnar workers back then, offering them his full support. He had conveniently ignored a parallel struggle led by his party MLA at close quarters.

And let none forget - even Kareem’s ever-loyal cadre - that back then, the struggle wasn’t just waged, but won against none other than the corporate goliath Tata Tea, part of the Kanan Devan Hill Plantation,  that once symbolized capitalist exploitation in the CPI(M)’s Old Testament.

Today, the ASHA workers’ struggle is seen as not against some faceless corporate giant but a government that has masterfully absorbed the habits, language and policies of one. How else does one justify the extravagant spending on PSC members’ salaries or the generous payouts to government pleaders when ASHA workers are expected to survive on crumbs?

What’s also forgotten in this long march is that this second consecutive term for the CPI(M) wasn’t just handed to them on a platter; it was also earned through the much-applauded handling of Nipah and COVID-19. The silent warriors in that battle, the very same ASHA workers, are now being treated as an inconvenient footnote.

In a cruel twist of irony, the ASHA workers, denied fair wages by the very government they toiled for, are forced to seek alms from the public to sustain their struggle. But Kareem, the righteous voice of his party, sees this as a pathetic and disgraceful spectacle. But then people in Kerala know his party as one that has proudly rattled donation buckets for decades and turned street-side fund collection into an art form, lending a helping hand even to dear old Cuba, eternally under the “imperialist” siege of the United States.

The new tactic to dismantle a class struggle is simple - stage a parallel one. And so, while ASHA workers fight for survival, the government’s ingenious counter is to shift the battlefield, directing all rage toward the ‘villainous’ Centre which has denied Kerala its rightful dues under the National Health Mission. Forget that in the reply in the Lok Sabha, the Centre stated that it owed only a few lakhs by the end of this fiscal, given the fact that the Centre has mostly been discriminatory to the State.

But behind closed doors, even the party’s seasoned leaders aren’t buying the act. One such leader, in a moment of rare candour, reportedly admitted, “We’ve sent a turncoat to Delhi as our go-getter. Every time we have to stage a protest against the Centre. But, this ‘agent’ gets a fat paycheck increase. If even a fraction of that were given to ASHA workers, this issue could have been settled by now.”