# Ajayan | History will simply etch this LDF Government, under the ever-so-valiant Pinarayi Vijayan, as the finest juggler of ideals Kerala has ever seen. A true masterstroke in reinvention - Robin Hood 2.0 - except, of course, the script has been flipped. Why bother robbing the rich to help the poor when you can simply squeeze the last penny from the struggling masses and funnel it into the coffers of the well-heeled, seems to be the slogan goading those at the helm.
That famous Robin Hood quip, “They’re nothing more than thieves, just like me. Thieves with crowns”, feels almost tailor-made for the present regime. Only, here the crown isn't jewelled; it’s polished with the sheen of indifference.
As the common man gasps for breath under the crushing weight of rising prices, vanishing opportunities and unpaid welfare pensions that barely qualify as subsistence, the government appears to have discovered its true passion: lavishly draining public coffers on men of straw, snugly perched in the Public Service Commission. As many as 21 people are to get a hiked salary of Rs 3.8 lakh and a pension of over Rs 1 lakh after being in office for just six years. It's not just an isolated incident; it's a recurring theme. Ever since securing its second term, the LDF has perfected the fine art of indifference, transforming apathy into official policy.
The Pinarayi-led Cabinet is a beacon of benevolence, that is if one is a PSC member. While the Government generously hiked the salaries of PSC members to a few more lakhs, lakhs of ASHA workers, the very backbone of grassroots healthcare, are left to shout themselves hoarse right under the nose of the State administration. And what is their crime? Daring to ask for a marginal bump in their meagre Rs 7,500 monthly honorarium and the clearance of long-pending arrears.
The so-called champions of the working class seem to have embraced a new mantra: why bother with the foot soldiers of public health when the generals of bureaucracy can lounge in luxury. After all, in the grand scheme of this government’s priorities, slogging in the sun seems far less rewarding than sitting in air-conditioned offices, penning policies that conveniently forget the hands that hold the system together.
The backlog of welfare pensions grows taller than the election promise of raising the pension from Rs 1,600 to Rs 2,500 which still floats somewhere in the political stratosphere. But the doors of the Public Service Commission swing wide open, certainly not for the brightest minds, but for the right ones, politically blessed and intellectually exempt. To secure this seat, all they need is to flash the party card, and a lifetime pension rolls in, dwarfing the crumbs the elderly and disabled are still begging for.
History is a mere inconvenience in the gospel of Kerala’s bourgeois Left. Take the KIIFB miracle, for instance, a glorious elixir of development brewed entirely on borrowed money. And who could be better to ring the ceremonial bell at the London Stock Exchange for this than Comrade Pinarayi himself? But the irony is that even the modest roads built with this borrowed fortune will now come with toll booths, because, apparently, progress comes with a price tag. And as for the inconvenient detail that Pinarayi, in his avatar as CPM State secretary, once vehemently opposed toll collection on national highways, the answer is collective amnesia is the order of the day. Comrades, forget the past, embrace the tolls, because nothing screams pro-people quite like forcing everyone to pay for roads they've already paid for.
And it’s little surprise then as the prophet Karl Marx nailed it ages ago: “The full man does not understand the wants of the hungry.” Neither does the comfortably full regime running the show. And yet, the streets echo with the same tired slogans of a government that champions the cause of the downtrodden.
