Kerala is about to go to the polls. Here is the time when we can look back and ask yourself : What have we campaigned about? Have we discussed any National issues that the next Parliament will have to deal with? Or any national issues which the last Parliament failed to address? The Left Front withdrew support to the UPA Govt last July on the issue of the Indo-US Nuclear deal. The Congress, leading force of the UPA alliance, and CPM, the leading force of the Left Front, are facing head on in Kerala. So this Nuclear deal should have been an issue of discussion in our Election campaign. But it was not to be. Not even the BJP raised this issue. Instead we discussed Madani and Sufia as well as the past cases and the past positions regarding them. Overnight they became heroes to some and criminals to others. We heard all communal organizations in the state extorting people whom to vote and where! Even the missile deal with Israel Aerospace Industry became a point of discussion just because a Keralite, Mr. A.K Antony happened to be the Union Minister of Defense and is involved in the deal. Or else we wouldn’t have discussed that issue either.

“One state outside the big four (Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh) that has seen high numbers of farmers suicides is Kerala. It saw a total of 11,516 suicides from 1997-2005.Worse, many of these occurred in small districts like Wayanad”, wrote Mr. Sainath in The Hindu two years ago (The Hindu, Nov 15 2007). The situation has not completely changed since then, except that, the suicides of farmers have ceased to be News in our media now. Following the path of the media, we refused to raise issues of farmers woes, debt waivers etc in the election campaign.

Everything, including our interests and concerns has got localized. The newspapers with so many editions have localized the issues. Foreign affairs get very little space in today’s Vernacular media (print and visual) in Malayalam. Thus we live in small circles of immediate “intimate” concerns, and don’t care much for men and matters outside that circle. On the other hand the technology had widened our horizon with the modern, all-pervasive world of the computer, internet, E-mail, mobile phones, etc etc. And here, we are in a paradoxical situation. The physical world to which one can have access has widened. But the mental space has got reduced and localized. Psychological Lilliputians living in bigger world space, that we are.