Just a few months after the 1917 October Revolution — when Lenin held on to a reading stand in the Congress in Petrograd and said, his eyes twinkling, “We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order” — thousands of kilometres away, in Cochin, a young, firebrand social reformer called Sahodaran Ayyappan wrote a poem about Russia waking up from the great slavery.

“Write a non a similar saga here, comrades,” he exhorted in Malayalam. That was arguably the first time the word “sakhakkale” – comrades – was used in Malayalam. Over the next 100 years, as communism took deep roots in the land, that word rang out from movies and plays, from speeches, songs and slogans. KK Shailaja — who has been described as “coronavirus slayer” and “rock star health minister” by Laura Spinney in The Guardian and one of the top 50 world thinkers by the Prospect magazine in 2020 for spearheading Kerala’s massive fight against the Covid-19 pandemic in its chaotic and terrifying early years — shrugs away those grand adjectives and chooses that deceptively simple word, comrade, to define her. As the title of her memoir My Life as a Comrade —one of the rare autobiographies of a female communist in India — reveals, her life and her ideology are inseparably fused. But there is a hierarchy even in that assimilation, she interjects: “First comes the party, then me.”

At the Kerala House in Delhi where I meet Shailaja, now a CPI(M) MLA, the lounge is still plastered with the pandemic slogan her team had coined when she was a minister — Break the Chain. New virus strains are still in the air. She does not hold a portfolio in the second Pinarayi Vijayan cabinet that the CM packed with newcomers — her absence had caused much heartbreak among the people —but she is still reading up and thinking about how best to fight this stage of the pandemic. “Covid hasn’t gone. I keep looking at the number of cases.

Post-Covid diseases have to be studied. People with symptoms should be taught to self-isolate. Earlier the government put you in quarantine; now you have to do it yourself. We should give special attention to people with comorbidities and increase facilities for people to test their heart, lungs and liver to detect any post-Covid problem,” says the 66-year-old.

What does the word comrade mean? “Being a comrade means to live and work for the society,” she says. “There are a lot of social evils. The reformers who went before us gave us the freedom to study, to work, to wear clothes, to build houses. But there are still problems that we need to solve. I chose to be with the Left to do that. I believe in the equality of people, that the society should be free of the exploitation which is the hallmark of capitalism, that we need to fight against the remnants of feudalism – casteism is still there. But one person cannot fight this. It requires a collective effort.”

A comrade doesn’t stand in isolation — she derives her identity from her association with others. So, when Shailaja talks about her life, it is never hers alone. She roots herself in the political and social milieu of her home and her village – the small and big struggles against inequalities and injustices. A child of divorced parents, a rarity in the 1960s, Shailaja grew up in a house full of women. The Left politics has been in many ways an inheritance for her. In the 1940s, her grandmother Kalyani, from the backward community Ezhava, would go to the Communist party’s classes with her Dalit friend Karutha “like two renegade girlfriends”. Kalyani insisted that “Karutha wear a mundu although caste rules forbade it”. Kalyani’s brother Krishnan was shot at during the Salem Jail massacre of 1950 in which 22 communist prisoners were killed. Krishnan, says Shailaja, carried a bullet lodged in his temple all his life. Shailaja’s is also a story of her party – from a banned organisation even in parts of inde -p e n d e n t India to one that has been returned to power in Kerala. How has the arc of the party changed? “The arc of the party is the same – it has the same distance and the same radius. But the situation is different,” she says. “When my granduncles fought against feudal jenmis and British imperialism, the enemies were visible, and so they fought directly and visibly. Now the enemy is not visible, you don’t see the capitalist who is exploiting the working class. So the way one has to fight it is also different.”

Shailaja was born in 1957, the year one of the first democratically elected communist governments in the world came to power, under EMS Namboodiripad, in Kerala. At the age of 20 , soon after Emergency ended, she became a member of the local CPI(M) branch. “After the Emergency I could not hold myself back. We had to fight back,” she says. “My uncle and Pinarayi (Vijayan) were among the hundreds who were tortured during Emergency.Pinarayi’s shoulder was smashed and he could not lift his head properly. Somehow that part has gone missing from the final editing of my book. I should put it back in the Malayalam translation,” she adds.

In 2016, Shailaja, a third-time MLA, became the health minister under the first Pinarayi government. She had no inkling of the storms she would face over the next five years—a cyclone, a flood, the virulent Nipah disease with “a terrifying mortality rate” and, finally, Covid. All she thought deeply about was: “What would be my term’s contribution to Kerala’s health story?” She decided on an ambitious plan to make huge improvements to the public healthcare system – from primary health centres to medical colleges. Little did she know that she was putting in order a system that could tackle a once-in-a-century pandemic. Much later when people would go to their nearby PHCs to get their Covid vaccine shots, they would marvel at how the centres had undergone a transformation.

THE COVID WARRIOR
Sometime in the middle of January 2020, Shailaja was reading about a new viral disease spreading out from Wuhan in China. She knew there were Malayali students in Wuhan and her then health secretary Rajan Khobragade confirmed that they would soon be coming home for holidays. By January 26, she ensured that a rapid response team was formed, a control centre was opened, guidelines on sample collection, surveillance and home isolation were prepared and medical teams were stationed at all airports in Kerala for passengers to report symptoms. The lessons in containing the Nipah disease of 2018 came handy.

On January 27, a flight landed with medical students from Wuhan—three of them reported symptoms. Three days later, one of them tested positive — India’s first Covid-19 patient. And Shailaja’s massive virus hunt began.

Her team would start tracking every possible contact of patients and isolating them. By the end of her term in May 2021, Kerala’s case fatality rate was only 0.3% while India’s was 1.1%.

Kerala had recorded 22,33,904 cases but the toll was only 6,852. A former science teacher in a school– why she’s still fondly called “Shailaja Teacher” – she would say science and data were her guiding lights. “I wanted to protect the people till a vaccine arrived,” she says.

Shailaja acknowledges that a collective effort was behind Kerala’s response to Covid, but she is also conscious of her role in leading that. She is equally aware of the eagerness to deride a woman in a leadership position. “When men talk about their achievements, they are just stating facts. When women do, that’s propaganda,” she says, alluding to allegations that she had mounted a public relations campaign to get global acclaim. “I never had any PR,” she adds. “When Laura Spinney wrote that article, maybe the headline [‘The coronavirus slayer! How Kerala’s rock star health minister helped save it from Covid-19’] could have been different but it created so much irritation.”

On the allegations of Kerala hiding Covid deaths, she writes, “In 2021 when there was massive caseload it is possible there were high numbers of omissions, but in 2020 when it was a completely different scenario of lower numbers and strong tracking it was just not possible. Also, in 2021, the norms were changed by the central government and… death of anyone who had recently recovered from Covid were also to be included in the official Covid death count.”

The public health response of Kerala, says Shailaja, was of a socialist state in action. “Believing in the power of the people is at the heart of the communist ideology. We wanted vaccines to be available for everyone. Everyone who needed to be tested should be tested.

Our response was well-planned, decentralised and organised.” Who are her political heroes? “There are so many. EK Nayanar [former Kerala CM], for solving knotty issues with a touch of humor. Pinarayi, for taking the right decisions at the right time and for standing firm on those decisions. KR Gouri Amma, for studying issues so deeply that she would become an authority on them.” Will Kerala have a female chief minister? “I can’t predict that, but if the question is about me, the answer is no.

In my political life, I have been a fourtime MLA and a minister. There are a lot of women who haven’t even become MLA once. We should make space for them.”