Kerala polls are facing a western (Asia) disturbance | Number Theory

.

Kerala will vote to elect a new government on April 9. Politics in what is an extremely politicized state is competing with the intense heat in the weather. But the state’s body politic is also dealing with an intense ‘western disturbance’: the war in West Asia and its impact on millions of Malayalis who are directly or indirectly invested in the region. Here are three charts which explain the argument in detail.

Artistes perform 'Velakali', a traditional martial dance-drama from Kerala, in Thiruvananthapuram. (PTI)

“Several Indians working in the Gulf said they were more worried about the risk to job security than personal safety”, A Financial Times story published on March 24 said. If not for the raging war in West Asia, newsrooms would have been reporting on the Malayali diaspora flying home to vote in their elections.

Kerala polls are facing a western (Asia) disturbance

• 
  The Gulf still anchors Kerala’s emigration story

  Last year, HT reported on a paper published by Chinmay Tumbe, a historian at IIM Ahmedabad, that showed there were “more people who speak Tamil or Malayalam as their mother tongue outside India than outside the states of Tamil Nadu or Kerala within India”. For Malayalam speakers, the international diaspora was 1.9 times the internal diaspora, the largest in proportional terms among speakers of nine major Indian languages. The importance of emigrants in Kerala is not something new. The state has always acknowledged it; be it in jokes of a Malayali running a tea-shop on the moon or the state’s pre-eminent economic research institute, Centre for Development Studies, conducting various rounds of the Kerala Migration Survey (KMS). The latest iteration of the KMS, conducted in 2023, shows that there were 2.2 million emigrants who went abroad from Kerala. While some of the more recent increase in emigrant Malayalis is on account of occupational categories such as students and to countries in Europe, North America, etc. But the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries still accounted for an overwhelming 80.5% of the total emigrants. The UAE alone accounts for 38.6% of all emigrants from Kerala, followed by Saudi Arabia at 16.9% and Qatar at 9.1%. There is no other way to put it: these Malayalis are living in a war zone at the moment.
• 
  Remittances are crucial for Kerala’s economy

  According to the KMS, total remittances to Kerala stood at ₹2,16,893 crore in 2023, up sharply from ₹85,092 crore in 2018. That is equivalent to 23.2% of Kerala’s NSDP and about 1.6 times the state government’s revenue receipts, underlining how central migrant money remains to the state economy. Remittances have been the most crucial element in the “Kerala Model of Development”. A 2022 paper by economist KP Kannan argues that the post-1980s growth acceleration in Kerala was “largely contributed by the increasing flow of remittances” made possible by large-scale migration to Gulf countries.
• 
  Even before the war, the old Gulf model was under strain for the outward looking Malayali

  The number of return emigrants rose from 1.3 million in 2018 to 1.8 million in 2023, the sharpest increase seen in the KMS series, indicating a growing strain in Kerala’s long-standing Gulf migration model. What stands out is that most of those (more than 90%) who returned, came back disappointed. Job loss or layoffs was the single biggest reason cited for return at 18.4%. “This increase over the last few years had been expected due to the global health crisis-induced economic disruptions, stricter immigration policies, and a significant reduction in available job opportunities. Many migrants found themselves in an untenable position, unable to find new employment while also facing mounting pressures,” said the report. Only 4.4% of return migrants stated that they returned after achieving their goals. As many as 86.4% of returnees came from GCC countries, led by the UAE at 36% and Saudi Arabia at 30.1%.