© KR Sunil
Culture & Living
During her tenure, Kerala’s forward-thinking minister of health and social justice has adeptly handled first the infectious Nipah virus, and now the pandemic. Today, her name features among the small set of women in power who are lauded globally for their response to the crisis
There are five of us at the table, a party of unlikely companions. At the head sits my trusted taxi driver Sudheer T, I am to his right, then Dr Latheesh KV, a public health official; on the opposite side, KK Shailaja, the minister for health, social justice and women and child development in Kerala’s Left Democratic Front-led government, and K Bhaskaran, the minister’s husband. We are seated around an oval table at the minister’s home, eating a late lunch on the first day of the Onam holiday season: two kinds of matta rice, turmeric-hued nadan fish curry, fried river fish, two kinds of vegetables and three different payasams for dessert, laced with the twang of north Kerala’s Malabar region of Kannur. Sudheer and I have been to many places over the years, but we had never shared a table, and it is for the first time, as guests of KK Shailaja, that we sit and eat together.
Shailaja has come home after months away in Thiruvananthapuram, the state capital. When I enter, I notice the boundary wall surrounding her two-storey home is short; over the tops of the potted bougainvillea you can see the health minister sitting in the verandah with her husband. There’s no security detail or mark of pomp. Just two things give a hint of affiliation and significance of the household: the Kerala government-issued Toyota Innova that looks more impressive because of the narrow driveway and a flagstaff with the white-sickle crimson-red flag of the Communist Party. “Have you ever seen a chenkodi in front of a house?” asks her husband. ‘Chenkodi’ is a portmanteau Malayalam word for ‘red flag’. “It is there because it represents everything that our life is about,” he tells me.
To hear this couple tell their story, leftist politics and its egalitarian approach towards many things—from their marriage to their hospitality—informs the way they approach the world and run their home. It is this outlook that has transformed this former school physics teacher into a global icon in India’s fight against COVID-19.
Over these past five years, chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s government has dealt with unprecedented crises. A few Biblical disasters short of the whole list, there have been two floods, a cyclone, and two infectious disease outbreaks, first the Nipah virus in 2018 and now COVID-19. The health department’s early planning and prescient action saw Vijayan enforce a partial shutdown, even before the WHO categorised COVID-19 as a pandemic, and weeks before India’s central government announced a lockdown.
That swift action brought down cases in Kerala to ‘zero’ for a time, and Shailaja was hailed as ‘The Coronavirus Slayer’. Till, of course, travel restrictions lifted, lockdown ended and numbers once again began to escalate. “Kerala was criticised for overreacting, but we knew it was very infectious. We don’t have the resources to manage large amount of patients so we had to make sure numbers were low,” she says. At the time of this issue going to press, Kerala has 92,164 active cases and has registered 906 deaths, while 1,60,253 people have recovered. “Right now, when a patient goes to a hospital, there are beds available, nobody is being turned away from lack of capacity. We have to maintain that,” she adds.
In June, Shailaja was honoured by the UN for Kerala’s effective management of the pandemic, and even today, she is counted among a handful of women leaders (like New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, Germany’s Angela Merkel and Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen) who responded accurately to the crisis. The WHO has also commended Kerala’s health ministry for its work in prevention and control of non-communicable diseases. This an unprecedented achievement for a health system in a state with a weak exchequer.
Shailaja has also developed a reputation as a minister willing to lead from ground zero. When the Nipah virus took hold in a village in Kozhikode, she went there, so that frightened villagers wouldn’t flee, and stayed on to direct hospital services. In August, when an Air India flight coming from the UAE skidded off the Kozhikode airport runway killing 20 people, Shailaja visited the site immediately, despite the threat of COVID-19. She had to self-quarantine for two weeks upon her return. “There’s no time to be scared,” she says, “More than fear, I feel an enthusiasm to get involved.”
Shailaja’s management style and the way she has approached the challenges of these last four years have been honed by decades of work in the Communist Party and its influence on her family. Her grandmother, uncles, husband and she are all battle-scarred social activists and demonstrators, though she’s the only one to become a successful politician. “My first memory of politics is holding my grandmother’s hand at a political meeting. I didn’t know what was going on, but that atmosphere stayed with me.”
In the early 2000s, a police officer hurled a brick into a crowd of protesters objecting to police action against a tribal settlement, and hit the future health minister on the head. “She had six stitches,” recalls Bhaskaran. “But when you’re in the middle of a heated situation, you don’t care what the police will do, you know you will get hit.”
Bhaskaran and Shailaja met as young party workers and married in 1981, uniting two families with similar political leanings. At 69, he is a retired school headmaster and, probably because they first met as colleagues, she still refers to him as Maashu, an epithet commonly used in relation to male teachers. Theirs is a very unique partnership, especially for Kerala, which has a distressingly high number of educated unemployed women, yet females are rarely seen in positions of power. In fact, Kerala has never had a woman as chief minister.
In the Communist Party of India (Marxist), it is the leadership that decides who stands for elections. In 1996, Shailaja was offered a ticket from the Koothuparambu constituency, considered a bastion of senior party leaders. She won, and that victory marked the beginning of her now vaunted career. “When we got married, Maashu told everyone, ‘She goes out, just like me; there’s no difference.’ I’d finish from school, where I was teaching, then attend party meetings and when I came home, my mother-in-law would ask me how it went and we would discuss it, so there was always support,” says Shailaja.
Politics is not a nine-to-five job, and since they’re all spread out, the family has created a routine around her wayward work hours: they have a video call to check in together, often around midnight. Bhaskaran is a Kerala history buff who recalls dates and incidents with Wikipedian efficiency and he recently began writing short stories with historical characters. When she’s away from home, he messages her a copy of his stories. “I read it at night after work. If I haven’t read it then he feels bad. He’s very talented, maybe when he’s got enough of them we can make it into a book,” says the minister who has authored two non-fiction titles.
Read the complete interview in Vogue India’s November 2020 issue that hit stands on November 9, 2020. Subscribe here
Manju Sara Rajan is co-authoring a book with KK Shailaja on Kerala’s public health system and the state’s COVID response, releasing on Juggernaut Books in 2021
Photographed by KR Sunil. Bookings editor: Jay Modi
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