Kerala politics

Now here's an ambitious topic! What a lot of it there is, and so many political parties, complex alliances, corruption charges, posters, marches, and demonstrations galore!

I can't claim to have got my mind around it to a very useful degree, or around Indian politics generally, but it's rather magnificent to get a glimpse of it all.

Here are a few pictures I snapped, which illustrate some of it. In recent times, Kerala's often been governed by a left wing alliance led by the Communist Party of India Marxist. When they are out of power it's been a coalition led by the good old Congress Party. The third big force in Indian politics - 'new broom' Prime Minister Narendra Modi's BJP - hasn't yet quite got there in Kerala, but we saw a very serious and enthusiastic march by a group of supporters, waving their new brooms and machetes rather menacingly to signal their intent to clean up the place.

Another march, pictured below, was by supporters of the incumbent Congress state government. They too looked rather joyless. They looked very convinced indeed about the seriousness of their task (to keep it unclean maybe!) or dare I suggest that they were just being paid to do it?

You'll notice there are four different brands of communist parties represented in these pictures. As I said, it's complicated. Here's Wikipedia on Kerala politics. They know it better than me:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Kerala

The burnt-out bus? I'm not sure. It's on the border between Kerala and Tamil Nadu. I tried to find references to it, and learned that in September last year, in response to the jailing of the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister for corruption, there was widespread rioting, and burning of government buildings and buses. Maybe this was one of those buses? And I just read that before her political career, she had been a film star - that's another common quirk of Indian politics.

Where three seas meet?

I'm looking at my Comprehensive Times Atlas of the World, and it almost works. They've marked the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Bay of Bengal. But do they really come together at Kanyakumari (Cape Comorin), the southernmost point of mainland India? The tourist slogan says they do, and it's rumoured they even sell presentation boxes with sand of three colours, from the relevant three beaches, though we didn't see any of these.

The trouble is, when you look at a larger scale map, like my 1:2,500,000 Marco Polo 'India', you see that the only sea that's right there actually goes by the name of the Lakshadweep Sea.

Whatever the detail around that, Kanyakumari is a spectacular place. That applies especially for the peak holiday and Pilgrimage season between Christmas and New Year, when we were there. What a massive crowd! Most of them wanted to see the sunset and the sunrise, visit the ghats and the big Hindu temple, and take the ferry out to the offshore structures that commemorate the Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar and the Hindu apostle Swami Vivekananda. There's also a Gandhi memorial building, where some of his ashes are stored.

Mostly we just wandered around, enjoying the colour and the crowds.

Colourful women of Tamil Nadu

Being pilgrim season in southern India, it's entirely possible most of these women aren't actually from Tamil Nadu itself. We were in the southernmost city of Kanyakumari (Cape Comorin), and it was extremely heavily pilgrimmed at the time.