Ally vs ally: In Wayanad, Annie Raja is more than a ‘textbook’ politician. Can she take on Rahul Gandhi?

Despite the insufferable April heat of Kerala, little groups of women stand outside the Communist Party of India office in Wayanad’s Kalpetta, gathering from as far as Manipur and as remote as the Sathyamangalam forests of Tamil Nadu. Emerging from the CPI office, Annie Raja chats and jokes with each of them as they spiritedly hold red flags or balloons bearing her name.

One of the most recognised faces of Left politics in India, Annie has been a constant presence in these women's fights for justice, joining protest grounds of just about anywhere in the country where cries for rights were often ignored. Now, when it is Annie's turn to fight, contesting the Lok Sabha election in Wayanad as the Left Democratic Front candidate, the women are returning the favour to be by her side.

“Women feel free to talk to her, tell her their issues. She knows people, she studies their problems, travelling thousands of kilometres across the country for it,” says Geetha Nazeer, Annie’s comrade in the CPI and member of the Thiruvananthapuram district panchayat.

More an activist than a textbook politician, 60-year-old Annie has been a part of the CPI since before she reached voting age. Now, she is contesting in an election for the first time. Her chosen constituency of Wayanad is of particular interest across India, because Annie will take on one of the biggest names in the Congress party – Rahul Gandhi. In the last election, Gandhi was elected with an exceptionally high margin of over 4.3 lakh votes.

Both the Congress and CPI parties are allies in the grand opposition alliance called INDIA, formed by several ‘secular’ political forces to defeat the governing Bharatiya Janata Party. Yet in Kerala, it is a different story altogether. Electoral fights in the state have always been between the Left and the Congress-led United Democratic Front.

On the morning of April 3, the day Annie filed her nomination, she spoke to this reporter in the short time she got to sit at the party office, between a road show and an afternoon round of campaigning. 

“I’ve never been dependent on anyone. Even as a child, I used to work odd jobs in the neighbourhood and bring back rice for the family. I have worked with people from all walks of life,” Annie says, sipping her midday cup of tea which she calls a bad habit. 

If Comrade gets a pazhampori (banana fritter) with her tea in the evening, she is doubly happy, Annie’s driver in Wayanad tells us. She ensures that everyone around her has their fill too, keeping the motley bunch comfortable and attended to.

An on-ground activist

Annie says her activism took root at a very young age, from a childish need to keep her friends with her. She grew up in Iritty of Kannur near the Aaralam Farm, a forest area and wildlife sanctuary, playing with children of tribal families in the neighbourhood. “I wanted them to play with me at school too, so I'd compel their parents to send the kids to school.”

As a Class 3 student, she raised the Communist flag for the first time, it possibly reaching her hand from her father Thomas, a trade unionist. The day she picked up the red flag, a woman with mental illness pushed her into a well. Annie still bears the mark of the injury from the fall on her face. “The price of carrying the flag came early,” she says. 

At home, she grew up as the youngest of four siblings, the only girl among them. Aparajitha Raja, Annie’s daughter, says that after her mother’s two elder brothers were born, her grandfather had gone underground for a while. This was a time when Communism was banned in parts of India. “There was a gap of a few years before the younger two were born,” says Aparajitha, who often joins her mother’s campaign in Wayanad.

Annie’s mother Mariyamma’s extended family, followers of the Congress party, were not pleased by Annie’s sway to Communism, Aparajitha says. “Grandmother would grumble about a young girl being sent out so often, but she did not protest much. But the extended family were angry she was so active. She’d even organised massive protests at her parallel college.” It must be an irony of fate then, that Annie is now in a direct electoral contest with one of the most popular faces of Congress.

Aparajitha, like Annie, raised a slogan for the first time when she was a child of eight, accompanying her mother to a protest in Delhi. She is now a leader of the All India Youth Federation, the youth organisation of the CPI, following in the footsteps of her parents Annie and D Raja, who is the national general secretary of the party.

Communism and ‘boycott’ by believers

In their young days, both Annie and Raja had worked for the AIYF. Annie was a member of the student wing of the party, the All India Students Forum, from her school days, and took charge of the Mahila Sangam (state women’s wing) in Kannur when she was a bachelor's degree student. It happened under the instructions of PK Vasudevan Nair, a big leader of the CPI who would go on to become chief minister of Kerala.

“I had no idea about any of it, I had not even heard about the concept of gender equality. But I took it up and went to stay with CPI leader Kandalottu Kunhambu and P Yashoda, from whom I learnt a lot,” Annie says. Yashoda, an activist and freedom fighter, is known to be the first woman journalist and teacher from Kerala.

Communism and the travels of a young woman in rural Kerala were not exactly a welcoming picture for the society in the 1980s. Annie had once been a devout Christian, active in church catechism and singing in the choir. She had even wanted to be a nun, until she read a book of essays by rationalist AT Kovoor and asked the priest at the catechism class a doubt.

The ‘doubt’ won her the epithet of devil’s child, and soon, she found herself cut off from the rest of the believers. People at the church would not even talk to her for 32 years, Annie says, until one day, the parish priest of the time spoke of her in high regard, as the pride of the town, as a woman who shone in national politics.

“After that when I went to church, the people who had not spoken to me for 32 years, were hugging and kissing me and asking after me. These are the people who once stamped me as the devil!” Annie says.

Regardless of the name-calling, young Annie walked past the insults with her head held high, as she rose through the rungs of the party. In her early 20s, she was taken into the state committee of the AIYF and given charge of the Mahila Sangam in multiple districts of north Kerala. This was the time that she received a proposal for marriage from Raja. Years before, when one of her female comrades had suggested to another to marry Raja, the second woman scorned the idea of marrying a dark-skinned person. Annie announced to her friends that if the proposal ever came to her she’d marry him.

And that’s exactly what happened. “Comrade Raja and I agreed that there shall be no dowry or adornments like a ‘thaali’,” Annie says.

A voice for women’s rights

Marriage briefly took Annie away to Tamil Nadu to Raja’s home, and later to Delhi when he was made secretary of the AIYF. Annie took a break from party work when Aparajitha was born, and began taking on multiple jobs – teacher, translator, announcer on All India Radio, restaurant worker – to make ends meet. When Aparajitha could cook her own meal by the age of 12, Annie became active in party work again. In a couple of years, she became the general secretary of the National Federation of Indian Women, the women’s wing of the CPI. 

From not knowing what ‘gender equality’ was when she took the reins of Mahila Sangam, Annie grew into a major voice for women’s rights, sometimes turning critical of the actions of even the Left parties, when she thought there was gender discrimination. Only three years ago, soon after the LDF came to power a second time in Kerala, Annie had criticised the Kerala police for their indifference towards women’s safety. She has never faced it at her home, or her party, she tells me, so she feels all the more enraged at the slightest injustice against women. 

Annie, however, did not limit herself to women’s issues. “She would rush to any remote area in any state as soon as she hears of an issue impacting people there, be it in Manipur, Chhattisgarh, or Kashmir. She, along with the likes of Aruna Roy had played a role in the legislation of the Right To Information Act and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act,” says her CPI comrade Geetha.

Annie also began collaborating with organisations like Act Now for Harmony and Democracy, which was formed in the wake of the 2002 Gujarat riots. Shabnam Hashmi, the activist who founded ANHAD, talks of the role that Annie and the NFIW have played in many of their campaigns, especially those involving women. From the long fight for reservation of women in governing bodies to the recent women’s movement called ‘I too am Rani Chennamma’ against the fascist forces in the country, Annie has been an integral part of many campaigns that worked for the rights of people. 

Both Shabnam and Geetha call her a fearless person, while Aparajitha adds another quality: organising skills. Shabnam too had witnessed this during a campaign, when vehicles that were meant to carry teams of women across 200 cities could not reach them, and Annie sat down to make as many calls as it’d take to arrange alternatives in time.

But Shabnam is unhappy with the Left’s choice of fielding her in Wayanad, against Rahul Gandhi. “If the party really wants her in the Parliament, they should have given her a safe seat. We would love to have both of them in the Parliament. Rahul Gandhi is national leader of a major political party and Annie represents the women's movement.”

Taking on Rahul Gandhi

This has been an issue of contention between the Left and the Congress, who are allies in the INDIA bloc. The Left has been blaming the Congress for bringing Rahul Gandhi to Kerala, where his fight would not be with the BJP but with an ally. The Congress in turn question the Left for speaking against Rahul while they are an ally.

Though she refrains from commenting about Rahul as a political leader, Annie minces no words in criticising her opponent’s performance as Wayanad’s incumbent MP. She says that people of Wayanad tell her he had done little for them in his years as an MP, and that he is insulting them by contesting from the same place again.

“An alliance should make adjustments. Why does the Congress fail to recognise the country’s biggest threat today?” she asks. The BJP is looting the country, she says, and calls electoral bonds “nothing but corruption in the guise of law”.

“I'd say that the most corrupt person in free India today is Prime Minister Narendra Modi. They will destroy the federal system of our country,” Annie says.

Annie had fought the BJP by fiercely supporting the many protests against them and risking arrest. She went multiple times to join the 2020-21 farmers’ protest against the BJP’s now-repealed farm laws. She was in Kashmir when there was unrest over the union government’s abrogation of Article 370, essentially revoking the state’s ‘special’ status. Last year she was slapped with a case for calling the Manipur violence “state-sponsored”.

“She and I were both arrested when we went to Jantar Mantar to support the wrestlers’ protest. Wherever there is unrest or injustice, she will be there,” says Kamaljeet from Punjab, national secretary of NFIW who flew down to Wayanad to support Annie. She also speaks of Annie’s ability to switch between languages – Malayalam, Hindi, English, and Tamil – that brings her close to people. 

A woman’s woman

Along with Kamaljeet is Nisha Sidhu of the NFIW from Rajasthan, and Glady Vaiphei Hunjan, a Manipuri entrepreneur and vice president of a tribal women’s forum in Delhi.

“I am from the Kuki-Zo community. When there was conflict in Manipur, Annie Raja stood with us for everything. She had an FIR against her because she stood with us. It is not easy for minority voices to be heard, but it means a lot when someone like her stands with us,” Glady says. 

In a homestay in Munderi, hardly three kilometres from Kalpetta, stays another group of women who came from the Sathyamangalam Forest in Tamil Nadu to support ‘Amma’ (a Tamil endearment for women). They are the survivors of harassment by police who put them in prison for nine years during their search for forest brigand Veerappan. They were later found innocent by a court, but the compensation that was promised to them so many years ago has still not reached them.

Chinnaponnu, hurriedly running with her red and white balloons bearing Annie’s photo, says they have known Amma for 16 years. “She had helped a lot in fighting for the compensation. With her intervention, we are now very close to getting it,” she says. 

More women from different parts of the country are expected to join the campaign, from Kashmir and from Shaheen Bagh, where Muslim women had camped for months in protest against the attack on students in Delhi who had peacefully protested against the Citizenship Amendment Act of the union government. This was yet another protest for rights that Annie had stood with. 

Annie rushes towards these people in trouble, not always as an activist enraged by perpetrators of injustice, but also as an empathetic woman who feels for the victims and the bereaved, says Aparajitha. When a 16-year-old boy was lynched on a train in a hate crime seven years ago, Annie’s heart bled for the mother who lost her son, she says.

“It shows a certain essence of how she looks at her politics. She allows space for emotion, shunning theories that politics has to be driven by rationality, that it has to be cold and calculated and strategic. That is something I picked up from my mother, that emotion and rationality are not necessarily opposing poles,” Aparajitha says.

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