THIRUVANANANTHAPURAM, KERALA
Mao Ze Dong is dead. Long live Mao. That, of late, has become the subcontinent’scredo. And after Nepal, pan-Maoism has trained its sights on Kerala. The April 30 raid byPorattam, a self-styled Maoist group, on the nodal office of the Asian Development Bank(ADB) in Thiruvananthapuram only emphasises that threat. South India, particularly AndhraPradesh and Kerala, has had a tradition of ultra-left politics ever since the ’70s.The legacy is still alive and ticking in Andhra, while in Kerala it had witnessed a longlull. But the latent ‘radicalism’ has come to the fore now, thanks to thegovernment’s five-year-long pursuit of an ADB loan.