Instead of ossifying into an autocratic force, Kerala's communists embraced electoral politics and since 1957 have been routinely voted into power. Instead of being associated with repression or failure, the party of Marx is widely associated with huge investments in education that have produced a 95 percent literacy rate, the highest in India, and a health-care system where citizens earning only a few dollars a day still qualify for free heart surgery.
This modern incarnation of communism also has produced one of the stranger paradoxes of the global economy: millions of healthy, educated workers setting off to the supercharged, capitalist economies of the Persian Gulf dreaming of riches and increasingly finding them.
Isaac estimated that the government would have to subsidize the workers' salaries for about 10 years, until they retire and their jobs most likely disappear.
He knew such subsidies were possible only because of the decidedly un-communist lives that the younger generations are pursuing. Increasingly, young workers are fleeing Kerala's low wages for the booming states of the Persian Gulf region, leaving Isaac to oversee an economy unlike anything Marx ever imagined — one fueled by global demand for Kerala's healthy, educated workforce. But even with the gulf money, Isaac is running the largest deficit of any Indian state.
As finance minister, Isaac dreams of building new highways, bridges and industrial parks that might make it easier to attract high-paying jobs to Kerala — "the best physical and social infrastructure in all of India!" he often says.
But for now, his government has more pressing priorities: expanding Kerala's four international airports — each of which offers nonstop flights to the gulf — and adding a fifth.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Kerala's migrant workers found employment building highways and skyscrapers in the gulf. These days, their better-educated successors fill jobs overseas as accountants, nurses, lawyers, doctors and mid-level civil servants. More than a third of Kerala's gross domestic product last year came from remittances.