Cleric for all seasons

A decade and a half ago, before the first of his many brushes with the law for his communally charged speeches after the Babri Masjid fell...

A decade and a half ago, before the first of his many brushes with the law for his communally charged speeches after the Babri Masjid fell, Abdul Nasser Mahdani was little more than a local cleric in Kollam with a particularly fiery tongue, running an orphanage on the side.

Then suddenly, he was in the news, busy mopping up the disgruntled from the soft-pedaling Muslim League, roping in the angry young men in the community, to launch the Islamic Sewak Sangh ISS, an extremist outfit taking off from the RSS to take on the RSS. The post-Babri angst was building up in Kerala and Mahdani, one leg blown away in an RSS attack, never had to look back. Not even after the ISS was banned and he had to rally his men into a new outfit with a political face, the People8217;s Democratic Party PDP.

He grew so rapidly that some nine years ago, the late Marxist ideologue E.M.S. Nambuthiripad spoke of this man in the same breath as Mahatma Gandhi. Two years ago, the Kerala Assembly passed an unprecedented unanimous resolution that the Congress moved, seeking his release from jail where he was an undertrial in the 1998 Coimbatore serial bomb blasts case.

Last year, he was almost the Left8217;s poster boy in an important assembly bypoll, even from jail. And now, two days after acquittal in the blasts case, Mahdani is Kerala8217;s most sought-after Muslim politician, for both coalitions.

In the early days, Mahdani8217;s USP was his promise of a fighting alternative for the dismayed ranks in the community8217;s only cohesive outfit of consequence, the Muslim League. Mahdani projected his outfit as a counter to the League that had appeared to tone down its post-Babri Masjid outrage to keep its place in the Congress-led UDF that ruled Kerala in 1992. If his ISS had a non-political and clearly extremist pitch, with the PDP, Mahdani began consolidating the community8217;s fringe elements into a vote bank.

The Muslim League8217;s slide had become pronounced by the late 1990s. Over 24 per cent or nearly one out of every four Keralites is Muslim, and the win-lose margin between the state8217;s Left and Congress coalitions is often below two per cent. But outside of the crumbling League, the community has no significant rallying platform of its own. No outfit can survive outside of the coalitions either.

Sensing Mahdani8217;s potential, Nambuthiripad, steering the Kerala Left which was trying to build bridges with the Muslims, suggested the Left could work with Mahdani in the late 1990s, saying he could not be deemed untouchable just because he believed in his religion. Theirs was no honeymoon, though. Mahdani was arrested discreetly in 1998 on another charge, while E.K. Nayanar8217;s Left government ruled the state. He was immediately handed over to Tamil Nadu, to be charged for the Coimbatore bomb blasts, locked up in jail. This happened while the Left was weighing its chances of doing business with the Muslim League, which was unhappy in the Congress coalition, and did not want Mahdani in the way.

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The Congress-UDF immediately declared his release from jail as a poll promise, and the PDP backed the Congress coalition that swept the polls. But things changed yet again. The Congress government, with the League as a major constituent, officially asked Tamil Nadu not to let out Mahdani on parole from jail.

With Mahdani making no bones about his disappointment with the Congress, the Left began rooting for him again. CPM state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan himself called on Mahdani in jail.

As things stand, both political fronts in Kerala are wooing the cleric, who has announced he would now broadbase his outfit to absorb dalits and other non-Muslim sections. That could well mean the PDP8217;s aspiring suitors no longer need agonise about its communal label.