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Journalism of Courage
No case for complacency against communalism
There are many reasons why the warning against the growth of Muslim communal forces in Kerala sounded recently by state CPI(M) general secretary Pinarayi Vijayan merits attention. The political authorship of the alarm is what distinguishes it. The state’s ruling Left Democratic Front, and its Marxist spearhead in particular, have in the past been accused of being soft on such minority communalism and of strengthening it. Their critics have, time and again, assailed the line of “appeasement” as evidenced in the Left’s alliance with the Indian Union Muslim League. E.M.S. Namboodiripad has repeatedly been held responsible for communalising the state’s politics considerably by creating the Muslim-majority Malappuram district in the late sixties. In the more recent past, too, it is in clashes with the RSS cadres in different parts of Kerala that the militancy of the Marxists has been most frequently manifest. It might have seemed, in fact, that the CPI(M) hadno cause for undue concern over minority extremism after the political rout of the rebellion sought to be mounted by Abdul Madani. Vijayan’s reported observations about the burgeoning activities of Muslim extremist organisations reveal a situation that has gone unnoticed beyond the state’s borders. Especially noteworthy is the Marxist anxiety about the mu- scle-flexing by the National Democratic Front (NDF), even while more avowedly communal organisations committed to an unholy `jehad’ have been mushrooming.
The other reason for caution is the attempt by the NDF to deny its suspected Coimbatore connection. Some of its members were arrested for alleged involvement in the bomb blasts that shook the textile city of Tamil Nadu over a year ago. By expelling them subsequently, the NDF has not erased evidence pointing to its involvement in incidents of minority extremism in both Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Post-Coimbatore police investigations have made clear that communal terrorism, like its ultra-Left counterpart,cannot be effectively combated within the boundaries of single states. The warning, thus, is not addressed to Kerala alone. But, the lesson, and this needs to be emphasised, does not concern only law and order exercises or the targeting of one particular type of communalism.
It would be simplistic to treat the incidents at Coimbatore as violence occurring in a vacuum, and not trace them back to Tamil Nadu’s communal conflicts over which political parties have chosen to keep a tacit and tactical silence through the years. In much the same way, the minority extremism that worries the Marxists in Kerala would not have grown to its present proportions without support from the political establishment and provocation from the majority community. It follows then that minority communalism cannot be fought with any degree of success without denying space and succour to its alleged adversary. `Fundamentalisms’ of the majority and minority kinds have always fed on each other. This is the fundamental fact that needs tobe faced — in Kerala and elsewhere in the country.
