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Journalism of Courage
In Kerala, militant fundamentalism is now hogging the inviting political space that the two coalition fronts have kept open, for a legitimacy that it never managed to have before. But no one is complaining, not when few Malayalis can tell 8212; or care to tell 8212; a fundamentalist from a Kathakali artiste. The fissures run deep enough to have homeless Hindu victims of the tsunami refuse houses the Christian church offered to build them, or the Sangh Parivar keep every Muslim man, woman and child in an entire strife-torn village in exile for over a year 8212; or cash rich Muslim extremist outfits continuing to Talibanise their captive pockets, feeding on a heightening paranoia that Kerala never knew earlier.
Kerala8217;s extremist outfits are moving out of the shadows, to decisively legitimate political positions. That hadn8217;t happened overnight. Seventeen years ago, Marxist idealogue E.M.S. Nambuthiripad had compared a fiery young man on crutches to Mahatma Gandhi, declaring that practising their respective religions could not make either of them less secular, or less acceptable to the Left. Nine years later, the man he legitimised was in jail. He still is: Abdul Nasser Mahdani, key accused in the 1998 Coimbatore bomb blasts that killed 59 people.
A year ago, the same ruling UDF that had surreptitiously faxed a missive to Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu asking that Mahdani be kept in jail or else he would wreck peace in Kerala pushed a resolution in the state assembly seeking to let him out for medical treatment. But the CPM did one better. It changed that to read Mahdani8217;s release, and got it passed unanimously.
This Assembly Poll, the PDP is in the Left camp, breaking bread with the Jamaat-e-Islami, another outfit that the comrades had always called communal. Giving both company is the Indian National League, a post-1992 spin-off from the same Muslim League that had first tasted political power in a CPM-led coalition government8212; but condemned later as communal once it went with the Congress. There8217;s also the ultra-conservative Sunni section of Kathapuram A.P. Abubacker Musaliar who figured in the murder of a prominent liberal Muslim cleric gleefully holding up the Left rump along with a huge Mujahid section, while the SNDP, exaggeratedly claiming to be the political arbiter for Hindu Ezhavas, Kerala8217;s largest caste formation, takes care of that angle.
Not that the Congress-led UDF couldn8217;t reap its own fundamentalist crop. It is banking on Jem Iyyathul Ulema, one of the largest Muslim pressure groups, to see it through the assembly poll in many north Kerala pockets, with liberal help from the other big Sunni outfit of E.K. Abubacker Musaliar, besides the many fringe Muslim bodies tagging along the Muslim League.
The political legitimisation of many of these outfits, including those till recently considered to be the loony fringe, is now a reality. To consolidate, many even have their own full-fledged, multi-edition daily newspapers selling tens of thousands of copies, some with multiple international editions.
Another is the BJP, which hasn8217;t had a single Kerala MP or MLA despite a 12 per cent vote share with erratic help from Hindu casteist oufits of almost all persuasions, and the RSS reportedly running about 4000 shakhas in Kerala 8212; the most in any Indian state, up from the 3500 that it announced in 2003. But even if its political legitimisation is still way off, the Kerala sangh parivar is busy consolidating its social base. It has significantly eased up on its earlier brand of combative Hinduism 8212; a communal killing or two when it mattered, an occasional attack on a missionary or a nunnery thrown in. Its USP of engaging the CPM in bloody reprisals and serial political murders is also being replaced by a more unobtrusive agenda, more focused on drawing specific demographic groups from schools to youth to tribals to the intelligentsia, through feeder outfits.
Kerala8217;s most successful model for legitimised extremist oufits is, however, the innocuously named National Development Front NDF 8212; a barely concealed extremist outfit regularly figuring in communal murders and eruptions across the state. Born out of the post-Babri outrage in the Muslim community, when the Muslim League suffered a credibility crisis as it stood by the Congress blamed for allowing the demolition, the NDF8217;s soft face is an 11-member supreme council at the top with an equally innocuous bunch of academics, lawyers, religious scholars and others. A doctor in Malappuram heads its women8217;s wing, and its youth wing runs indoctrination sessions in many parts. Despite a well-defined command structure extending down to tiny village units, the NDF rarely gets implicated directly since the outfit8217;s members are scattered over almost every mainline political party in Kerala excluding the BJP, and including the CPM. Except for its core leadership, the workers don8217;t wear their NDF identity on their sleeves, and only the Muslim League had admitted to being heavily infiltrated by this outfit, vowed to get rid of them, but never did. The outfit builds on its legitimacy from posturing as a rights advocacy group, and using its own newspaper and many other publications.
The rise and legitimisation of many of extremist Muslim outfits had to do with a redundant Muslim League 8212; for long the community8217;s only political plank. It failed to connect with emerging Muslim concerns or aspirations in a changing milieu of oil money-driven affluence, highly inflammable pan-Islamic passions and increasing literacy. It could also not offer a convincing ideological cushion beyond the spoils from wielding political power.
The CPM, on its part, could never have a convincing or consistent criterion for relating to Muslim organisations. Even a dozen years now since it agreed to allow the INL into the Left camp in 1994, there is yet to be a consensus in the party about it. Despite the EMS fiat for expanding the Left8217;s social base, the CPM was never comfortable with allowing religious identities in hard politics. Even its last state conference in the Muslim heartland, Malappuram, had more portraits of Yasser Arafat than Karl Marx, and the party had put up banners with Lal Salam in Arabic at mosque entrances in north Kerala.
There is also the element of subjectivity in bracketing an outfit as communal or extremist, that many use as an escape hatch. Going by criminal records or convictions may not help in the case of decidedly elusive ones like the NDF. But bureaucratic verdicts can8217;t always help, either. Four years ago, the Congress in Karnataka bracketed the Muslim League, an important constituent of the Congress-led coalition government in Kerala, in the state8217;s official list of extremists. Soon after, A.K. Antony8217;s government in Kerala included RSS and Shiv Sena in its own list. This list had stayed official until someone observed that a Sena MP was then the Lok Sabha Speaker, and the Sena also happened to be a party in power in India.
