From maverick to CPM’s Muslim hope

Consider this: Jaleel is estimated to have polled over 41,000 of the 47,000 new votes in his constituency, mostly of the young, middle class voters. More importantly, Jaleel has emerged the Kerala Left’s most credible instrument to burrow into the substantial Muslim sections that had kept aloof all these years, for a permanent relationship — different from its current tenuous courtship with fringe extremist groups like the PDP and Jamaat-e-Islami.

The timing couldn’t have been better. In places like Perintalmanna, Tirur and Ponnani, all parts of Muslim heartland Malappuram, this is the first time that Muslim sections had overcome mental blocks to vote the Left to victory. This is barely a couple of years after the Karuvarakundu panchayat in the same district had officially printed and circulated a fatwa from an Arab cleric that said no real Muslim can be a Communist.

Jaleel’s USP is obvious — he is conservative to a fault (he was groomed by the since banned fundamentalist Students Islamic Movement of India) but refreshingly prone to some occasional idol breaking (he famously derided Muslim League leader Panakkad Syed Mohemmad Ali Shihab Thangal’s halo of a revered spiritual leader saying the man was only a politician, no matter if he was made to apologise afterwards).

Jaleel is also well educated (he has a doctorate in history), and is a firebrand orator. He is also the hard-nosed, astute politician — soon after getting the nod from the CPI(M) for his candidature, Jaleel had quietly made off to Coimbatore jail to meet PDP chief Abdul Nasser Mahdani — awaiting trial in the Coimbatore serial bomb blasts case that killed 59 people. On the flip side, he leveraged feminist groups, secular cultural leaders and intellectuals looking for his opponent Kunhalikutty’s scalp — the man had been involved in one of Kerala’s worst sex scams.

But more importantly, Jaleel also carries the image of the young whistle blower-crusader who paid with his party position for trying to pull the League back to its perceived earlier values. This is when the League’s failing credibility is often alleged to be the cause of its moving away from its original moorings, from a movement led from the front by those like CH Mohammed Koya who invited no taint, and led a decidedly Spartan life — to a gaggle of affluent businessmen tainted with anything from moral turpitude to financial corruption and worse while increasingly disconnecting from aspirations of the community they lead.

While he was still a Muslim League man, Jaleel had publicly insinuated misappropriation of funds that the Muslim League leadership collected for victims of the Gujarat riots victims and the tsunami. He had also opposed the controversial Express Highway project that the Muslim League, as part of the state government, was pushing for and the League’s bid to allow Ilmenite quarrying that had invited flak for ecological reasons.

rajeev.pi@expressindia.com