Marad’s circus

The police was better at action than anticipation though. Early in 2001 there were five communal killings in Marad and since then there have been telltale signals.

Hindu and Muslim fishermen started going out to sea in separate boats painted saffron and green—a practice unknown to this fishing belt. The local peace committee meets became farcical with members dropping in and out. The egalitarian teashops that historically subverted inter-dining taboos became Hindu and Muslim. Football, Malabar’s abiding passion, got segregated too. Marad has a Muslim football team and a Hindu one.

Meanwhile every political partly developed a stake in the social divide. This is pragmatism for you. Closer to the ground, it is pygmy-pragmatism. Which means freewheeling local liaisons with money, muscle and militancy. The mainstream activist moonlights as militant. Come elections, the laziest option is pursued and any winnable quickfix is botched up.

In the last panchayat election, Marad saw a joint candidate of the BJP and the Muslim League taking on the CPI(M). The poll-time fevicol came off too soon. Today the Hindu home is bereaved, the Muslim has lost his home and the left has nothing to write home about.

The Congress, which heads the ruling coalition, has a former chief minister, K. Karunakaran, whose euphemistic politics is a constant reminder of the incumbent’s non-Hindu identity. The BJP goes further to make an issue of the Muslim League’s presence in the government. Chief Minister A.K. Antony hopes the big picture will improve gradually. He says Kerala has to graduate from a debating to a developing society. Sure, but as of now development is in the realm of hope and the debate is awesome.

Kerala’s newspapers with their total reach and the five TV channels with their captive graying audiences are constantly in the debate mode. What happens in Marad or elsewhere ceases to be of interest on Day Two. By then politicians, cultural activists and sundry paperback pundits have already stepped in and taken over the laidback, newspaper-addicted, TV-viewing public mind. Reactions and counter-reactions flood in. The event itself is quickly forgotten and before the din trails off the debaters cut seamlessly to the next instant debate.

While the rest of Kerala has moved on to other debates, Marad is still debating Marad. In the police camp, two senior officials treat us to a scintillating discussion on whether the event was communal or political. In the Araya Samajam office, Hindu leaders line up under a formidable array of wall portraits, from Vivekananda and Ved Vyasa to the two martyrs of last year’s clashes, and present a well-argued case.

They marshal every factor in their favour—the cold-blooded massacre, the weapons seized from the mosque, and who, they ask, is bankrolling the cell-phone wielding Muslim youngsters on motor bikes while the Hindu boys have to sweat it out for a living?

The 100-odd displaced Muslim women who have taken refuge in the neighbouring Kappakkal village sit huddled in a long abandoned teashop. Their spokeswoman is no less articulate.

Is this a democracy, she asks. Not a single government official has come to their help while relief is pouring into Marad’s Hindu homes. Their men have been detained, tortured and driven away; their houses have been looted and one of them has lost as much as 50 sovereigns of gold that came with the daughter-in-law.

She wraps up her argument with an offer to commit collective suicide if that would please her erstwhile Hindu neighbours.

Don’t read anything Islamic or jehadi into this. The word ‘‘suicide’’ springs easily to the Malayali lips. It is yet another pragmatic way out of problems. The state has the highest suicide rate in the country.

There isn’t a moment of reflection. Everyone is ready with his or her sound bytes. Everyone articulates in measured tones. No one is angry. No one is sad.

There is an unpublished photograph that says it all. Clicked when I.D. Swamy, Union minister of state for home, visited Marad, the picture shows a solemn Swamy and around him a bevy of local faces grinning away. The next Kerala model will tell us how an unfeeling society achieves whatever.