Left leans on Madhani bridge for Muslim votes

At another level,it could even lead to some whole new churnings in the states Muslim mindspace and re-alignments in the communitys own politics,both current and aspirational.

Holding centrestage in this Left turbulence is,ironically,a fiery Islamic cleric whom few Muslim outfits of some significance in Kerala now want to be seen with. Abdul Nasser Madhani founded the ultra-radical Islamic Sewak Sangh,which he used to galvanise the communitys post-Babri angst of the early 1990s. After it was banned,he gave it a more innocuous name,Peoples Democratic Party PDP.

After his nine-odd years as a POTA undertrial,as an accused in the Coimbatore serial blasts,Madhani has been training himself for a relaunch into Keralas political space on the Left mother vehicle.

Gone is the rabidly communal vitriol that made him face trial in communal incitement cases before the Coimbatore blasts most of which the Left Government graciously got scrapped later. The Madhani brand is now a mix of the rights victim appeal that always had a surefire resonance in Kerala,and a kind of carefully projected ersatz asceticism fused with some incredible Left posturing. All bundled together with some clever rabble rousing targeting a big constituency that is,at least theoretically,still up for grabs at the bottom of the community spectrum.

This man is the Lefts,or one beleagured section of the strife-torn CPIMs,bridge to the Muslim vote this time. The Left has been at pains to insist there is no formal alliance,keeping to a we-cant-say-no-if-he-wants-to-support-us stance. Besides the 47,000 votes that his party polled in its turf Ponnani last Lok Sabha polls,when Madhani was being euologised as a rights victim in jail,and its smaller pocket boroughs scattered down south,Madhanis actual vote pull is still indeterminate.

Yet,the immediacy for this CPIM strategy is clear. Apart from gestures like some huge flex board promotions of Yasser Arafat hugging EMS Nambuthiripad in suspectedly morphed photos earlier,celebrating Saddam Hussein as an anti-imperialist warrior,and the latest diatribe against Israels Gaza invasion,and India sending an Israeli satellite into space,the CPIM has done little to get into the larger local Muslim mindspace. More significantly,the Kerala CPIM also has no Muslim leader of any consequence in its scheme of things,not counting a couple of loyal Pinarayi Vijayan acolytes,T K Hamsa and Paloli Mohemmed Kutty.

This is though,unlike elsewhere,international issues strike a chord among the community in Kerala,which incidentally,has even named an entire beach after Saddam. Reason why Shashi Tharoor,former UN under secretary general and Congress candidate fromThiruvananthapuram,had to pen an apologetic reaffirmation of his support for the Palestine cause in a Jamaat-e-Islami sponsored newspaper last fortnight,after he wrote an article abroad saying India should have taken the cue from Israel to strike,after the Mumbai terror attack. This is also why outfits like Jamaat-e-Islami have now given a specific call to defeat Tharoor and former Kerala tourism minister and Congressman K V Thomas the latter for having received the former Israel prime minister Ariel Sharon at an official function in New Delhi and giving him a memento.

But such concerns by themselves have seldom washed in any Kerala election,to any drastic extent. And the Left,which had never got to clearing the communitys traditional hesitations and suspicions about it,had failed to do anything major for its deeper concerns: in nothing from ensuring filling up of reserved job quotas,to protecting its youth from what a huge chunk of the community believes is a SIMI witch hunt. Three Kerala Muslim IT professionals and a scholar have been jailed without trial in different states as terror suspects,and the feeling is rife that the Left government had done nothing.

But the larger problem for Madhani and the Left is,the more charges he survives,the more tumble out on him,at inopportune times. He and his wife have been linked to a growing series of embarrassments for the CPIM from an armed PDP group burning a Tamil Nadu state transport bus to protest Madhanis incarceration,to many leads that say Keralite militants shot dead or caught near the LOC while trying to cross over to Pakistani terror camps were mostly PDP men,including a close Madhani supporter. It was Madhanis own men who were caught for a conspiracy earlier to assassinate the then CPIM CM E K Nayanar,after the latter handed Madhani to the Coimbatore police in connection with the serial blasts there.

There is,anyway,a clear groundswell of resentment building up in the Kerala party over the Madhani factor. Not just from the VS Achuthanandan-led puritanical hardliners,but also from a sizeable segment that sees it as a betrayal of the partys fundamentals no matter if EMS himself had once euologised the same Madhani,equating him with none less than Mahatma Gandhi,saying both only stood for their own religions,after all. What compounds the issue is that the tyrannically centralised state party apparatus it is run virtually single-handed by state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan is no longer the sole arbiter of life or the provider of means of living for its ranks,that it once was. So the rumblings have been growing louder,and the only speculation now on is about the time it would take to achieve a critical mass.

Early this week,the party,which has been drawing heavy flak even from the CPI and other Left Front constituents over PDP,had started an in-house feedback exercise on the strategy. But many believe it may be too late.

On the flip side,a sizeable section of the community is going beyond taking it as just a CPIM faux pas,even reading into it an effort to taint the communitys image and split it for vote banking. The Jamaat-e-Islami has changed its stance from the blanket support it gave to the Left during the last polls,to default piecemeal support for 18 of its candidates.

Significantly,the Jamaat-e-Islami has underlined that it continues to differ with the Left on its approaches and policies in Kerala,but had made the decision because its anti-imperialist premises would not allow it to support the UPA government,which had allowed a free run for Israels Mossad in India. In other words,it is an ad hoc decision for the Lok Sabha poll.

The National Development Front,another radical Muslim outfit of former SIMI men with a substantial following,has put on hold its plans at the last moment to launch a political outfit of its own,to watch out for the Lefts expected Madhani fiasco. Even the traditionally Left and powerful Sunni section of Kanthapuram A P Abubacker Musaliar is keeping cards close to the chest this elections,and no different is the case with other key outfits. That there are at least five Muslim newspapers packing significant clout among different community sections,and a string of other publications,has not made things easier for the Left.

A big gainer from the mess is likely to be Congress ally Muslim League,which has been making itself progressively redundant in the last few years. The League,long considered to be the communitys moderate buffer,and its only political face,may still be led by the same gaggle of men that has little to connect with the large and emerging young Muslim middle class and its aspirations,and headed by its unimpeachable supreme Panakkad Shihab Thangal who dispenses both magic water and political advice.

But the Left mollycoddling Madhani is now forcing a clear perception shift in the Leagues favour among many Muslims,and not just because Madhani has been screaming that the Muslim League flag and the Pakistani national flag are one and the same. There are simply no options.