Just when it seemed that bread and butter issues raised by the Opposition were seriously troubling the LDF government, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has sprung a surprise. He has revived a social mobilisation strategy that had done wonders for the LDF during the 2021 Assembly elections.
It is a version inspired by the BJP's electoral algorithm, but far more advanced. The Narendra Modi success formula is pretty straightforward. Vilify Muslims as a whole and just stand whistling as the Hindu votes rain into the pocket.
Pinarayi Vijayan has attempted something nearly similar. But his is a more targeted operation. Instead of the entire Muslim population, he has demonised a fringe religious outfit, Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (JIH). This way he hopes to secure not just the support of Hindus but Christians and Muslims, too.
Lure of secret talks
What has come in handy for Pinarayi is the closed-door meeting held by RSS and BJP leaders with certain Muslim outfits, including Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, at the residence of the former Lieutenant Governor of Delhi, Najeeb Jung, on January 14.
On February 17, more than a month after the meeting, the Chief Minister put up a Facebook post asking the JIH to come clean on what transpired during the meeting with the RSS.
“The JIH's logic that the RSS was a kind of organisation that could be reformed and modernised through dialogues is like hoping that a thorough wash could turn a spotted leopard into a spotted deer,” the Chief Minister said, and threw a pointed question: “Who gave the JIH the authority to represent minorities in India.”
Welfare politics
The Chief Minister followed this up with a grander political rhetoric while flagging off the People's Resistance March led by CPM state secretary M V Govindan in Kasaragod on February 20.
He asked whether the Congress and the Indian Union Muslim League had anything to do with JIH's secret negotiations with the RSS. He also reminded Kerala of the UDF's electoral understanding with the Welfare Party, the political wing of the JIH, Kerala.
Jamaat's defence
The JIH Kerala assistant emir, P Mujiburahman, called a press conference and accused the Chief Minister of spreading “Islamophobia”. Mujiburahman said it was wrong to say that Jamaat-e-Islami Hind had held talks with the RSS. “The JIH was just one of the Muslim groups invited for the talks,” he said.
True, Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind and some Sunni and Shia organisations were also present. Also, the meeting was part of a Muslim outreach programme set in motion by the RSS in the middle of 2022.
Nonetheless, the Chief Minister was certain that the most influential Muslim bodies in Kerala will not find this defence convincing.
Muslim dislike for Jamaat
Even before Pinarayi had raised the issue, both the Samastha factions that together have a near complete sway over the Muslim community in Kerala -- the E K faction led by Muhammad Jifri Muthukkoya Thangal and the AP faction led by Kanthapuram A P Aboobacker Musliyar -- had publicly questioned the JIH's decision to hold talks with the RSS.
“We have strongly disapproved of the JIH's move to hold talks with the RSS,” said Abdusamad Pokkottoor, a prominent leader of the E K faction (Samastha Kerala Jem-iyyathul Ulama), the most influential Muslim religious body in Kerala.
“How can any well meaning organisation have a discussion with a group that does not believe in Indian secularism and still continues to justify the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi,” he told Onmanorama.
Prominent Muslim bodies have scant respect for JIH's ideology. “The collective Muslim opinion is against the JIH,” said Luqman M, a young Muslim scholar and writer with close links to the AP faction.
“For one, like the RSS, they do not accept the Indian Constitution and the plurality it envisages. So for these two organisations to hold talks is a dangerous prospect,” he said.
Further, Luqman said that political Islamists like the JIH had derived their religious and political beliefs not from basic Islamic texts. “Instead, these outfits have internalised violence-based ideologies that were inspired by the French Revolution,” Luqman said.
Patron saint of Muslims
So when he asked whether the Muslim League and the Congress had any role to play in the talks the JIH held with RSS, Pinarayi was not just trying to sow the seeds of suspicion in the Muslim community against the UDF, the League in particular, but was also projecting the CPM as the sole anti-Hindutva force.
Pinarayi's leadership role in the anti-'Citizenship Amendment Act' struggle had won him many admirers in the Muslim community. The 2021 election results testify to his increased popularity among Muslims.
According to Lokniti-CSDS’s post-poll survey data, nearly two-fifths (39%) of Muslims had voted for the LDF in 2021 as opposed to about one-thirds (35%) in 2016.
Christians and the dreaded trio
By speaking against Jamaat-e-Islami and the Muslim League, the CPM hopes to humour both the Hindu and Christian communities.
The Christian-Muslim brotherhood has long been sullied. The 'love jihad' and 'narcotic jihad' claims of the Syro Malabar Church, the most dominant Church in Kerala, and then the aggressive Christian demand for a sizeable share of the minority scholarship granted exclusively to poor Muslim students had pulled the two minority communities apart.
It was this growing Christian distrust of Muslims that the then CPM state secretary Kodiyeri Balakrishnan sought to exploit in the least subtle manner when, in October 2020, he made the controversial comment that the UDF was led by the Emir-Kutty-Hassan axis.
If at all this was missed by anyone in the Christian community, Kodiyeri stressed his point in bold. “A Front that was once led by Oommen Chandy and K M Mani is now being led by Ramesh Chennithala, M M Hassan (then UDF convener), Kunhalikutty and the Jamaat-e-Islami Emir (M I Abdul Aziz),” Kodiyeri said.
The 'instill the fear of the Muslim in the Christian' strategy seems to have worked, going by the Lokniti-CSDS’s post-poll survey. Like in the case of Muslims, nearly two-fifths (39%) of Christians, too, had voted for the LDF in 2021 as opposed to about one-thirds (35%) in 2016.
Beware, says Jamaat
Now, by alleging that the JIH is trying to strike a deal with the RSS with the League's blessings, the CPM is trying to do an encore.
The JIH assistant emir Mujiburahman serves a warning. “The CPM had played this dangerous political trick last time, too,” he said of the CPM's alleged attempts to pit the Christians against the Muslims.
“It was a formulation that had caused severe injury to Kerala's social fabric. They want to employ this tactic once again for electoral gains,” he told Onmanorama.
Fake liberal Hindu
The CPM is also fighting for the Nair and other upper caste Hindu votes, which it had lost considerably after the Sabarimala agitation.
More than the secular Nair-Brahmin votes, which traditionally fall for the UDF, the CPM is eyeing the vote of the anti-Muslim Hindu who has still not found the BJP palatable.
“This group is made up of fake liberals within the Hindu community who have the Sangh Parivar DNA in their blood but still are reluctant to be seen aligned with the extreme right,” said Manikantan R, a retired teacher who now researches Kerala politics.
“If the CPM can demonstrate an optimal anti-Muslim fervour, it can perhaps persuade these fake liberal Hindu elements to shift their allegiance from the Congress. It helps that the CPM, at least for the moment, has dropped the plan to woo the League to the LDF fold,” he said.
Relentless and sharp attacks on a fringe Muslim outfit like the JIH seems like a safe bet. It will keep the fake Hindu liberals happy but would not bother the mainstream Muslim community.