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As Kerala’s Men Push For ‘All Against All’ War, Women Provide the Antidotes
While the last word on how Kerala as a state managed the COVID-19 pandemic will have to wait, one thing is largely felt: Kerala economy is likely to be among the worst hit due to this crisis. This is not surprising given the state’s economy has been deeply entwined with the global economy for the last five decades, be that export of human resources or tourism.
With the pandemic putting global capital under suspension and its implications in one’s life – in terms of shrinking of economic fortunes and thinning down of opportunities – people have been driven into a state of insecurity and desperation.
There are two ways of responding to such a situation. The constructive way would be to formulate projects and reorganise channels so that, as a people sharing a common destiny, a solution could be found through a social approach. The second is cynical and commonplace in the majoritarian grammar of political organisation: invent external enemies and concoct fears to create a sense of community.
Kerala’s men seem to have chosen the second, and the outcomes are rather alarming.
Hate campaigns and majoritarian positions
The Bishop of Pala, Mar Joseph Kallarangatt, was in the news recently for making a case for “narcotic jihad”; the allegation that young Muslim men are trapping Christians by getting them into substance abuse in order to convert them into Islam. The Bishop has been criticised for creating fear and enmity between two communities, and it has been pointed out that he has bothered neither to explain nor substantiate his wild allegation.
Men, at the helm of all political parties, have condoned Kallarangatt’s position: the Bharatiya Janata Party, understandably, decided to extend their support to further such allegations, while the ruling Communist Party and the opposition Congress party have both paid visits to the Bishop rather than demand details or condemn such a callous and dangerous statement outright.
This is not surprising given the community arithmetic of the state: Christians have evolved to be the most important political community. In a state where Hindus are only half of the population, without either Muslim or Christian support, there is no way in which the BJP can ever come to power. The North East model of Hindu-Christian alliance is their only hope. The Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) loosely had the social base of Muslims, Christians and Nairs through alliances with communitarian political parties. Due to the Nair vote-base shifting to the BJP, Congress has no hope without getting back Christians, who have shifted sides to the Left in the last assembly elections. The Left is aware that, with its largely Ezhava and Dalit votes, in addition to the party votes that cut across communities of religion and caste, it could be re-elected to power because of the Christian votes, and losing them could turn out be damaging. So the male leadership of Kerala parties decided to somehow keep the Bishop with them, rather than engaging with the statements.
Much of the evidence that has surfaced shows that “narcotic jihad” allegation is just one among the many dangerous conspiracy theories that float around in these spaces. This allegation of alluring Christian women doesn’t seem to be limited to Muslim men alone. Another parson, Father Royi Kannanchira of Changanassery, in a training programme for teachers has warned believers against the mysterious plans of Ezhava men. The insecurity of Kerala’s dominant communities and the resultant arbitrariness of public debates are such that any such wild allegation is lapped up immediately, with cyber warriors lining up on both sides.
One major provocation for enmity between Kerala Muslim-Christian communities was an article by the Indian Union Muslim League leader Sadiq Ali Shibab Thangal in the Muslim League mouthpiece Chandrika, supporting Turkey President Recep Tayyib Erdogan’s conversion of Hagia Sophia museum into a mosque. This went against his own party’s stated commitment for communal harmony and was completely out of tune with a party that stood for minority rights when the Christian minorities of Turkey – which would also make the Christian minority of the state anxious and feel alienated – were at the receiving end. Thangal’s position supporting Muslim majoritarianism elsewhere contributed to the growing apart of the communities in the state. The Taliban capturing of Afghanistan has also contributed to communitarian divide in the state.
The Malayalam social media space is filled with hate messages, making it a war of all against all. Newspapers and TV channels are too scared to address any such issue because criticism of any dominant community is treated with a boycott of the media house by a large section of the community. More so, politicians keep custodians of community vote banks happy regardless of long term implications. What is on display is a tragic farce.
Women countering the male madness
Kerala has four dominant communities, all of whom should be counted among the most powerful communities in socio-economic, demographic and political terms in the entire country: Ezhavas, Muslims, Nairs and Christians. All four emerged significant through communitarian social development – the practice of each community growing in the educational and economic sphere through intra-community work – without any social antagonism against other communities, and hence working as tributaries to the state’s common growth. In most cases, this growth necessarily entailed community reform as well. All four have also benefitted substantially from Kerala’s journey of economic growth over the last half a century.
But this model, a remarkable possibility, started turning into a liability when community leadership, in the interest of the rich businessmen and powerful politicians, started using the institutions for extracting the wealth brought in by foreign remittances. Financial corruption became naturalised in the educational institutions of Kerala. While being hyper capitalist and plutocratic, the state stayed incorrigibly feudal in attitude and the political rhetoric was all socialist, thanks to long and effective political action and education by the Left.
There were three casualties for this state apportioned by the dominant communities: women of all sections, who have been exploited by the capitalist economy as well as feudal social system; Bahujan groups, who have been systemically denied the economic, educational and political capability and the all-too obsessively exploited ecological system.
Communitarian antagonism always uses women as the site of a community’s honour and hence controlling women’s bodies and restricting female spaces is in its very DNA. But quite encouragingly, women of both the Christian and Muslim communities have recognised this male design and are standing up resolute to be heard.
Where male politicians and community leaders hesitated and feared to respond to the hate mongering in the church masses, the nuns of Kuruvilangad, under the leadership of Sister Anupama, walked out of a church service saying the priest was making anti-Muslim remarks during the speech in the church. Sister Anupama was earlier in the news as part of the legendary protest on the street against Bishop Franco Mulakkal for sexual exploitation. They categorical said “no” and “not in my name” to the male leadership, all over again to the male matrix that claims the community’s ownership.
At the same time, Haritha, the young women’s organisation of the Indian Union Muslim League, is ushering in a new debate on issues of gender equality in Kerala. What started as an intra-organisational issue of a member in the male wing slut-shaming the office bearer of the female wing in a meeting of office bearers has gone on to become a compelling debate on gender justice. The senior male leadership has taken the drastic step of dismissing the entire state committee of Haritha and of removing the National Vice President of Indian Union Muslim League’s student body, Fathima Thahliya, for supporting the young women of Haritha.
The disbanded state body, led by Najma Thabashira and Mufeeda Tesni, have decided to take the male leadership of the party head on and have gone public with it, including filing a complaint with the Women’s Commission. These women give a wonderful sense of sorority, question the gender biases of both the party and the society and claim a tradition of women’s political work connecting often side-lined women – from Gauri Amma to Haleema Beevi – and push the agenda of constitutional nationalism with the historical content of gender justice. Their fight “in the party against the party for the party” is giving a sense of direction to the male-ego induced heedlessness to the political debates of Kerala.
When men, in their fear and absolute lack of political imagination or ethical commitment, work to make despair convincing, the women’s antidotes to these male designs make the hope possible that there is a more egalitarian, inclusive tomorrow to work towards.
(N.P. Ashley teaches English at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. Courtesy: The Wire.)
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In Kerala, the Ruling CPM and an Islamophobic Bishop Make Strange Bedfellows
Apoorvanand
Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has said that Mar Joseph Kallarangatt, the bishop of Pala, was not aiming to create enmity between communities when he delivered controversial sermon claiming that Muslims are waging a “narcotics jihad” against people of other faiths. According to The Hindu, Vijayan said that “the bishop delivered the speech from the pulpit to believers. He had not made a public statement. Hence, the government believed there was no legal ground for any case against the prelate.”
Even if we set aside the strange understanding of public and private that the Kerala chief minister wants us to accept, some context is necessary before we move ahead. During a sermon in a church in Kuravilangad on September 8, Bishop Kallarangatt had said that there had been an increase of instances of “love jihad” and “narcotics jihad” in the state.
“Love jihad” is a conspiracy theory which claims that Muslim men are waging a campaign to court women of other communities with the aim of getting them to covert to Islam.
The bishop said that “narcotic jihad” or “drug jihad” was a method adopted by “jihadis” to convert the youth of other religions into drug addicts. He did not stop there.
‘Destructive mission’
“In the eyes of a jihadi, non-Muslims are meant to be destroyed,” Kallarangatt claimed. “When the intention is to spread the religion and annihilate non-Muslims, the adopted methods take different methods – two such methods that are widely discussed are ‘love jihad’ and ‘narcotic jihad’.” According to Kallarangatt, besides ill-treating and forcibly converting non-Muslims, “jihadis” capture women who are members of other religions by faking love and then use them for terrorist activities and to make financial gains.
If this is a sermon to believers by a priest who professes to love Christ, we must reconsider the meaning of a sermon. What the bishop was doing was clearly instigating the followers of his church against Muslim men. It is hate speech and needs to be treated as a criminal act.
For Pinarayi Vijayan to rush to the aid of the hate-preacher and defend him by claiming that no legal action could be taken against him because his statement was not a public act is even more serious. It compromises the office of the chief minister. He has turned the understanding of crime on its head.
If we go by the standard set by Vijayan, even the extremist Hindu priest from Ghaziabad, Narsinhanand, or those people from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh fold who spew venom against Muslims day and night cannot be charged with any crime: they could all claim that they were addressing only their followers, believers of a different kind. This could not be deemed a public act , hence no crime has been committed, they could say.
The bishop was doing was not making his followers aware about a social evil, as the chief minister and the diocese are implying. He was clearly spreading misinformation with the purpose of creating enmity between Christians and Muslims.
He achieved it. The chief minister must be aware that, as The Telegraph reported, “Two food-processing companies in Kerala have become targets of a communal hate campaign and boycott call in connection with a bishop’s allegations about ‘love jihad’ and a ‘narcotic jihad’.”
This boycott call came after Muslims marched in protest against the bishop’s remarks. Members of his diocese organised organised a counter march. Just after this, a campaign started on social media targetting two food processing companies: Ajmi Flour Mills India and KKFM India, both owned by Muslims.
According to The Telegraph, “The companies, both based in Erattupetta in Kottayam and owned by Muslims, are being accused on social media of facilitating a recent protest march in Pala against Bishop Mar Joseph Kallarangatt of the Pala Diocese.”
The owners have denied this. They have even lodged criminal cases against the people who made this allegation. We need to think about this denial as well. Is it a crime to participate in or support a protest march against a hate speech? Is it not a democratic right?
‘Privately’ spreading hate
Chief Minister Vijayan has promised action against the people who want to create discord in the society. But he sounds conflicted. He does not want to be seen as acting strongly against Christians. Nonetheless, instead of making it clear that those peddling hate will not be tolerated, the chief minister is obliquely granting the bishop the right to “privately” spread enmity against Muslims.
The chief minister belongs to the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which has the distinction of legitimising the “love-jihad” conspiracy theory propounded by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its affiliates. In 2010, VS Achuthanandan, who was chief minister at the time, alleged that there was a conspiracy in Kerala to expand the size of the Muslim community by getting young men from the community to lure non-Muslim women to marry them. Achuthanandan sounded like a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh spokesperson.
But anti-Muslim sentiment runs even deeper in the party’s veins in Kerala.
In 2017, scholar J Devika wrote about it in an article in Kafila praising Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Brinda Karat for supporting Hadiya, a young woman who had converted to Islam and married a Muslim man when Hadiya was facing persecution by her family and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh groups, aided by the courts.
But Devika also had some concerns. “I write… to also express my gnawing worry about the rising and totally unchecked respectability of Islamophobia among vocal [Communist Party of India (Marxist)] supporters on Facebook,” she said. “They ostensibly criticise one particular group, the SDPI [the Social Democratic Party of India, the political arm of the extremist Muslim organisation, the Popular Front of India] but inevitably, their venom falls on all practising and religious Muslims. A few weeks earlier, we saw them justify the father’s violence publicly, but now that he has been revealed to be a criminal by Hadiya’s own words, they have shifted to a kind of Islamophobia reminiscent of that unleashed by US imperialist feminism in the wake of the bombing of Afghanistan.”
Devika points out that Communist Party of India (Marxist) members and supporters take the cover of criticising the Popular Front of India and the Social Democratic Party of India to hide their hatred. Even Karat had written an article saying that Muslims persecute women who marry outside the community.
Seeking a clarification
“…May I please ask a clarification?” Devika writes. “In your essay, you mention that Muslim women in Kerala marrying Hindu men are being violently threatened by extremist Muslim groups like the Popular Front. I would like to know what sources you may be basing this claim on. Since this group has been the target of much attack from quite long, since we now know how wary the general public is of Muslim extremism here, surely, many cases must have been filed against these alleged ruffians?”
The scholar added: ‘I have been trying to trace these cases since yesterday and have found very few, but none in which the Popular Front is directly involved. If you have information – say case numbers, the police stations etc. – please do publicly share them? I am saying this because I have observed since 2008 that the Popular Front has been the target of consistent demonisation by both the left and right in the state. It is high time we start going by clearly identifiable acts…given the heavy climate of fear against religious Muslims, complaints must have been filed and pursued as well. But if no such evidence is available then maybe that remark should be withdrawn.”
Karat did not withdraw her remarks. Leaders, especially communists, never make mistakes. To understand what Devika wrote, we need to read Ayyapn P in a long article published in OnManorama. Analysing the strategy of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in a state in which relations between Muslims and Christians are tense, he noted: “…The CPM had subtle ways to humour the openly secular but secretly communal Hindu. It created a villain , the Extremist Muslim, and flogged it publicly. The spectacle was clearly intended for the satisfaction. of the ‘half-way Hindu’ who did not want to be seen with the Sangh Parivar crowd but still had found merit in the wild fears they had raised about the Muslim.”
The figure of the extremist Muslim is very useful. It allows the Communist Party of India (Marxist) to be sympathetic to Muslims, to pass a resolution against the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act but to take a “principled stand” against extremist Muslims. How can anyone criticise a government which is against extremism?
Ayyapan explains the strategy the Communist Party of India (Marxist) put in place right after the Lok Sabha polls of 2019. “All societal ills were traced back to the extremist Muslim. Maoism, too. Alan Shuhaib and Thaha Fazal, the two students were booked under the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, were said to be pushed into Maoism by extreme Muslim ideology.”
The Communist Party of India (Marxist)’s alliance with the Mani Congress, which is unabashedly anti-Muslim, has to be understood in this context: a bid to win the support of Christians. But the Communist Party of India (Marxist) had to go further. It also vilified the Indian Union Muslim League as an extremist, communal party, which it knows too well that it is not. The Communist Party of India (Marxist), like all communal parties, defames any political expression that bears a Muslim identity and asks Muslims to accept it as the only champion of their rights.
While it could justify its opposition to the alliance of the United Democratic Front and the Muslim League, it must not forget that it is using a patently false (and dangerous) argument to do that.
Christian Islamophobia
In Kerala, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is trying to wean away Christians from the Bharatiya Janata Party. This explains why it does not want to address the vice of Islamophobia in the Christian community. It does not have the courage of acitivist John Dayal who calls the evil by its name.
“Islamophobia has not been mentioned publicly, but the caste-ridden Christian community finds itself more at ease with their Hindu neighbours than with Muslims, who, before the discovery of oil in West Asia and the job boom, were economically less well-off,” Dayal has written in an article in the Quint discussing the complex, tense relation in which Christians, Hindus and Muslims exist in Kerala.
Dayal called out the bishop in no uncertain terms: “He used a dog whistle, which accentuated the Islamophobia that the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Sangh are assiduously fanning as they seek a foothold in this politically important state.”
What is heartening is that many nuns have spoken out against this open Islamophobia and Bishop Geevarghese Mor Coorilos, the Metropolitan of the Niranam Diocese of the Malankara Jacobite Syriac Orthodox Church, in Kerala was unambiguous in his assertion that Christians did not face any threat from conversion or similar phenomena. “In Kerala…no religious community is under any serious threat, let alone Christianity,” he said.
It was this unambiguity we expect from a chief minister who claims that he is secular. Instead, he tried to avid the matter by making a general appeal to Keralites maintain harmony.
Christians must understand that a large section of them suffer from Islamophobia and it is easy to fall in this trap as Bishop Coorilos, the nuns and Father Cedric Prakash have been warning.
Internal document
As I wrap up this piece, The Indian Express reported about a Communist Party of India (Marxist) document circulating internally in the warning its cadre: “At professional college campuses, there are deliberate bids to distract educated young women to extremism and fundamentalism. The student fronts and the youth front should pay special attention to this issue.”
The note does talk about the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and attempts to push Christians against Muslims but notes that Christians in the normal course of things are not found succumbing to communal thought. We need not say more.
The newspaper reports that after Chief Minister Vijaya’s soft statement absolving the bishop of a hate-crime, Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader and state cooperation minister VN Vasavan visited the cleric. Vasavan later said the controversy was a closed chapter. He even praised the bishop, saying, “The bishop is an erudite person, he has in-depth knowledge of the Quran and Bhagavad Gita. I have watched his speeches and shared dais with him.”
It is very clear that the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is trying to humour the Christians. But in a dangerous manner. Instead of calling out the bishop for his Islamophobia, the party is fanning it. The statement of The Catholic Bishops Conference of India laity council secretary, Advocate V C Sebastian, is a glaring proof of this. He welcomed the Communist Party of India (Marxist)’s note, saying it “attests what Bishop Kallarangatt had stated about extremism”.
The silence of the central leadership of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is ominous. Islamophobia is not an opinion one is allowed to have and to practise. It should be identified when it takes the cover of a fight against extremism and should be nipped in the bud.
(Apoorvanand teaches Hindi at Delhi University. Courtesy: Scroll.in.)
