A Scribbling On Passive Communalism in Kerala
By Anvar Ali
07 August, 2015
Countercurrents.org
Zakharia and his helpless mother
The majority of Indian states might have a history of communalism and its aftermaths. If one can term it as active communalism, Kerala, the state I belong to and a linguistic terrain I can proudly but critically call democratized through modern means, bears a modern tradition of passive communalism. Nothing like an insurgency happened in the Muslim dominated North Kerala while Babri Masjid was demolished. The onslaught on the Tamil folk in Srilanka, who are ethnically and linguistically closest to Malayali identity, never provoked us, not even after the incidents in recent history that doomed the island nation to the darkness of genocide.
Here I will tell the desperate story of an adolescent Muslim boy who is not only the victim of Islamophobia but of the passive communalism the so-called Kerala model nourished along with its modernity.
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There is a Malayali boy called Zakharia, an unknown person in the public sphere of Kerala who celebrated four birthdays on either sides of his sweet twenty inside a jail in Bangalore without knowing why he is in prison or what crime he has committed to provoke the law and order system or the national security of his motherland. Someone in police uniform came to the mobile phone shop where he was working and took him into custody. Hearing the news, his mother rushed to the local MLA's residence nearby and, after an immediate enquiry, the MLA informed her that Zakharia's arrest has not been reported or informed in the nearby police stations. She approached police officials too. One mid-level officer in the district disposed off the matter casually telling her that it’s quite natural that the police would gate-crash into the families if one of its members is a terrorist. It was all done, on behalf of Government of Kerala...done to a young and innocent person who lived in Kerala’s society. Zakharia was arrested on February, 2009. Four years have passed. Zakharia himself or his family members and friends or the common folk in his village still do not know why he was arrested and what is the crime he has committed.
Zakharia was charged by Karnataka Police as 8th accused in the Banglore explosion case on 2008, the same case in which Abdul Nazar Madani, an Islamic scholar, orator and political leader, was marked as the prime accused. On 2012, when Jisha, a young journalist and activist along with K P Sasi, the well known activist, visited Madni in Bangalore Jail, they happened to meet Zakharia too. Jisha went ahead with a detailed investigation in Thiroor, Parappanangadi and the nearby places in Malappuram, a district in north kerala, where Zakharia had been brought up, had his education and worked. Jisha’s report published in Madhyamam, a Malayalam weekly, brought out the issue as a subject of public debate for the first time. Still the majority of the sophisticated middle class people and the mainstream political spokespersons of Kerala were hesitant to believe the facts she revealed, mainly because, I guess, the article appeared in Madhyamam, which is supposedly connected with Jama-at-e-Islami.
Then another detailed report came out in Keralasabdam, a weekly never branded as belonging to any ideology of any community or religion and again, Chandrika, a newsweekly, an organ of the Indian Union Muslim League which is considered as one of the most secular political party of the Muslim community in Kerala in the post-Independent era. It is interesting that Chandrika reported the issue as part of an analysis of Abdul Nazar Madani’s prolonged imprisonment and the urgency to demand for the protection of his basic rights, and to bring the matter to the attention of the Indian judiciary. Madani, a new model who was a constant headache to the political parties including the communist parties and Indian Union Muslim League who tamed themselves to parliamentary opportunism, came to the limelight. It is after a few years that he caught the attention of the mainstream again but not as a sensational as well as a dangerous political figure but as a victim of state terrorism. Even now the facts of the case are not straightforward. The plight of the new Madani, defined by the neo- social activism through internet and video activism in general (‘Fabricated’ , a documentary emphasizing authentically on the cooking up of the Madani case based both on the proofs collected by K K Shahina in her Tehelka report and the statements made by the false witnesses in the FIR) cannot be denied easily by the opportunistic political parties who used to cash in on the passivity of the Kerala society towards the issues that may sabotage their mediocre livelihood and survival. Still the aspect of Islomophobia worked in a passive manner. K K Shahina, the courageous journalist who did pioneering work in exposing the Hindutva conspiracy hatched by the Karnataka Government, was falsely implicated in a sedition case by the Karnataka police. In spite of the Tehelka report, not even a single main TV channel or newspaper in Kerala paid proper attention to the seriousness of the threat. This passivity stabbed deep into the heart of the innocent Zakharia too. Besides, there are many youngsters belonging to Dalit activist groups, who were branded as Maoists merely based on the stories supplied by police and consumed by media.
Sometimes, passivity can silence all kinds of voiced realities. Kerala has a moderate tradition about such rituals, I feel. We have accepted the darkness of the Emergency by embracing Indira Congress in 1977 General Elections, while most of the other Indian states that were suffering from active communalism right from the beginning of British empire or before, bluntly voted out fascism. We are practical enough to accommodate or tame all kinds of fascist perceptions if they do not make any consumerist as well as contextual damage to the middle-classness that we gained through our modernity. We never vote for R S S or core Islamists for, we are modern. We hate not only Hindutva governments or BSP governments. We are even cynical about syndromes like Jayalalitha, or Mayavati or Mamta Banarjee. But we invest our communal obsessions in any kind of modern political outlets instead of their rightist or leftist position. That’s how we ignore the prevalence of any extent of communalism- and political fascisms too – only to achieve ‘development’ better than the active development models including Narendra Modi’s , by our passivity.
The impressions I scribbled down may not accommodate the history of Kerala positively.
Yes, Keralam is widely appreciated among the Indian states as a developmental model because of its achievement in the fields of public health and literacy, and also gained worldwide attention for its political slant that created a communist government through the ballot in 1957 during the early days of Indian democracy. The structural remains of the so- called ‘Kerala Model’ is still there along with its results, effects and after-effects. Though this writer is not at all capable of doing a socio-political analysis on such remains, as a participant - -as a consumer and victim and even as manipulator too --in its civic life, I too have the right and responsibility to look into it. This is my only justification for the narrations and conclusions I made above.
Anvar Ali is a well known Malayalam poet
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