Kerala's killing fields: looking beyond death list

Ten days have passed since S N Rajesh, a 34-year-old RSS karyavahak, was killed in Thiruvananthapuram. The killing itself has not been established by the police as political in nature – the BJP and the RSS allege that key members in the gang of the arrested assailants are affiliated to the ruling CPM. The CPM refutes the charges, tracing the murder to local issues.

But that’s a familiar game of blame in these times of political turmoil in Kerala. What the murder has translated into, beyond its immediate political ramifications, is an unprecedented national focus on the law and order situation in the state.

The BJP-RSS combine’s campaign at the national level, highlighting what it calls a systematic elimination of Sangh Parivar activists by the CPM, has evidently contributed to this new discourse of concern. The issue, however, is that while both the camps brandish numbers of their dead – the balidanis and the martyrs – to establish that they are the victims, and not perpetrators in this decades-long cycle of violence, their political compulsions are also feeding uninformed opinion about life in Kerala being passed as normal.

When MPs call the state “God’s forsaken country” as internet trolls feign concern over its alarming “Talibanisation”, there is not much that separates the language. Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has taken note of potential implications of this campaign that seriously undermines Kerala’s distinctly progressive traits and projects it as a killing field.

It hasn’t helped that the violence, till now identified largely as a political theme in the state’s northern districts, has now hit the capital city. “There has been a concerted effort to portray Kerala as a conflict zone. This could dent the state’s potential for development,” Vijayan said after an all-party meeting called to discuss developments in the wake of the political clashes.

The state government has since responded with full-page advertisements in national dailies highlighting Kerala’s premier standing in human development indices, governance, literacy, health, law and order enforcement and other parameters.

“Kerala and its people have a huge potential; they need peace, they deserve peace, civility and democracy,” Arun Jaitley, Union Finance Minister and senior BJP leader, said after meeting families of Rajesh and other BJP-RSS victims of political violence. Jaitley has been unequivocally dismissive of the CPM’s stance that there are victims on both sides. “Why does violence increase whenever the Left is in power?” is his question in retort.

The BJP and RSS respond to questions on their role in the violence by stating that as the ruling party, the CPM is in a better position to end violence. The argument makes political sense and is in line with the Sangh narrative that its activists are being targeted without provocation.

The BJP, despite increasing electoral vote shares, is still struggling for political acceptance in the state; the party won its first ever seat in the Legislative Assembly in the 2016 election. BJP-RSS workers point out that the Sangh doesn’t have to engage in such vicious political resistance in any other state. It is important that they still view this as “resistance”, a necessary response in the Sangh’s battle for clout with a much bigger, ideologically irreconcilable political force.

The CPM, meanwhile, has also stuck to the argument of resistance. M B Rajesh, the party’s Lok Sabha MP, quotes from reports sourced from the State Crime Records Bureau and says that between 2000 and 2017, 86 CPM workers and 65 BJP-RSS workers lost their lives in political clashes. The numbers have varied and at times, even been tweaked to suit political affiliations. These numbers are important because they help perspective amid propaganda. But there are supporters of the Left who feel that the debate over numbers is unwieldy in that it doesn’t facilitate closure and instead, only keeps the score of death ticking.

Inciting violence
The CPM can do better than being charged of inciting violence as it addresses a new reality, of an increasing Sangh presence in the state. It is important to hear voices in the Left that call for an ideological resistance; voices that call out the futility in cadre vandalism and attacks, even if retaliatory, like the one on the BJP state committee office in Thiruvananthapuram.

The turn of events over the past 10 days has also left the CPM with possibilities of emerging as a formidable opposition – in sheer terms of policy-driven resistance and not electoral numbers – to the BJP. Led by a chief minister known for his political will and a no-frills approach to administration, the party could look beyond this bloodied scorecard and model its resistance on ideological terms.

The BJP has built its narrative of victimisation to emerge as an alternative opposition while the Congress grapples with factionalism and a fractured leadership. The party, however, has suffered a setback after R S Vinod, its cooperative cell convener, was sacked for having accepted Rs 5.6 crore from the proprietor of a medical college to obtain a Medical Council of India clearance. The CPM has alleged involvement of national BJP leaders in the scam and dismissed the anti-CPM campaign as part of efforts to divert attention from the scam.

The allegations have left the BJP, under state president Kummanam Rajasekharan, on the defensive. The party is also facing a rather peculiar issue of identity. State BJP leaders have in the past taken positions different from their colleagues at the Centre on issues including the beef ban. Now, with the RSS central leadership calling for President’s rule in the state against the backdrop of the clashes, the party has to tread cautiously. Its leaders can’t afford to extrapolate with hash-tags condemning “jungle raj” in the state while alienating its people.

“All of us have to put our heads together to find out why,” Jaitley said while responding to questions on why violence has continued. It is unclear if his own partymen would bring this up in peace meetings.