BJP's Kerala seat: What it spells for the state

As the dust settles on the recent Assembly elections, what emerges is a bifurcation of the political tendencies of the 2014 general election: if Tamil Nadu and West Bengal reiterated the value of powerful leaders, Assam points to the BJP getting out of the trap of its national image and making intelligent local partnerships. But it is the Kerala poll results that followed its ritualistic character though with an interesting twist in the seat won by the BJP. After every five years, Kerala’s voters opt for a change, and this time has been no different. Had change not taken place, the absolute heedlessness that the Congress-led UDF showed in the past two years, after winning 60 per cent seats in the 2014 LS polls, would have gone uncontested.

In Kerala, the key item of common engagement, is politics. Adequately funded by the expatriate Malayali, the political programme is a daily ritual here since the 1970s. Hence, the hold of political parties in each and every segment of life is complete: to the point that every party has a class one organisation as well as a porters’ organisation in the state, and several in between. But the use of the same old language have turned political activities into a meaningless spectacle.

It is interesting to note that a number of expressions that signalled “new politics” in Kerala in the past two years have been either eaten up or dissolved in the party fold: the exciting organic movements floated and championed primarily by women questioning the grammar of politics in Kerala, from the struggle for salesgirls to be permitted to sit during work hours, the “Kiss of Love” movement against moral policing, the women workers’ movement in the tea plantations, the meets against fascism — all, finally, became tributaries for the LDF.

The “green politics” projected by some young Congress-front MLAs ended up nowhere. The historic “standing agitation” seeking land for the tribals suffered in its social content when its leader C.K. Janu became an NDA candidate. The real new item on the menu is the BJP’s single seat in the Assembly. Both the BJP side and anti-BJP side seem to view a “domino effect” in this. This grand symbolic value attached to the BJP’s entry might mean something big for the morale of its cadre. But to argue that this is the first time communalism has entered Kerala is to miss a lot: the RSS and Muslim fundamentalist outfits have been very active in Kerala for decades.

The BJP apologists wonder why, in a state where the IUML and the Kerala Congress (essentially a Christian organisation) have been strong, the BJP’s presence has become an issue — but these two miss the point. Not really because they are “minority organisations”, but as these two parties don’t subscribe to an Islamist or Christian ideology, the way the BJP does with its Hindutva ideology.

Communitarian parties do represent the interests of the community (and it is true that they have often been unethically insensitive to other communities), but this is different from communal parties which understand their community’s interest always in opposition to that of other communities. It might not also be correct to count the BJP as a third kind of party. This party can only work in Kerala as far as it wins a new kind of communitarianism of Hindu consolidation, becoming a new face of community politics.

There are two reasons why the BJP has grown in Kerala: the political one is disillusionment with the two fronts, or the disappointment with certain leaders, social fascism in certain localities, and so on. The emotional reason is the narrative of a “new India” with identifiably religious undertones capturing the imagination of many youngsters. So the emergence of the BJP will eventually mean majoritarianisms of three kinds in various parts of Kerala: Muslim in the north, Christian in central Kerala and Hindu in the south. It cannot mean a new political ethic in any meaningful sense.

If the public of Kerala can get on without investigating its political foundations, what will be ushered in is a certain politics of balance based on mutual fear among different communities. Once an autorickshaw  driver in Kannur, an area that is infamous for clashes between the CPM and the RSS, said to me, pointing to another area, which had conflicts between Hindus and Muslims: “It is good to have political clashes. Or else, communalism will come here too.” That echoed the view of many Malayalis. But there lies no future in this line of thinking. The time may have come to convert this mandate into a turning point: a search to forge a political narrative based on socio-economic and demographic factors, and to do all this ethically.