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Ominous signals
THE VIOLENCE IN a village near Beypore in Kerala that left five people killed, several others injured and property worth a couple of crores (including fishing vessels) destroyed may have been contained. The measures by the State Government - whether it was sending adequate police force or ensuring that members of the political establishment were sent across to the trouble-torn district - were indeed prompt and this certainly saved the situation. The violence could have spread to other parts of the region. After all, civil society in parts of Kerala, particularly the towns and villages in and around Malappuram district, has been infected so deeply by the communal virus in the past few years. The virulent campaign in this region by the Hindutva outfits and the refusal by the mainstream political platforms in the State to confront the fundamentalists among the minority communities - more importantly Abdul Nasser Madhani's PDP and the National Development Front (NDF) - in the past decade have contributed immensely to the polarisation on communal lines across Malappuram district. The violence witnessed at Marad in Beypore was only a consequence of this long process. In this sense, there is hardly any basis to hope that the problem can be taken care of only by the law enforcing agencies.
It is this aspect of the violence that causes concern. And in this sense, the incidents in Beypore are distinct from the violence that marks parts of Kannur in the same region. It may be true that the tragic tales from Beypore - the menfolk having to run away from there and the women and children having to watch their huts being gutted - may look less tragic when compared to events in some of the villages in Kannur district where violence is more or less a part of the day-to-day life. But then, there is a difference. While it is partisan politics that leads to the violence and killings in the villages in Kannur (where attacks and reprisals that the members of the Left parties and the RSS indulge in have led to the death of several men from both sides), the Beypore incidents have very little to do with any clash of ideologies. The violence and the gutting of a whole lot of huts (belonging to the members of the minority community) at Marad beach was the doing of a mob that was organised by outfits wedded to majoritarianism as a political idea. This is how the Beypore incidents become distinct from the endemic violence in Kannur and hence are cause for serious concern.
There was a buildup to the incidents in Beypore. While the immediate context was provided by the localised disputes between sections constituting the lunatic fringe in both the communities - the activists of the NDF on the one side and the Hindutva outfits on the other - on December 6, 2001, when the NDF called for a bandh in the region, there indeed is a long term dimension to the flareup. This has to do with the retreat, in recent years, of ideology in the political discourse. While a section within the Congress(I) in Kerala was behind the emergence of Mr. Madhani as a political leader, the CPI(M) too contributed to his growth by refusing to forthrightly condemn the NDF and the PDP as fundamentalist outfits. The objective was the same. While sections in the Congress(I) were keen to checkmate the leaders of the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), the Left too found in the NDF a vehicle to break the IUML's hold in the Malappuram-Ponnani belt. And all these helped the BJP too in that its leaders could conjure up images of the Hindu faith being in danger in that region. The violence in Beypore will have to be seen in this larger context. And it is imperative for the political parties - the Congress(I) and the CPI(M) in particular - to heed the ominous signals and draw up a course of action to restore the political discourse of issues of concern to the people.
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