THE BJP president, Amit Shah, has embarked on a dangerous course of inciting violence against the CPI(M) by leveling false charges and accusations against the Party.

Amit Shah has launched a `yatra’ of the BJP in Kerala, starting from Payyannur in Kannur district.  In his speech at the inauguration of the yatra, Shah made the shop-worn allegations about “red terror”, but what was new was his attributing the “killings of BJP-RSS workers” to Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan.

The RSS violence against the CPI(M) in Kerala has occurred not only during the tenure of the present LDF government, but it had happened earlier when the LDF governments were headed by E K Nayanar in the 1990s and by V S Achuthanandan a decade later.  In fact, the RSS attacks have a 45-year history.  It is the response of a right reactionary, fascistic force to the rise of a powerful working class movement with deep roots in Kannur. 

Filled with the arrogance of power, Amit Shah thinks that he can bulldoze the Sangh politics into Kerala using the false flag of red terror.  This, in itself, shows the inability of the BJP-RSS combine to counter the CPI(M) and the Left politically in Kerala.  The LDF government, under Pinarayi Vijayan, has in the past seventeen months shown by its performance that there is an alternative to the BJP’s reactionary economic policies and divisive communal agenda.  No yatra across the length of Kerala to purvey the lies of the BJP-RSS will shake the people’s belief in Left and secular politics.

Amit Shah hopes that the BJP lotus will bloom in the communal filth (in his own words, keechad) that he hopes to create in Kerala.  For this, he imported Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, a rabid communal fanatic, to participate in the yatra.  But the people of Kerala led by the Left and progressive forces will ensure that no such filth will take root in Kerala society. 

Shah is the last person who should be accusing an elected chief minister of being responsible for murders. As the home minister under Modi in Gujarat, Shah was booked in a false encounter case in which Sohrabuddin and his wife Kauser Bi were killed by police while in their illegal custody. He was discharged in the case by the Mumbai High Court, but his sordid record as a minister, during which period many false encounters took place, has qualified him as a specialist in “encounter politics”. 

Shah has called for protests by BJP workers outside the CPI(M) headquarters at A K Gopalan Bhawan every day till October 16. He has also announced that the BJP youth wing will hold protests in all the state capitals.  The fact that the ruling party of the country is daily organising protests outside the office of a national political party speaks much about the lumpen politics that Amit Shah has introduced. 

There is no way such intimidatory tactics will work as far as the CPI(M) is concerned. Both in Kerala and Tripura, the Left-led governments and the CPI(M) are in the forefront of combating the Hindutva communal forces. In the coming days, the Party will step up its efforts and rally all the secular and democratic forces to counter the BJP’s disruptive politics.

(October 4, 2017)