RAHUL GANDHI, the national leader of the Indian National Congress, and the leader of the opposition in Lok Sabha, addressed a UDF rally on March 7. He spoke on many things, and even made a five-guarantees declaration, promising the Kerala people a series of doles, including free travel for women in KSRTC buses, monthly award for girl students, interest free loans for the youth, health insurance and an enhanced pension. These guarantees have failed to create any stir, primarily because the people of Kerala are already beneficiaries of several such schemes implemented by the Kerala LDF Government.

However, the intent of the speech of Mr. Gandhi was different. He spent his intelligence and energy to piece together a non-existent narrative of a 'covert' alliance between the Modi Government and the LDF Government, and 'proving' that if the Modi Government is anti-people, then the LDF Government in the state should be put in the same bracket. He called this as Communist Janata Party (CJP) and sought to prove his argument by citing his own case - he was tried by the ED for 55 days, but the Kerala Chief minister was not tried even for one day. This argument, unfortunately, was spurious because Mr. Gandhi was tried for the National Herald case in which Mr. Gandhi and his family is facing a prolonged litigation, while the chief minister of Kerala had already been acquitted from the only serious case pending in his name, the SNC-Lavlin case. The ED is in the habit of pouncing upon anyone in the opposition if a hairbreadth of a chance is provided to them and Mr. Gandhi has enough skeletons in the cupboard to show that several Congress men have fallen within this hairbreadth and have shifted allegiance to the BJP. Perhaps it will be useful for Mr. Gandhi to keep a dossier on those deserting the Congress to join BJP instead of bleating about covert alliances on the basis of a ridiculous comparison.

It would also be useful for Mr. Gandhi to draw a few lessons in Kerala History. It will also be useful to avoid cock and bull stories given to him by some Congress leaders from Kerala. The first such lesson is from 1957, when a Communist party came to power in the newly formed Kerala State, and started introducing important reforms that could have been taken up by the ruling Congress Government at the centre. These included land reforms, education reform, reforms of the public distribution system, police reforms, reservation norms in Government appointments and decentralisation of governance. However, the Congress led opposition decided to oppose these reforms and connived with caste and communal forces to overthrow the State Government. Communalism thus obtained its first breathing space in Kerala thanks to the Congress.
 

The second lesson is from 1971. The Congress led UDF was then in power. At Thalassery, a minor altercation between a temple procession and a group of youths resulted in a major conflagration in and around Thalassery where the RSS went on a rampage, attacked Muslim houses and set fire to their mosques and shops. It was the CPI(M) workers, led by Pinarayi Vijayan, who was then the local MLA who ensured the safety of the Muslim residents and protected them from RSS attacks. From then on, the RSS began to treat the CPI(M) as its major enemy not just ideologically, but physically as much as Gowalkar himself suggested. It began to target its members with physical assault and murder, whenever and wherever possible. Pinarayi, the village to which Com. Vijayan belongs, lay at the centre of this assault zone. Over two hundred CPI(M) workers have laid down their lives while combating the RSS hordes. The Congress of the region were either mute spectators or connived with the RSS.

The third lesson is from 1984. Once again, the UDF Government, with Mr. K. Karunakaran as the Chief minister was in power. A centuries old stone cross was discovered from a Siva temple at Nilakkal, not far away from Sabarimala. The Syrian Catholic Church wanted to erect a church at the site, which was opposed by the authorities of the Siva temple. All the Hindu organisations including the RSS, and the Ayyappa Seva Sangham, led by Kummanam Rajasekharan (presently a senior BJP leader of the state and former Mizoram Governor).  Rajasekharan was the chief organiser of the Hindu movement. The UDF, while making ample noises of a mediator, really sided with the Hindus. Finally, the Syrian Church was forced to give up their project and remove the stone cross from the site. This was probably the first victory of the Hindu forces in Kerala, with the 'covert' connivance of the UDF Government, which actually provided major shift in the communal influence, and the subsequent rise of the Hindutva forces.

The fourth lesson is from 1987.  It was from an open uncompromising anti- communal platform that the LDF won the Assembly elections. To defeat the LDF, the Congress led UDF experimented with putting up a joint opposition candidates against the LDF, which came to be called CLB (Congress-League- BJP). Such candidates were put up in Beypore assembly and Vatakara Lok Sabha constituencies. This unethical alliance lost both the seats. The person who won as an LDF candidate in Vatakara was K. P. Unnikrishnan, a veteran Congress parliamentarian who passed away recently.  Mr. Gandhi can take heart at the fact that not all Congressmen supported such ill-begotten tactics!

The fifth lesson is comparatively recent and known, of course, to Mr. Gandhi. A suit had been filed at the Supreme Court for obtaining permission for young women of the menstrual age to worship at Sabarimala temple, where there is ritual ban on such worship. The Court issued its verdict in 2018, permitting the entry of women and the state government decided to comply with the verdict. There was a big hue and cry against the verdict by Ayyappa devotees abetted by the RSS, in which, at a later stage, the UDF also joined. In fact, the entire Lok Sabha election campaign in 2019, by both, the UDF and the BJP, was conducted around devotees’ rights.

From these brief lessons it is clear as to who have been actively promoting the communal forces in Kerala, and who have been at the receiving end of communal violence throughout this period. Even during the last LSG elections, we have at least one curious case of Mattathur Grama Panchayat, where all Congress ward members resigned and joined BJP to put BJP in power, keeping the LDF out. Even after these series of cases of connivance and subterfuge on the part of the Congress in Kerala, Mr. Gandhi has the cheek to declare that CJP is ruling Kerala. What the Congress has been doing. and is the best when doing it, is piggybacking on communal forces, while pretending that they are 'Nehruvian' and even 'real left'.  Of course, Nehru, and Indira Gandhi were at the helm when the Congress piggyback riders managed to oust the Communist ministry in 1959. Since then, the caste and communal right-wing forces have always been on the prowl to eliminate the left forces, and the Congress have always joined them, even providing ammunition to them. During the last ten years of LDF rule, the Government, which has been in forefront of the fight for secularism, democracy and federalism, has been under continuous attack both from the central Government and the political opposition in the state, who are supposed to be leading the national opposition! The national leader must be knowing that he is making this puerile remark against one of his consistent allies which sin the fight against Hindutva communal forces, both inside the parliament and outside. We can call such allegations as examples for political insipidity, falling into the insinuations of his rapacious colleagues, but it is also an instance of self-deception of a person whose statements are sometimes not under his own command.