Kerala: Is the land of Gods dying by the hands of radicals?

The enticing advertisements by the Department of Tourism by the administration of the Indian state of Kerala entice visitors with seductive images of natural beauty in the tropics, capping it all with the slogan “God’s Own Country”. However it is becoming increasingly apparent that this begs the question, exactly whose ‘god’ does this refer to? Which kind of ‘god’ now dominates this south Indian state?

The state also boasts perhaps the earliest Muslim community in India, as the Moplahs or Mappilahs date back to the seventh century, tracing their descent to Arab traders settled along the Malabar coast .It was around this time that one of India’s foremost spiritual figures Adi Shankara was born, in the village of Kaladi in Kerala. He was barely a teenager he attracted many disciples and wrote commentaries on the Brahmasutras, Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita which were later compiled into the Bhashyas, writings which stand at the very pinnacle of Indian philosophical writing. Shankara is perhaps best known for engaging other schools of philosophy in debate. In this it was said that no other teacher could match him. Travelling throughout India he established ashrams and mathas (spiritual centres or monastaries) as he engaged in debate with other spiritual masters. This included reaching as far as Kashmir. Here at the temple dedicated to Saraswati (goddess of learning) he won the debate with all other scholars, a feat until then never achieved by a philosopher from southern India. At the age of thirty-two this most respected son of Kerala retired to the cave of Kedarnath in the Himalayas where he is said to have achieved samadhi (complete absorption of the individual consciousness in the self at the time of death).

In addition to its much vaunted communal harmony the state has also boasted the highest literacy rate in modern India, the highest life expectancy which in fact is in line with developed countries, and has made determined efforts to tackle poverty. While the latter has been successful much of it is due to remittances sent back by expat workers in the Gulf. These amount to the highest amount of remittances in any Indian state. Hence while the state’s economic development has been lauded, few have commented on the distortions caused by the latter factor. The very fact that Malayalis feel the need to work in places like Dubai where they are treated as virtual slaves should make us question just how successful Kerala has actually been.

The destruction of Babri Masjid in 1992 had repercussions in the state as elsewhere in India, even if they were more muted. In December 2001 communal clashes broke out when the extremist Muslim National Democratic Front demanded that the Babri Masjid be rebuilt. On 2 May 2003, 8 Hindu fishermen were killed by a Muslim mob in Kozhikode district on Marad beach. A judicial commission concluded that the Indian Union Muslim League was directly involved in what became known as the Marad massacre. Also in 2008, four youths who were shot dead by the security forces in Jammu and Kashmir as part of a team of militants trying to cross over to Pakistan were found to be from Kerala. The Communist Party, as is common with the rest of India, had courted Muslim support by playing to fears of Hindu ‘fascism’ and ‘communalism’. Yet by 7 August 2010 it was the communist state chief minister, V.S. Achuthanandan, who warned that Muslims were trying to turn Kerala into an Islamic state using demographic arsenals of financial inducements to convert and deliberately marrying non-Muslim women. Despite the fact that Achuthanandan emphatically stated that he was referring to Islamic extremists and not the Muslim population in general, his break with stifling political correctness nevertheless led to him being accused of employing the incendiary language of ‘Hindutva’.

The dress style of Malayali Muslims, once almost indistinguishable from their Hindu neighbours, has now become more pronounced with Arab-style hijabs and purdah. Poverty cannot be the cause of this as even educated Muslim women are now taking to this Salafi style Islamic attire. The PFI’s media arm, he Inter Media Private Limited, held by the Thejas Publishing Charitable Trus, has been very active in publishing hardcore Islamist propaganda in Kerala’s very own Malayalam, as well as Tamil, Kannada, English, Hindi and Urdu. Support has been attracted through its organisational capability, notably by the synchronised paramilitary parades which its cadres performed on 15 August in 2008 and 2009 across in Nuremberg-style rallies in cities across the south Indian states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Muslims in Kozhikode thronged the roads and packed into the city stadium to watch the march. In 2008 it chose the Hindu stronghold of Mangalore to stage the provocative display. In 2010 the rallies were banned by the Kerala government.

The police however claim that the PFI goes beyond providing jobs. “All Muslim youth joining the PFI are given mobile phones, motorcycles and money. The organisation also assists in job recruitments in the Gulf,” says Vinson M Paul, ADGP, Crime. The PFI claims Muslims are powerless against the Hindu majority, citing violence following the destruction of Babri Masjid and in 2002 in Godhra where Muslims were massacred in Gujarat . Since 2008 the PFI and its political wing, Social Democratic Party of India, have set up committees in 15 states and already have a significant following in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. The PFI’s formulations of “total empowerment” for Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis and Backward Castes and connect it with other parties. The Asom United Democratic Front (AUDF), led by perfume magnate Maulana Badruddin Ajmal and with significant power in Assam politics, has declared solidarity with the PFI. Smaller outfits such as the Milli Ettehad Parishad in West Bengal and the Tamil Nadu Muslim Munnetra Kazhgam (TMMK) have joined the PFI-led national alliance of Muslim groups and parties.

Now this talk has often been dismissed as Hindu extremism, anti-Muslim hatred and a problem of ‘communalism’ that ambiguous term to describe sectarian violence between Hindus and Muslims in India, but which has the rather unambiguous anti-Hindu undercurrent in its usage. But then how to explain the brutal assault on T. J. Joseph which occurred on Sunday, July 4 2010, as the professor and his family were leaving a church service? Can this be laid at the door of centuries of Hindu-Muslim animosity? Kerala is a state that has had a strong Christian presence for over two thousand years. They have mostly lived in amity.

Also after Joseph was attacked, police raided the Popular Front’s offices and found literature and videos about Taliban-style executions and the severing of limbs as punishment for crimes. The Internal Security Investigation Team (ISIT) of the Kerala Police also found CD’s linked to al-Qaeda and links to Lashkar-e-Tayyeba. This should come as no surprise considering that the PFI has openly expressed its “solidarity to the freedom fighters in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq ” and declares that Hamas, Taliban and al-Qaeda are part of its liberation struggle.

President Obama invited the latter group to his speech in Cairo in June 2009 as he extended a hand of friendship to the Muslim world. Now with the outfit’s electoral victory as the ironically named Freedom and Justice Party, the Obama administration continues to court the favour of these extremists. It was the Indian national newspaper ‘The Hindu’ which broke the startling news in December 2011 that Obama had asked the Ikhwan’s leading jurist, Qaradawi, to mediate secret talks between the United States and the Taliban. This is the same man who in 2009 called for the extermination of all Jews and issued a fatwa asserting that “the Kashmiris were properly fighting jihad against the Indian army” in a legitimate war because mujahideen groups sought to create an Islamic state. The fatwa was therefore incumbent on all Muslims to help Kashmiris gain their “freedom from Indian aggression.” The jurist previously has called for killing American soldiers in Iraq and has vowed that Islam “will conquer Europe [and] will conquer America ,” whether by force or by the spread of radical Islam. It is this last element which is either ignored or laughed off by western commentators. But the terrorist organisation’s founding father, Hasan al-Banna, himself cited i’adat al Khalifa al Mafqudah as the chief political goal of the Muslim Brotherhood, right from its founding in 1928. This meant the immediate restoration of the caliphate abolished that year by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in his attempts to turn the new republic of Turkey into a secular, western and European direction, thus cutting it off from its Ottoman and Islamic roots and thus deposing and exiling the last sultan. In Arabic the caliphate is known as ‘Khilafat’, a word which though rarely used in discussing the Saalfist hijacking of the Arab Spring, should cause us intense alarm because the Khilafat was also the name of an Islamic movement in India from 1918 to 1923.

It was at this juncture that India’s freedom movement made a fateful mistake. Like Obama’s well-meaning yet naïve calls for reaching out to the Muslim world, the Indian National Congress hoped to create amity among all Indians by demonstrating to their colonial rulers that Muslims were as much a part of the freedom struggle as the majority Hindus.

In his 1998 book ‘The World of Fatwas’, Rajya Sabha member Arun Shourie begins by describing the fallout from the Khilafat movement. Gandhi was adamant of full unconditional support of the Khilafat movement and even boasted that “Shaukat has me in his pocket”. As late as January 1924 with Gandhi suffering ill health in Yeravda Jail, the Ali brothers kissed his feet as a mark of respect and tears flowed down Mohammed Ali’s face. It took a pogrom against minority Hindus and Sikhs (usually referred to in non-judgmental politically correct terms even then as ‘communal riot’) in the North-West Frontier Province of Kohat in September for this façade to finally break. While admitting that Gandhi had a higher moral character than even his spiritual guide Maulana Abdul Bari, Maulana Mohammed Ali nevertheless confessed the truth behind his apparent volte-face in a letter to Swami Shraddhananda:

“It was the result of the agitation carried out by two Muslim organizations, the Khuddam-i-Kaba (servants of the Mecca Shrine) and the Central Khilafat Committee. Agitators actually preached the doctrine that India under British Government was Dar-ul-Harab and that the Muslims must fight against it and if they could not, they must carry out the alternative principle of Hijrat. The Moplas were suddenly carried off their feet by this agitation. The outbreak was essentially a rebellion against the British Government. The aim was to establish the kingdom of Islam by overthrowing the British Government. Knives, swords and spears were secretly manufactured, bands of desperadoes collected for an attack on British authority…..As soon as the administration had been paralysed, the Moplas declared that Swaraj had been established. A certain Ali Mudaliar was proclaimed Raja, Khilafat flags were flown, and Ernad and Wallurana were declared Khilafat Kingdoms. As a rebellion against the British Government it was quite understandable. But what baffled most was the treatment accorded by the Moplas to the Hindus of Malabar. The Hindus were visited by a dire fate at the hands of the Moplas. Massacres, forcible conversions, desecrations of temples, foul outrages upon women,  such as ripping open pregnant women, pillage arson and destruction – in short all the accompaniments of brutal and unrestrained barbarism, were perpetrated freely by the Moplas upon the Hindus until such time as troops could be hurried to the task of restoring order through a difficult and extensive tract of the country. This was not a Hindu-Muslim riot. This was a Bartholomew. The number of Hindus who were killed, wounded or converted, is not known. But the number must have been enormous.”

Is Obama therefore paying too high a price for his outreach by recognising the Muslim Brotherhood as a legitimate democratic force? When western media refer to Salafist groups such as Tunisia’s Ennhad party as ‘moderate’ is this not the same intellectual dishonesty as when they term every pogrom against Hindus in India as ‘communal riot’ or the result of Hindu fascism? What is dismissed as a problem of a Third World poverty and seen through the outdated colonialist paradigm of dark-skinned heathen masses with bizarre customs will now be something which rudderless western democracies have to deal with. Misuse of terms such as ‘democratic’ and ‘moderate’ do not change the ideological DNA of such organisations whose unambiguous aim is that of the caliphate, an Islamic superpower based on the Salafi brand of Islam which if fast overtaking oil as Saudi Arabia’s main export. If such a revered figure as Gandhi could not make peace with such forces what chance do contemporary statesmen have? It was in America that Gandhi’s ideas of ahimsa (non-violence) were used with such effect half a century ago by Martin Luther King to gain full civil rights for all the country’s citizens. Now a president, who without the effort of King and others would have most likely not been able to even vote let alone become head of state, is following in Gandhi’s rather less illustrious footsteps by giving unconditional support for the vanguard of the present day Khilafat movement.