Ever since Congress president Rahul Gandhi chose to contest from Wayanad, a constituency perceived as predominantly Muslim, attempts have been made to paint the Muslim community as the other. That the BJP would gleefully do this was no surprise. But the CPM state secretary Kodiyeri Balakrishnan, too, has used language that sounds eerily similar to UP chief minister Yogi Adithyanath and BJP state president P S Sreedharan Pillai.
“Rahul Gandhi has clambered up the Wayanad pass mounted on that dead horse called the Muslim League,” Kodiyeri Balakrishnan said in his column in the party mouthpiece 'Deshabhimani' on Friday. He said he was borrowing a term used by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to once describe the League. The other day, Sreedharan Pillai, too, was heard saying that Nehru had called the League a “dead horse”.
Kodiyeri put forward yet another charge that Pillai had raised a day ago. “That the Congress had taken refuge in a constituency that could be won only with the help of the Muslim League showed the utter helplessness of the Congress,” the CPM state secretary said, almost perfectly echoing Sreedharan Pillai.
Kodiyeri echoes Yogi
It was prime minister Narendra Modi who gave Muslim-bashing the least subtlety after Rahul Gandhi chose to contest from Wayanad. Modi said the Congress was so afraid of a Hindu backlash that Rahul Gandhi had gone to “contest from a seat where the minority is majority”. UP chief minister Yogi Adithyanath's anti-Muslim rant had no subtlety but it was technically not directed at the Muslim community, but at the Muslim League. He called the League a “virus”, confident that his support base can easily track the patch of the barb. Sreedharan Pillai but carefully made a distinction between Muslims and the Muslim League. “We have nothing against our Muslim brethren,” he said.
But the CPM state secretary, like Adithyanath, did not find it necessary to bother with at least a namesake distinction. Kodiyeri said that the Congress was cultivating Muslim fundamentalism by aligning with the Muslim League. Former chief minister Oommen Chandy was more amused than provoked. “It feels as though the Congress and the Muslim League have come together only after Rahul Gandhi was announced as the candidate,” he said.
CPM's pacts with the League
Kodiyeri is also displeased that the Congress had aligned with the League instead of forging a secular front. This statement, too, suggested a disconnect with reality. The Muslim League has always been part of the Congress party's secular front. The League was very much part of the UPA-I dispensation that the CPM had supported from outside to keep the BJP at bay. There is nothing to show that the CPM was displeased with the presence of the League then.
To be fair to the CPM, it had ideologically considered the IUML to be a communal force. But this had not prevented the party from forging an alliance with the League, and parties that broke away from it, whenever the need arose. In 1967, when E M S Namboodirippad formed the Sapthakakshi Munnani (the seven-party front), the Muslim League was an ally. Later, between 1977 and 1985, the party had a seven-year alliance with All India Muslim League, a breakaway faction of the IUML. These are facts that Kodiyeri chose to ignore when he said that the Congress had always allied with communal forces to defeat the Left.
It is also a fact that the present chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan was censured by the party in 2000 for openly hinting at a tie-up with the Muslim League.
