The CPM State Secretary M V Govindan was quick to disown the party's Kerala leader Anil Kumar's remarks that suggested that the CPM saw the 'hijab' as a regressive accessory.
Two months ago, Govindan did something that, on the face of it, looked just the opposite. He aggressively backed Speaker A N Shamseer's "Ganesha is a myth" line and, even in the face of the NSS threat to unleash a second 'namajapa' protest, rebuffed demands for an apology.
Fact is, seen in the light of the CPM's political strategy in the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls, both these actions do not cancel each other out but are complementary. Both are intended to deny the BJP an extra inch of political space in Kerala.
Spare the believer, save the party
Shamseer had to be backed because what he said was part of the CPM programme to relentlessly discredit the Sangh Parivar's attempts to window-dress myths as scientific truths. It is only in the tone that the CPM has made a major change. The pro-science agenda is drummed in not with self-righteous vigour but with charm.
So even when it encourages people to place science above myth, the CPM does it with a soft caress on the cheeks of the believers.
'Spare the faithful' has been the CPM motto ever since the party's attempts to whip up a 'Second Renaissance Movement' in Kerala, in the wake of the Sabarimala verdict, backfired big time.
It looked like Govindan had forgotten the lesson while defending Shamseer in the first week of August. On the first day, he behaved like an unrepentant science evangelist. "Is the concept of Ganapati science? Is it not a myth," he shot back at reporters who fired posers at him.
The very next day he had his hands on the cheeks of the faithful. "Believers have the right to believe in Ganapati or Allah. I didn't term Ganapati a myth or endorse Allah as a non-mythical concept," he said.
Since Govindan was quick to make amends, the CPM believes that the moderate Hindus, who are still suspicious of the BJP, have not been upset. At least the NSS was convinced, and called off its statewide stir.
Battle for Muslim votes
The public rebuke for Anil Kumar, on the other hand, was a strategic move to prevent any damage to the party's meticulous efforts to woo the Muslim community to its fold and, by that means, appropriate the anti-BJP space in Kerala during the coming Lok Sabha polls.
As it stands, the biggest chunk of Muslim votes flow to the UDF. The CPM wants this equation reversed. The party is not even interested in a 'down the middle' split.
The assessment is that a near equal division of Muslim votes between the UDF and the LDF could help the BJP candidates, especially in Thiruvananthapuram where the Left (CPI) candidate was relegated to the third spot in the last two general elections and Thrissur where the BJP candidate Suresh Gopi, though was third, had managed to corner nearly 30 per cent of the votes.
Gambling house mentality
Aggressively courting the Muslim community is perhaps the CPM's biggest political gamble. It is not as if the party has a choice. If it has to remain relevant in national politics, the CPM requires at least 10 Lok Sabha seats and, for this, increased Muslim support, which traditionally has been hard to come by during Parliament elections, is a must. Even if done citing the pretext of BJP’s fascist tendencies, the CPM has already dumped its original position on Uniform Civil Code to favour supposedly dominant Muslim sensibilities.
This attempt to wean away Muslim voters from the UDF could in hindsight be pronounced disastrous as it could scatter the Muslim votes, rather than consolidate, and let the BJP win by default from a Parliament seat in Kerala for the first time.
For instance in Thrissur, sensing a Gopi wave, there was minority consolidation in favour of T N Prathapan, the Congress candidate. If the CPM ploy works, such a consolidation will not happen.
CPM’s Faustian bargain
That the CPM was pursuing Muslim votes even at the cost of its own identity was made evident when its leadership refused to utter a word against a senior Muslim cleric who, in May 2022, publicly rebuked the organisers of a prize distribution ceremony in Malappuram for inviting a 10th standard girl to the dais to collect the prize. Janata Dal (S)'s Mathew T Thomas was the only LDF leader who found the cleric's behaviour offensive.
The CPM silence was not hard to fathom. The cleric, MT Abdulla Musaliyar, was a senior functionary of Samastha Kerala Jem-iyyathul Ulama, the most influential body of Muslim scholars in Kerala that has historical ties with the Indian Union Muslim League but has of late shown an increasing affinity towards the CPM.
To keep an influential Muslim body happy, it looks like the CPM is willing to hide even a progressive social aspiration like gender equality like it was contraband.
