Analysis | CPM busy shielding Pinarayi, P Jayarajan writes new anti-Sangh Parivar chapter for party

After the massive election defeat, two political impulses are fighting for supremacy in the CPM. One is the desperation to preserve the old order. And the other, an eagerness to quickly reshape the party's political discourse.

For the moment, it is the first impulse that has the upper hand. For proof, look at how the party used mob power to intimidate Enforcement Directorate officials who came to interrogate Pinarayi Vijayan's daughter in the CMRL-Exalogic bribe scandal or at how the CPM state committee, after two days of intense deliberations, refused to make any top leader accountable for deeds that the party itself concluded had contributed to the defeat.

The competing impulse is found in the anti-Sangh Parivar book tour that state committee member P Jayarajan has begun from Thiruvananthapuram. Through his new book 'Sanatanikalude Hindutva Vazhikal' (Hindutva Manoeuvres of Sanatanis), Jayarajan wants to provide an ideological guide that can help the CPM pull itself out of the crisis it has found itself in.

His self-help strategy is uncomplicated: Free Sree Narayana Guru from the clutches of 'sanatanis', bring the Ezhavas back to the party's fold, restore the CPM's secular credentials and expose the 'evil designs' of the Sangh Parivar and those like SNDP Yogam general secretary Vellappally Natesan who masquerade as Left sympathisers.

Not for him the secular make-believe that places the Jamaat-e-Islami as the Muslim alter ego of the RSS, a strategy that has Islamophobia written all over it in bold and had backfired. 

It was no coincidence, therefore, that Jayarajan's first lecture of the 'book tour' was held on the day CPM state secretary M V Govindan made public the conclusions of the party's post-defeat analysis.

While Govindan still found it hard to fully disown Kerala's chief islamophobe Vellappally Natesan, Jayarajan had no qualms calling him an unreliable character who had hawked his soul to the Sangh Parivar.

"If the party had the spine to dismiss Vellappally the way Comrade Jayarajan has, it would not have suffered such a rout," said Jyothikrishna, a member of Kerala State Employees Association (KSEA) that is affiliated to the CPM. "Vellappally is not the embodiment of the Ezhava community as the party seemed to have believed. He is a corrupted version," said Jyothikumar who was at the KSEA hall to attend Jayarajan's lecture on June 9. 

Jayarajan, however, has not positioned himself as a rebel, an alternative. He essentially wants the party to recover the daring that Pinarayi Vijayan himself had exhibited on December 31, 2024.

On that day, while inaugurating the 92nd Sivagiri Pilgrimage, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said that Sree Narayana Guru was neither a proponent nor a practitioner of Sanatana Dharma. Instead, Pinarayi said that Guru was a seer who dismantled Sanatana Dharma and on its ruins had reconstructed a new moral code for the changing world. 

"Pinarayi had hit the Sangh Parivar where it hurt the most. Stung, its leaders said that the Chief Minister had insulted the Guru by painting him as an opponent of Sanatana Dharma," Jayarajan said. Pinarayi's comments on Sanatana Dharma came a year after DMK leader Udayanidhi Stalin's comment that Sanatana Dharma was a blight that should be eradicated like dengue and COVID.

Jayarajan wants his party to sustain the bold resistance that Pinarayi had begun in 2024. "There were attempts to misrepresent Guru's teachings even when he was alive. But what we see now is not just distortion but a planned attempt by Hindu revivalist forces to falsify history for narrow political ends," he says in his book.

He also says that Sangh Parivar leaders like P Parameshwaran knew that it was Guru who stood in between them and Kerala. "Sree Narayana Guru's entry caused a radical deviation from the class-caste system that existed in Kerala from its birth. Therefore, it is Guru's teachings that have thwarted the Sangh Parivar's plans to entrench itself in Kerala. It is because of Guru that Kerala continues to exist as an island of secularism in the country," Jayarajan said.

In short, he wants his party to destroy the Sangh Parivar's 'grand design' to appropriate Sree Narayana Guru. "My book and what I want to say through it becomes relevant because the Sangh Parivar is beginning to find a place in Kerala," Jayarajan said at the June 9 lecture.

"Sanatana Dharma is an expression of religious fundamentalism and it has achieved some positive results in Kerala. The Thiruvananthapuram Corporation is now ruled by the Sangh Parivar forces. And in the last Assembly polls, the BJP has secured three seats for the first time in history. This is a sign of danger, and now is the time to rise up against forces that advance inequality as an ideology," he said.

It is still not clear whether Jayarajan's party has heard him.