The UDF on 11 May held a public meeting in Vadakara against the alleged communalism of the CPI(M) after a 3 May march by the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI), the CPI(M)’s youth wing, over similar allegations against the UDF.
According to the regional media, the CPI(M) and the Indian Union Muslim League, which is part of the UDF, Monday expressed interest in holding an all-party meeting to bring an end to the alleged communal attacks from both sides. The Congress, however, is yet to react to that interest.
V.P. Abdul Rasheed, state general secretary of the Indian Youth Congress from the constituency, alleged that the UDF was able to highlight many scams during Shailaja’s tenure as minister in its campaign. “When the LDF foresaw failure, they resorted to a communal campaign as a last measure. It has always used that kind of campaign in this constituency,” he said.
The LDF, on the other hand, alleged that the UDF presented Shailaja as a communal force for consolidating Muslim votes, but it backfired, leading to the consolidation of secular votes. CPI(M) member Jinos Basheer said Vadakara has a history of consolidating against communal forces and his party was successful in resisting the campaign against Shailaja.
As the parties play a blame game, state-based political analysts say such slugfests could stroke tensions in a constituency that has historically seen a lot of political violence.
“The Vadakara belt has a historical memory of many CPI(M)-League (IUML) conflicts, which, if you look closely, will be Thiyya-Muslim landlord issues on the ground. Now, there has been a campaign to blow up the historical conflict,” said P.J. Vincent, a political analyst and head of the postgraduate history department at the Government Arts and Science College, Kozhikode.
The Thiyyas are a Hindu OBC community predominantly found in northern Kerala. Historically, in the Vadakara area, many landlords were Muslims and their tenants were Thiyyas, with the resulting class conflict still casting a shadow today.
C.R. Neelakandan, another Kerala-based political analyst, said the allegation of communalism against the UDF is the CPI(M)’s strategy of trying to whip up sentiments in its favour in case of a potential defeat.
“The LDF understood that it would not get votes as (much as) it thought. Shafi is vibrant, and Shailaja teacher is a cult figure. So, it used the communal angle,” Neelakandan said, adding that the UDF resisted the campaign through counter-communalism.
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2024 Vadakara battle & blame game
Located in the northern part of Kerala, Vadakara has seven assembly segments — two within the Kannur district (Thalassery and Kuthuparamba) and five in Kozhikode (Vadakara, Kuttiady, Nadapuram, Koyilandy, and Perambra).
Of these seven assembly segments, LDF parties represent six and UDF member Revolutionary Marxist Party (RMP) holds the Vadakara seat.
However, the Vadakara Lok Sabha seat has been with the UDF since 2009. The sitting MP is K. Muraleedharan, senior Congress leader and son of former chief minister K. Karunakaran.
However, this time, the Congress was forced to move Muraleedharan to Thrissur after his sister, Padmaja Venugopal, defected to the BJP. Their father, Karunakaran, was a long-time MLA from the Mala assembly segment under the Thrissur Lok Sabha constituency. The party then gave the ticket for Vadakara — which has a significant Muslim population — to Shafi Parambil, a young Muslim face of the party and Palakkad MLA.
The LDF, on the other hand, fielded its senior leader and former health minister K.K. Shailaja to reclaim the lost citadel, pinning hopes on her popularity and the international accolades she received for the handling of the Nipah and COVID-19 outbreaks during her ministerial tenure.
At the very beginning of the campaign, the battle between the candidates turned personal when Shailaja accused the UDF of a cyberattack against her. Shafi then sent her a legal notice for “tarnishing his name”.
Youth Congress leader Rasheed said that Shailaja’s allegation was also a part of the LDF’s communal strategy. “Vadakara is the Congress’s sitting seat and the Muslim League is a strong force of the UDF there. League cadre worked hard for Shafi as they had worked for Muraleedharan,” said Rasheed, adding that the LDF, realising it wasn’t going to win, fell back on communal politics.
However, CPI(M) member Basheer alleged that the UDF’s “communal” campaign against Shailaja would push secular votes towards his party. He also alleged that the UDF has continued to make the same allegations and personal attacks against Shailaja even after the polls, referring to RMP leader K.S. Hariharan’s controversial remarks last week, after which Kerala Police filed a case against him.
Speaking at the public meeting inaugurated by Kerala Leader of the Opposition V.D. Satheesan, Hariharan said, “Will anybody ever try to make a porn video of the teacher (Shailaja)? We can understand if anyone makes a porn video of women like (Malayalam actor) Manju Warrier.”
The UDF is now feeling guilty about the damage that comment has caused, said Basheer, adding, “Now, they are understanding the impact it has made. Shafi and the UDF are working to prove that it was not them who did it. All of Vadakara would have believed it if he had said all this a day before polling,” he said.
“At the end of the day, the BJP is going to benefit from the polarisation,” Basheer said, adding the damage was done and that all political parties woould have to figure out how to undo it.
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North Malabar’s history of violence
The Vadakara constituency has a significant presence of voters from minority communities. According to the 2011 census, Kannur district has a 59.83 percent Hindu population, followed by 29.43 percent Muslims and 10.41 percent Christians. Kozhikode district has a 56.21 percent Hindu population, followed by 39.24 Muslims and 4.26 percent Christians.
While Vadakara’s Muslim voters mainly support the IUML, the Communists finds their voters among the Thiyyas. The politics in the area is rooted in the economy and land ownership relations, according to historians.
“The Vadakara belt historically has been a land of conflict between Hindus and Muslims. It’s a Thiyya-Muslim landlord issue if you look at it class-wise. It’s land with several Muslim landlords, while the agricultural labourers are Thiyyas,” Vincent said.
In a research paper, ‘The Nadapuram Enigma: A History of Violence and Communalism in North Malabar(1957–2015)’, published in 2016, scholar P.K. Yasser Arafath writes that the region has a long history of communal tensions since the 1950s. The Thiyya community started asserting their caste identity, and later their religious identity centred on Hinduism, by the early 20th century, which brought new dimensions to the politics of the area from the 1930s.
“The process of rural conversion, agrestic relationship, and extended caste dynamics amongst Muslims, and a religiously-invoked caste identity within the Thiyya community, played a significant role in the construction, pattern and the consequences of the violence in the region,” Arafath writes.
According to the paper, the political engagements in the region have shaped the Mappila (the predominant Muslim community in the Malabar region)-Thiyya binary since 1988, leading to the 1985 death of A. Kanaran, a CPI(M) leader from the Thiyya community. Kanaran was assaulted 5 km away from Nadapuram when he interrupted an IUML protest, demanding an “unbiased” probe into the murder of a 26-year-old local resident, Nambodankandi Hameed, who was shot dead in 1985.
Arafath’s paper says unprecedented violence followed as CPI(M) activists demanded immediate retaliation through public announcement systems “for his serious injury” at “Mappila hands”. Members of the IUML the Congress, the CPI(M) and its student wing were among those killed in the violence.
The area also came under the media glare after the murder of Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI, the CPI(M)’s youth wing) worker Shibin (19) in Thuneri in 2015, allegedly by a gang of IUML workers. Afterwards, violence erupted in the region. A year on, one of the accused, Aslam, was murdered. His body had over 60 stab wounds.
In February this year, a special court acquitted the 17 accused in the Shibin murder case as the prosecution failed to prove the charges. The trial of one of the accused, a juvenile, is pending.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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