Communalism sans violence: A Keralan exceptionalism?

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I undertake a broad survey of communalism in the southern Indian state of Kerala. I argue that Kerala displays as a dominant trend, a non-antagonistic form of communalism or peaceful competition among religious communities, which is a rarity for the Indian subcontinent. The reasons for this can be attributed to the severity of caste oppression and the consequent salience of caste divisions, deep inter-religious civic engagement, governmental participation by communal parties, and the presence of a communist movement and the strength of class politics. However, the emergence of Hindu nationalism as a powerful force in India and its capture of state power, and the rise of Islamist extremism, largely as a response to it, have led to a new conjuncture of antagonistic assertion of religious identities. Kerala is not immune to these trends. The transformation in political economy and the de-radicalization of the communist movement have provided a conducive atmosphere to them. Yet, non-antagonistic communalism prevails, but less emphatically.

Acknowledgement

I thank Shajahan Madampat for his insights. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Nissim Mannathukkaren's research interests are focused on left/ communist movements, development and democracy, modernity, the politics of popular culture and Marxist and postcolonial theories. He is the author of The Rupture with Memory: Derrida and the Specters that Haunt Marxism, and has publications in journals such as the Journal of Peasant Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Dialectical Anthropology, South Asian History and Culture, Third World Quarterly, Journal of Critical Realism, International Journal of the History of Sport, and Economic and Political Weekly. He is also a regular contributor to the Indian popular press and his articles have appeared in newspapers, magazines and blogs like The Hindu, Outlook, Tehelka, The Wire, The Citizen, and Kafila.

Notes

1 The BJP finally opened its account in the State Assembly with one seat in May 2016.

2 As Aloysius argues: “If the colonial administration’s policy of viewing people primarily as religious entities, regionalized these religious issues, the later day nationalists, not to be left behind, went ahead and nationalized them. The most unfortunate and disastrous result of this politics of religionization was the arresting of the process of horizontal and class-like polarization, and the replacement of the same with a counter process of vertical polarization in politico-religious terms” (Aloysius 1997, 89).

3 The Nairs were a landowning caste. They were also linked to the highest caste in the hierarchy, the Brahmins, through the system of inter-caste marriage. The lower caste Ezhavas in the past were denied temple entry and temple approach by the upper castes. They were predominantly lower class and consisted of tenants, landless labourers and toddy-tappers.

4 Simeon too argues, unsurprisingly, for India as a whole, “caste is “a far more basic identity” than a religious communal identity (Simeon 2012). And caste is a pan-religious phenomenon in India, affecting Christianity and Islam as well. Thus, among Muslims in Kerala, there are caste-like hierarchies, and severe exclusions faced by lower caste convert Muslims (Kanchana 2012, 265; Arafath 2016, 51).

5 Christianity in Kerala dates back, according to legend, to the arrival of St. Thomas, one of the apostles of Christ, on the Kerala coast (Visvanathan 1994). A vast majority of Christians in Kerala are known as the Syrian Christians for they follow the Syrian liturgy. The Syrian Christians are a leading business and farming community. Under feudalism, they were also tenants, cultivating lands owned by upper caste Hindus.

6 The Nairs, unlike the Ezhavas and Christians, were governed by the matrilineal joint family system, which limited individual initiative and enterprise.

7 Includes votes polled by independents supported by the party.

8 While the NSS felt that the landowning Nairs would be affected by the Agrarian Bill, the Church which owned a large majority of private educational institutions was threatened by the Educational Bill.

9 In the same year, there was a new development – a classic example of liberal communalism – which was to have a lasting effort on Kerala politics and society. A section of the Nair and Christian members of the Congress party broke away to form the Kerala Congress (KC) in 1964 backed by the Catholic Church as well as by the NSS. Gradually, it became a party representing Christian interests only.

10 The success of the minority communal parties encouraged the Hindu caste organizations to start their own parties which endured only for a few years.

11 The interest-oriented nature is also fully evident from the splits that have characterized it on the basis of personality clashes among leaders.

12 In the recent times, a major communal incident occurred in Nadapuram, Malabar which saw “unprecedented targeted destruction of properties” of Muslims (Arafath 2016, 47)

13 The BDJS secured only 3.9% of votes in the 2016 Assembly Elections. It had aligned with the BJP.

14 One of the examples of intercommunity and secular engagement by a communal organization is the non-religious newspaper Madhyamam run by the Jamaat e Islami Hind (JIH) which has an impressive circulation of 2,00,000 copies per day. But there are scholars who view this as secular posturing by fundamentalist organizations to gain mainstream legitimacy (Shajahan Madampat, personal communication, July 19, 2015).

15 The other major pole of secular politics in Kerala, the Congress Party had no program to counter communalism since the beginning.

16 In the early days of communism, enthused by its activism, there was the assertion of the lower class Muslims and Hindus against elite landlord class Muslims. This incipient class conflict eventually gave way to communal identities of Hindu vs. Muslim (Arafath 2016, 50–2).

17 In Kerala, there is a relative absence of large landholders outside the plantation sector (the plantation sector is exempt from the land ceiling). Nearly 80% of the landholders are small-scale landholders whose average size of landholding is one-third of an acre.

18 At the same time, we should not see this simply, or only, as revivalism. Religiosity itself takes new shapes including being commodified (Osella 2003), or as Warrier argues, even carrying “within it seeds of some- thing quite different – trends towards the secularization of civil society” (Warrier 2003, 213).