Tension Seeker

On 25 November last year, P Noushad, a 32-year-old autorickshaw driver in Kozhikode city, learned that two cleaners, unknown to him, had fallen into a manhole and were trapped inside. Noushad rushed to help. As he was trying to pull them out, one of the trapped men clung to his leg, and in the process, pulled Noushad into the drain. All three were asphyxiated to death.

The tragedy stunned Kerala. Responding to the popular mood, the state’s government announced an ex gratia payment of R10 lakh to Noushad’s family. Kerala’s chief minister, Oommen Chandy of the Congress party, promised a government job to Noushad’s young widow. These decisions were universally applauded, before a solitary voice of dissent emerged some days later.

“Noushad’s family was given this compensation only because he was a Muslim. Would this government make such gestures if he was a Hindu?” thundered Vellappally Natesan, the general secretary of the powerful Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam, or SNDP, a 112-year-old organisation that represents the Ezhava community, founded by Kerala’s social reformer Sree Narayana Guru. Natesan claimed that the compensation was “yet another instance” of Kerala’s Congress-led government’s appeasement of minorities.

Malayalis are familiar with Natesan’s excessive comments, but were taken aback nonetheless. Livid responses condemning his statement poured in from across political, religious and caste barriers. Yet Natesan, known for his acerbic tongue, stuck to his guns. He said he had nothing against Noushad, but the government’s intentions weren’t so pure.

In a politically hyper-sensitive society such as Kerala, it is unusual for a non-politician to occupy centre stage for long. But Natesan, a 78-year-old contractor and hotelier, has been grabbing headlines for the past several months in the state. Although he has always played an indirect role in the state’s politics during his 20-year stint with the SNDP, he has now entered the arena himself. The SNDP’s political outfit, the Bharat Dharma Jana Sena, was launched on 4 December last year, and seems set to complicate Kerala’s traditionally bipolar politics.

The Ezhava community has traditionally backed the Left parties in Kerala’s longstanding electoral rivalry between the Congress and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), currently the respective leaders of the United Democratic Front and the Left Democratic Front alliances jockeying for power in the assembly. Ezhavas constitute 24 percent of Kerala’s Hindu demographic, in itself about half of a total population of over 30 million people. Now, however, the Bharat Dharma Jana Sena is likely to be the first major Kerala ally of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which has been desperately seeking partners to end its political isolation in the state. With the SNDP’s support, the BJP increased its vote share from 12 percent to 18 percent in Kerala’s local body polls, held late last year. Thushar, Natesan’s son and his deputy in the SNDP, said that this was a signal the BJP would “open its account” in state elections, due to be held this year. (The BJP has yet to win a seat in Kerala’s assembly.)

Natesan’s provocative statements have drawn him into several controversies. Just last month, he withdrew an invitation to Oommen Chandy to preside over a function in Kollam on 15 December , where Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled a statue of R Shankar, a former general secretary of the SNDP, and chief minister of Kerala’s Congress government between 1962 and 1964. Natesan said he had requested Chandy to keep away, as his audience would have disliked the latter’s presence due to the state government’s “heaping of insults” on Ezhavas.

In the ensuing furore, both the UDF and LDF condemned this as an insult to the state and boycotted the function. It also triggered a national row. Congress leaders protested in parliament, and claimed that the prime minister’s office was behind the move. “Like the BJP’s earlier attempt to appropriate Sardar Patel, they are now trying to take over Congress’s own Shankar,” Chandy said. Modi, in his speech at the function, had pointed out that Shankar launched the Hindu Mahasabha in Kerala in the 1950s, and was close to the BJP’s political forebear, the Jana Sangh. The prime minister made no mention of Chandy.

The SNDP, with roots in a social movement for caste equality that stretches back nearly a century, has traditionally been pro-Congress, even though its Ezhava base has tended to vote for the Left in state elections. Natesan’s decision, in 2013, to end this state of affairs and join hands with the BJP, catapulted him into the spotlight. It was not the first time Natesan had attempted to broker power using Hindu unity. He had previously attempted to form an alliance with G Sukumaran Nair, the general secretary of the SNDP’s Nair counterpart, the Nair Service Society, although that partnership broke down last year due to disagreement over the issue of caste-based reservations.

Natesan has openly supported the BJP ever since Modi emerged on the national stage. He often cites the similarity between Modi’s origins and his own—Ezhavas, like Ghanchi Telis, Modi’s community, are classified as Other Backward Classes. He has also said that neither the Congress nor the Left would support a backward-caste leader as a prime minister. His first public gesture to Modi was to invite him, in 2013, to a function at the Sivagiri Mutt, the final abode of Sree Narayana Guru, an important religious centre for the Ezhava community. That invitation sent shock waves through Kerala, and both the Left and the Congress boycotted the function. They lambasted Natesan for burying the “great secular traditions” of the guru and his movement. Modi, then Gujarat’s chief minister, hit back, saying the Congress and Left were practicing “untouchability” towards the backward castes.

Natesan’s move inspired pro-Hindutva factions among other communities to follow suit. Soon after that visit, Modi became the much-fêted guest at the sixtieth birthday celebrations of Kerala’s popular Hindu spiritual leader, Amrithananda Mayi. In 2014, Modi was once again chief guest at a major function of the most backward Dalits, co-organised with BJP by the Kerala Pulaya Maha Sabha, which was once left-leaning. The current BJP president Amit Shah, who played an instrumental role in cementing these relations, recently took Natesan and his family to Delhi, where they had a personal audience with Modi.

However Natesan’s alliance with the BJP has been fraught with many internal contradictions. The first is the SNDP’s own legacy. It was Sree Narayana Guru’s life mission to uplift the Ezhava community from caste exploitation and discrimination. To this end, Guru preached that nobody should “ask caste or tell caste.” Humanity, he taught, needed only “one caste, one religion and one god.” Natesan, on the other hand, holds that he will always ask as well as state caste, for as long as discrimination continues against Ezhavas. For the past many years, Natesan has been accusing “the secularists” of appeasing the upper castes and minorities. He once said that such people only preach “to backward castes never to ask or tell caste.” After Modi unveiled the guru’s statue in 2013, CK Vidyasagar, a former president of the SNDP, said that “by forging an alliance with the upper caste-dominated Sangh Parivar, Natesan has thrown mud at Guru.”

Guru Narayana was a great advocate of abstinence. In an attempt to end Kerala’s addiction to the bottle, he appealed to the Ezhavas, whose traditional profession was tapping toddy or country liquor, to “stop tapping, selling or consuming toddy.” Yet until the recent imposition of prohibition in Kerala—barring some outlets in five-star hotels—most toddy shops and foreign liquor outlets in the state were owned by Ezhavas, a business in which Natesan, too, has interests. Thushar even tried to justify the business, saying Guru forbade only toddy, not foreign liquor.

The Sivagiri Mutt, which is wealthy and influential, has typically stayed out of the Ezhavas’ temporal affairs, but many of the Mutt’s sanyasins have also expressed reservations with Natesan’s right-wing alliance. His relationship with the Mutt has become further complicated by renewed interest in the death of a former Mutt leader. In 2002, Swami Saswatheekananda, the 50-year-old supreme head of the Mutt, drowned while bathing in a river close to one of his ashrams. Saswatheekananda had played a crucial role in Natesan’s rise in the SNDP, but the two had fallen out in the years following the latter’s elevation to general secretary. Thushar reportedly had an altercation with Saswatheekananda weeks before the he died. The swami’s family and some sanyasins alleged foul play in his death. He was an expert swimmer, it was said, and would never have drowned. But a police inquiry ruled out the possibility of murder.

Then, in October 2015, Biju Ramesh, another hotelier, raked up the case again, causing others, including the swami’s family, to demand a re-investigation. A businessman even alleged that he had seen Thushar beat Saswatheekananda in July 2002, during a trip to Dubai. On 31 October, the state government ordered a fresh investigation into the case, under way at the time of writing. Natesan has protested this decision, claiming that it is the result of a political vendetta against him for having joined hands with the BJP.

Going forward, Natesan’s political venture is set to encounter a number of hurdles. His community’s growing closeness to the BJP has alienated its traditional rivals, the upper-caste Nairs, from any putative Hindu alliance. G Sukumaran Nair has stated that they will have no truck with either the SNDP or the BJP. Then there is the question of traditional Ezhava political leanings. Some observers say the community will continue to vote for the LDF, a prediction supported by voting patterns in last year’s local body polls. Natesan’s accusations of anti-Ezhava sentiment against the Congress and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) may not hold much water, either. Powerful leaders in both parties, including the Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee president, VM Sudheeran, and the Left’s senior-most leaders, VS Achuthanandan and Pinarayi Vijayan, are themselves Ezhavas. “Even with SNDP’s alliance, BJP got less than five percent seats” in local elections, the CPI(M) state secretary Kodiyeri Balakrishnan said after the polls. “What more can they do?”

Matters of votes and seats will acquire more urgency as state elections approach, but Natesan’s plays for power have exposed deep divisions in a society that has traditionally prided itself on its secularism. At a time when social intolerance is on the rise, the selfless sacrifice of Noushad should have given society pause to reflect on the innate goodness of human beings. Yet Natesan’s speech, and the reactions that followed, have dented Kerala’s self-conception. Anoop Kumar, a Malayalam film actor, reacted to the fallout with a poignant note on Facebook, writing in Malayalam: “Noushad, until you died inside that manhole you were merely a good human being. Today you have a religion. You need not have died in order to make others say that you were just a Muslim. You could have easily returned to your waiting wife feeling smug and satisfied that you had tried to save them. Isn’t it what we all, including I, would have done?”