On 30 April, RV Babu, the official spokesperson of the right-wing organisation the Hindu Aikya Vedi, offered a one crore reward. The offer was in response to a reward-for-facts trend surrounding the controversial Hindi film The Kerala Story. In the film’s teaser, released in November 2022, actor Adah Sharma appears as a burqa-clad woman, who introduces herself as Shalini Unnikrishnan. She says she is Fatima Ba now, a terrorist affiliated with ISIS—the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—and is lodged in an Afghan prison. “A deadly game is being played to convert normal girls into dreaded terrorists in Kerala and that too in the open,” the character states. She claims that this film is the story of 32,000 girls who were forcefully converted to Islam and then recruited by ISIS. This alarmist figure, with no basis in facts, has been repeatedly cited in the buzz surrounding the film. The Kerala Story’s trailer suggests that Muslim men are entrapping Hindu women into marriage, as part of a larger conspiracy to establish Islamic rule. This narrative is in line with the bogey of “love jihad,” a Hindu-nationalist conspiracy theory pushed by the Bharatiya Janata Party and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
Soon after, the state committee of the Muslim Youth League—the youth wing of the Indian Union Muslim League—shared a poster calling for submission of proof, of any such conversions of Hindu women for terrorist recruitment, at any of its district offices. The organisation offered one crore rupees as a reward. In the face of much backlash against the grossly exaggerated figure, the film’s team was forced to climb down on its claims and edited the caption of the trailer to state that The Kerala Story is the story of three women and not 32,000. The filmmakers also agreed to remove this number before the Kerala High Court. Kerala’s right-wing organisations, such as the Vedi, appear to be working as face-savers on behalf of the film’s team. In a spin to the reward-for-facts trend, Pratheesh Vishwanath—the founder of the Hindu-nationalist organisation Hindu Seva Kendram—offered ten crore rupees to anyone who can prove that nobody from Kerala has left for Syria to join the ISIS. Babu had responded by claiming that neither the teaser or the trailer of the film mentioned that 32,000 girls were recruited by ISIS from Kerala. However, the announcement teaser for the film, released in March 2022, still mentions in its caption that, “Behind the beautiful backwaters of Kerala, lies the horror of 32000 missing females.”
The Hindu Aikya Vedi, or platform for Hindu unity, was established around twenty years ago with the stated goal of uniting Hindus and to take up “Hindu issues” in Kerala. In its attempt to push for Hindu unity, the Vedi has mobilised around a range of incidents that they claim put Hindus in danger. The organisation was central to the mobilisation against the Supreme Court judgement in 2018, that allowed women to enter the Sabarimala temple. Since then, the organisation has mobilised around scattered incidents, usually to spread Islamophobic conspiracy theories, or attack the state’s Left-led government.
The Vedi has also attempted to rewrite the state’s history away from the moorings of the Navodhanam, or renaissance, a period in the eighteenth and nineteenth century when numerous avarna leaders—those left outside of the four-fold varna system—led struggles against the state’s severe caste system. The Vedi argues that caste reflects diversity and denies its hierarchical nature. The organisation has instead attempted to co-opt the leaders of the Navodhanam and paint them as Hindus, in complete ignorance of their struggles against the religion. Speaking at the Vedi’s most recent conference, in Thrissur’s Thekkinkadu grounds, on 9 April, KP Sasikala, the state president of the Vedi said that the organisation is a continuation of all the “renaissance” movements that have taken place in the past to awaken Hindus. “When they say that saffron should not be permitted on this land, we should say louder and louder that the colour of this land is saffron,” she declared.
Speaking before her, the RSS’s national executive member, Ram Madhav, began with an apology for his inability to communicate with them in their “musical language.” “Unfortunately, Hindus in Kerala, for that matter, Hindus everywhere, need constant persuasion, constant reminder, constant encouragement about their Hinduness, about the greatness of the dharma to which they belong,” Madhav said. He said that the Vedi, along with the RSS and the Vishva Hindu Parishad were central players in “awakening Hindu consciousness.” Kerala has so far remained elusive in fulfilling the RSS-BJP combine’s quest to establish India as a Hindu state.
“There is a funny saying in English, ‘Rama is a good boy. Good for nothing.’ Hindus are becoming like that,” Madhav said, and added that Vedi is doing the important work of encouraging Hindus “to live the life of a true Hindu.” Madhav’s address underlined what was a common theme throughout the Vedi’s functioning: that encouraging “Hinduness” must target the other faiths of the sub-continent. “We are standing up, we are branded as communalists. We are standing up, we are branded as Islamophobic,” Madhav said. “Whatever is being said about certain aspects of Islam is not over phobia. It is the reality.”
The Vedi is most known for leading the protests against the Supreme Court judgement on the Sabarimala temple. The organisation, like other orthodox Hindu groups, believe that the temple should be off limits for women of menstruating age, as its deity Ayyappa is believed to be eternally celibate. In 2018, Sasikala became the general convener of the Sabarimala Karma Samithi, an umbrella body of right-wing groups formed for the purpose of preventing the implementation of the verdict. In the weeks following the judgement, the Samithi mobilised thousands of supporters across Kerala’s districts, to protest the ruling as an attack on Hinduism. Mobs waylaid vehicles on the route to the temple to ensure that there were no women in them. Journalists, including women, covering the protests were assaulted.
On 17 November 2018, the Kerala police arrested Sasikala on her way to Sabarimala, as they suspected that she was planning to launch an agitation on the temple premises. The arrest led to a state-wide hartal called by Hindu groups. The threat of violence against women attempting a visit to the temple continued to remain so palpable that Bindhu Ammini and Kanaka Durga, the first two, and only women to enter Sabarimala from the religiously prohibited age group, needed a cluster of police escorts and the relative safety of darkness.
Even at the conference, the Vedi heavily advertised its involvement in the Sabarimala mobilisation. In a venue adjoining the conference, an exhibition narrating the Sangh’s perception of Kerala’s history described Bindhu Ammini, Kanaka Durga and Rehna Fathima—whose attempt to visit the temple was unsuccessful—as “loose women.” In the late afternoon of the conference, there was a mass recitation of Harivarasanam, a popular devotional song dedicated to Ayyappa, while a screen on stage displayed images of what the Vedi described as the “Save Sabarimala” movement against “unethical” entry of women. At the same venue, Madhav had declared that Hinduism empowers women. “We are not a society that keeps women in burqa,” he said. The examples of notable Hindu women he chose to cite were Vedi president Sasikala and the godwoman Amritanandamayi, whose proximity to the BJP and the RSS is widely reported.
The violent agitations in 2018, however, did not translate to electoral gains for the BJP in Kerala. In the 2021 Kerala assembly elections, the party lost its only seat and saw a drop in its total vote share. Since then, organisations like the Vedi have kept their eyes peeled for incidents that serve their cause of creating a robust base of Hindu voters, who view themselves as victims because of their religiously identity. Madhav’s speech at the Thrissur conference was an exercise in pandering to this victim complex.
The organisation has raked a wide range of issues under the pretext of defending Hinduism. In March this year, when a temple in Malappuram district painted its walls green—a colour that the Hindu right-wing deems as associated exclusively with Islam—the Vedi threatened that its members would repaint the walls if the colour was not changed. The temple authorities relented to the pressure and repainted the temple walls to be ivory in colour.
The Vedi and its Sangh Parivar compatriots most recent attempts at communal polarisation were centred around an arson attack that occurred on a train, on the night of 2 April. As the train was passing through Elathur, in Kozhikode district, a man had started a fire in one of the coaches by throwing an inflammable liquid, suspected to be petrol, at the passengers. Nine people sustained burn injuries in the attack. Three people, including a woman and a child, were found dead on the tracks; they likely either jumped or fell off the train in the panic that ensued during the fire. One Shahrukh Saifi was arrested by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad from Ratnagiri district, two days after the incident. An 18-member Special Investigation Team interrogated Saifi. The National Investigation Agency and the Intelligence Bureau suspect terror links to the attack, alleging that the intention behind it was to set fire to the entire coach. The NIA took custody of Saifi on 2 May.
Madhav and Valsan Thillankeri, the Vedi’s chairman, sought to compare this arson attack with the fire aboard the Sabarmati Express in Gujarat in February 2002, which killed 59 Hindus returning from Ayodhya. In 2002, right-wing groups had spread rumours about the involvement of Muslims in the fire, instigating and orchestrating the anti-Muslim pogrom that followed. “We thought Godhra was the last time,” Madhav said. “But they are bringing it to Kozhikode.” This lends a dangerous spin to an incident which is still under investigation.
At the Thrissur conference, Thillankeri asked why the accused planned the attack in Kerala and not any other state. “Kerala is the safest place for terrorists to organise attacks and escape beautifully,” he said. Thillankeri alleged that Saifi was a native of the Shaheen Bagh neighbourhood in Delhi, seeking to link it to the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act that occurred in Shaheen Bagh in 2020. He referred to Shaheen Bagh as a “hatchery of terrorist activities.” Worryingly, soon after, the Kerala Police began using the same language. MR Ajith Kumar, the Kerala Police’s assistant director general of police, who heads the SIT looking into the case, told the media on 18 April, “You all know about the kind of area he comes from, and you know what that area is famous for.”
At the conference, in a speech that lasted nearly an hour, Thillankeri resorted to fearmongering, alleging that Kerala’s secularism would cease to exist if the Hindu population were to reduce to less than 50 per cent. “Is there democracy in Saudi Arabia? Or in any Islamic country?” Thillankeri asked, evoking examples of the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan and the state repression of protests opposing the enforcement of headscarves for women in Iran. “There is a plan to turn this state into an Islamic state by 2047,” he added. Stoking apprehensions about a growing Muslim population is an age-old tactic for the Sangh.
In Kerala, the Sangh have found an ally among the Christian clergy in projecting Muslims as a threat, chiefly through the spectre of love jihad. “Christians are on alert as a community,” Thillankeri said. “Every Sunday, they are raising awareness in their churches to ensure that not a single girl falls into the hands of jihadis.” He claimed that a girl from a parish in Kannur district was recently “abducted by a jihadi.” He said that the parish members brought her back within 48 hours. “Certainly, members of the BJP’s minority morcha and Sangh Parivar workers joined them in their efforts to bring her back.”
Confronted by competition from both the CPI(M) and the Congress in Kerala, the BJP recognizes that it cannot rely on Hindus to vote en-bloc for the party. The top brass of the BJP has been meeting Kerala’s senior Christian clergy to harness their antagonism towards Muslims, in the party’s favour. In early April, the Archbishop of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church, Mar George Alenchery, described prime minister Narendra Modi as having the “qualities of a true leader.” He argued that Christians do not feel insecure in India, choosing to be oblivious to several reports of right-wing violence against Christians in BJP-ruled states, including in the neighbouring Karnataka.
The Hindu Right’s primary impediment is Kerala’s history of social-justice politics, that makes much of the state’s avarna population wary of overtly Hindu organisations led by the upper castes. This year, the Kerala government and several organisations and parties in the state have been hosting the centenary celebrations of the Vaikom satyagraha. The Vaikom satyagraha was a movement organised between 1924 to 1925, that demanded open access to the roads surrounding a Shiva temple in Vaikom, which was until then prohibited for people from avarna castes. The movement in Vaikom sparked several other agitations for temple entry.
At the conference, the Vedi attempted to rewrite the history of the Vaikom struggle. Kummanam Rajasekharan, the former president of the BJP in Kerala, argued that the Vaikom satyagraha was a movement for Hindu unity. “What was the dream of those who participated in the Vaikom satyagraham?” he said. “What was the dream blazing in their hearts? It is the Hindu Aikya Vedi which will fulfil that dream.” Rajashekeran argued that the participation of Nair, Ezhava and Pulaya leaders in the movement reflected that, beyond their caste identities, they were Hindus first. He, and others who spoke about the movement, chose to obfuscate the fact that the prohibitions imposed on avarna castes were based on the very foundation of Hinduism. He said that “the deserving, the learned and the capable,” regardless of their social location, are now allowed to worship in the sanctum sanctorum of temples. The Travancore Devaswom Board—a statutory body governing more than a thousand temples in Kerala—has appointed priests from non-Brahmin and Dalit communities in temples under its administration. But this is clearly selective. Sabarimala, for example, has in recent years rejected candidates on the grounds that they were not Brahmin.
“Now in this centenary year, what do we need?” Rajashekaran asked. “A proclamation to enter temple administration. We now need to gain entry into temple administration.” There are five autonomous boards governing temples in Kerala, which receive aid from the state’s Devaswom (Temple Affairs) ministry. With the Left-led front in power in the state, the BJP and the RSS have been pushing the narrative that temples suffer undue state interference while places of worship of religious minorities do not. In fact, former supreme court judge Indu Malhotra had lent credence to this theory when she said that communist governments want to take over all Hindu temples “because of the revenue,” in an undated video recorded during her visit to the Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram. Malhotra, incidentally, had dissented against the Supreme Court verdict which permitted entry of women into Sabarimala. In her note opposing the ruling of the other four judges on the bench, she had argued that the prohibition on women of menstruating age constituted an “essential religious practice,” which should be protected.
At the conference, Rajasekharan alleged that Kerala’s temples are under the control of “government superiors.” He described the government as the kings of present times. The people counting the revenue of the temples are “secularists,” Rajasekharan said. “We should reject this slavery. We should break the shackles of this slavery.” A similar narrative was peddled during the Sabarimala agitation when the Vedi and other Sangh groups argued that the women seeking to enter Sabarimala were not genuine devotees but “secularists”—a pejorative in the Sangh’s lexicon.
Alongside attempting to rewrite the history of temple entry movements in the state, the Vedi is also attempting to co-opt anti-caste icons from the nineteenth century. On their website, the Vedi claims that its activities follow the footsteps of Sree Narayana Guru and Mahatma Ayyankali, both of whom led struggles that challenged the caste practices prevalent in Kerala. Narayana Guru was from the avarna Ezhava caste while Ayyankali belonged to the Dalit Pulaya community. But the Vedi presents them as “Hindu” icons.
However, here too, the Vedi has mixed messaging. The Vedi’s exhibition showcased how the Sangh Parivar places itself as a defender of Hindus in Kerala’s history. One of the photographs it displayed was of the RSS’s second chief, MS Golwalkar, visiting Mannath Padmanabhan on his deathbed. Padmanabhan is remembered as a social reformer in Kerala’s popular imagination, especially because of his participation in the Vaikom satyagraha. But there are historical records of speeches where he has made openly casteist statements. Ahead of the assembly elections in Kerala in 1957, he had said, “An Ezhava by birth, a failed Nair and a lost Christian becomes a communist.” He was the founder of the Nair Service Society, which remains the most influential organisation in the state lobbying for the interests of the upper-caste Nairs. Whether Padmanabhan was the progressive reformer he is touted to be is a hotly debated issue. But Padmanabhan’s endorsement of the RSS could not be any clearer; in the RSS mouthpiece Kesari, Padmanabhan had described the Sangh as a pillar of support for Hindus. The exhibition ais a clear attempt at conflating reformers from avarna castes with the privileged Brahmins and Nairs, together painting them as leaders of a monolithic Hinduism. Though the Vedi does not deny the existence of caste practices, but has frequently attempted to portray it as a result of government action and not an inherent element of Hinduism. The various temple entry movements in Kerala, for instance, were described at the exhibition as a tussle between Hindus and “authorities.” Sangh-affiliated groups perceive their interventions in Kerala as movements for “social justice.” One such “social justice” initiative the exhibition seemed to stress on was the RSS’s 1968 protests against the formation of the Malappuram district by combining regions from Palakkad and Kozhikode. The exhibition displayed images from the protests and propagated the idea that Malappuram’s formation was a “communist communal agenda” to create a Muslim-majority region.
This is a consistent pattern in the Vedi’s rhetoric: attempting to distract criticism about their support of caste through the vilification of Muslim communities. When Malayalam news anchor Arun Kumar made a statement about how caste functions in “pure vegetarian” restaurants, Sasikala responded with a sarcastic remark. “If you eat a masala dosa, the Constitution will go backwards,” she said. “If you immediately eat a halal beef kuzhimanthi, the Constitution will go forward!” Kuzhimanthi, a hugely popular Yemeni rice dish in Kerala, has also been a subject of communal rhetoric in the state. In early January, several news outlets reported that a 19-year-old girl died of food poisoning after consuming kuzhimanthi from a restaurant in Kasargod district. Local BJP workers had promptly staged a protest outside the restaurant. The girl’s death was later reported to be a suicide.
Less than a week after the Vedi’s Thrissur conference, the same venue was inundated with blue flags on BR Ambedkar’s birth anniversary celebrations. A speech by Mohan Gopal, a former director at the National Judicial Academy of the Supreme Court, seemed to respond to the Sangh’s rhetoric. “If a Vaishya or a Brahmin or a savarna attains a high position, what is the expectation?” he asked. “That we will be happy because I am a Hindu and he is a Hindu, that I will believe that I have been given representation.” Gopal explained that there was a concerted effort to repress the cultures and issues specific to each caste to create a consciousness that everyone is a Hindu. “If savarnas obtain something, there is an attempt to push the message that all of us obtained it, that India obtained it, that Hindus obtained it.”