Thiruvananthapuram: Months before the Kerala poll notification came on 15 March, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state vice-president B.Gopalakrishnan had begun work in Kodungallur constituency, a temple town in Thrissur adjoining Kochi.
The BJP had been growing organically in the constituency, home to Ezhava and Muslim communities, and he sensed an opportunity to make history. However, it was announced that the seat would go to Twenty20, the BJP’s new alliance partner which polled zero votes in the civic body polls.
Perplexed by the decision, Gopalakrishnan made feeble protests, still hopeful of landing another constituency. On 19 March, he found his name on the BJP’s second list from Guruvayur, another temple town at the other end of Thrissur district, adjoining Malappuram.
The very next day Gopalakrishnan made his presence felt in Guruvayur by making communally coded statements.
“Why doesn’t Guruvayur, an international pilgrimage centre, have a Hindu MLA despite 48 percent Hindus?” he asked in the now-withdrawn video. “I have been summoned by Guruvayurappan (the deity) to rescue this place from a 50-year-long captivity at the hands of temple plunderers and anti-temple folks.”
The Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), filed a complaint with the Election Commission. Kerala Students Union (KSU), the student outfit of the Congress, then lodged a complaint with the police, along with a petition in the Kerala High Court.
Gopalakrishnan refused to back down despite the chief electoral officer directing the returning officer in Thrissur to register a case under Section 123(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, Section 192 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Samhita, as well as breaching the Model Code of Conduct.
But, the BJP candidate is brazening it out. “Why don’t the Left or the UDF (United Democratic Front) field a Hindu candidate? Does the constituency have an MLA who can stand at Guruvayur temple and say that they believe in Guruvayurappan? I will raise Hindu issues, and I don’t care if I face charges for that.”
BJP playbook
Gopalakrishnan’s attempt to communalise the election sits well with the BJP’s similar tactics in Ranni constituency, home to the Sabarimala shrine, in 2021. Back then, it undertook a social media campaign that only a Hindu should represent the constituency. This helped Left Democratic Front (LDF) candidate Pramod Narayanan edge past Congress’ Ringu Cherian by a little over 1,000 votes.
This year, the BJP inexplicably gave the Ranni ticket away to Twenty20, which fielded Thomas Samuel, hailing from the ‘Church of God’, a Pentecostal group.
When the media sought his comments on the Sabarimala gold theft scandal, Samuel refused to comment, leaving the BJP red-faced and prompting a backlash from Sangh Parivar veteran Kummanam Rajasekharan, who is contesting in the adjoining Aranmula constituency.
The Congress has latched on to it to suggest “an understanding” between the BJP and the Left. K.S.Radhakrishnan, the other BJP state vice-president, refused to be drawn into the issue. Radhakrishnan himself was in the reckoning to contest from Thrippunithura, which also went to Twenty20.
BJP veteran Narayanan Namboothiri suggested that the decision may have been taken at the top, with Twenty20 having demanded 20 seats to contest. “There have been no discussions on it in the BJP state committee, but the decision-makers will have their logic. As part of forming a coalition, BJP will have to make some compromises,” the party spokesperson, dismissing the Congress allegation as ‘political’.
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Guruvayur’s communal amity
To be sure, Guruvayur has not elected a Hindu representative since 1967. Going strictly by numbers, the Muslims outnumber the sizable Hindu population in the constituency. The Chavakkad Taluk encompassing Guruvayur has 54 percent Muslim versus 42 percent Hindu population as per the 2011 Census, with the Christians making up the rest.
The constituency has undergone major delimitations, and today a sizable part of the Guruvayur municipality is part of the adjoining Manalur assembly constituency, which would suggest Guruvayur is essentially Chavakkad by another name.
It was a mark of Kerala’s secular character that when the adjoining Ponnani constituency in Malappuram (with the Muslims making up twice the Hindus there) was represented by P.Nandakumar and P.Sreeramakrishnan during the last three terms. Similarly, N.K.Akbar and K.V.Abdul Khader represented Guruvayur.
Back in the day when a major fire broke out at the temple in 1970, rescue efforts were coordinated by then MLA Varkey Vadakkan, brother of Reverend Joseph Vadakkan, who associated with the Left and the ‘Vimochana Samaram’ (Liberation Struggle) at different phases. Despite the bar on entry of non-Hindus, all communities came together, show newspaper archives.
Guruvayur’s electoral history
Both the LDF and the Congress-led UDF have had their legislators elected from Guruvayur over the years. In 1977, the UDF handed over the Guruvayur seat to its ally Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), which won it unabated until 1991.
A by-election took place in 1994 after Ebrahim Sulaiman Sait split away to form the Indian National League (INL), protesting the IUML’s refusal to sever ties with the Congress over the Babri Masjid demolition.
Then Guruvayur MLA P.M.Abubacker joined Sait and resigned in its wake. The INL decided to sit out the by-election and support the LDF, with controversial preacher Abdul Nazar Madani queering the pitch for the UDF.
The Left fielded film director P.T.Kunju Muhammed, who was recently in the news for accusations of sexual harassment, in the bypoll. The LDF wrested the seat, with Madani’s People’s Democratic Party (PDP) polling over 15,000 votes, ensuring IUML’s loss.
Muhammed retained Guruvayur in 1996, and but for the IUML recapturing the seat in the 2001 UDF wave, the LDF has kept winning ever since. According to a veteran Left leader, the Left won the seat in 1994 as a result of the social engineering initiated by Baby John, the CPI (M) area secretary in the 1980s.
In 1987, John got IUML state committee member and Kadappuram panchayat president P.C.Hameed Haji to defect, protesting the fielding of P.K.K.Bava from Kozhikode. The LDF fielded Hameed, hailing from an influential family, thus weakening the IUML in its stronghold of Kadappuram, even if it went on to lose. The social engineering eventually produced results, with Guruvayur becoming a Left stronghold now.
Meanwhile, Gopalakrishnan’s foray in Guruvayur has a curious context. In 2021, the BJP did not have an official candidate in the constituency. The apparent reason was the nomination papers of its candidate Nivedida Subramanian getting rejected for lacking signature of the BJP state president.
The circumstances were deemed suspicious because Subramanian is a lawyer and had contested there in 2016.
Last week, K.N.A.Khader, the losing candidate, an IUML veteran from Kozhikode, released his memoir, ‘Vyakaranamillatha Jeevitham’. A two-time MLA and Sanskrit scholar to boot, Khader accused the CPI (M) and the BJP of having entered into a pact in Guruvayur in the book, which he substantiates by numbers.
The CPI (M) cadres, Khader told ThePrint, went door-to-door among the more conservative sections painting him as a ‘soft-Hindutva’ character, even as the party struck a ‘deal’ with the BJP.
“How can you believe that a lawyer like Nivedida Subramanian filed nomination papers without the signatures of the state president? But what convinced me of the deal was that the BJP did not even register a protest with the electoral officer after her papers got rejected,” Khader said.
The BJP had then backed Dileep Nair, of the little-known Democratic Social Justice Party, but he ended up securing merely 6,000 votes. The CPI (M)’s N.K.Akbar won with over 52 percent vote share.
A repeat offender?
Gopalakrishnan is a leader prone to communal rants, sometimes couched in humour. Having lost multiple elections including recently to the Thrissur Corporation, his quick fix to gain traction has been making polarising statements.
In 2021, Gopalakrishnan was fielded from the bellwether constituency of Ollur, where Syrian Christians are in sizable numbers. Soon after landing in the constituency, he made an appeal to Ollur church priest Reverend Jose Konikkara, spreading hate against the Muslim community.
In a widely-circulated video, Gopalakrishnan can be heard stating how Thrissur’s historical Sakthan market underwent a change of character with Muslim establishments outnumbering the Christian ones lately. Reverend Konikkara may not have been swayed by the appeal even if Gopalakrishnan’s tactics seemed to have inadvertently come to the aid of LDF candidate K.Rajan’s thumping victory.
BJP state president Rajeev Chandrasekhar, who presents himself as a moderate, sought to justify Gopalakrishnan by suggesting that he was only demanding a ‘believer’ become the MLA of Guruvayur.
However, that premise is deeply flawed. Political parties distribute tickets on the basis of demography in major constituencies, even if people don’t always vote on that consideration alone in Kerala.
Beyond the example of Guruvayur and Ponnani, Congress veteran M.M.Hassan represented Thiruvananthapuram West, abode to the Padmanabhaswamy Temple, multiple times.
Similarly, Changanacherry, where headquarters of the Nair Service Society is located, has been electing a Syrian Christian MLA for over 50 years now. Varkala, where the Sivagiri Mutt of the Ezhava community is based, was represented by multiple Muslim legislators. Congress veteran A.K.Antony used to get elected from Cherthala where the Syrian Christians are a minority.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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