Onion-Eaters Of Kerala

When Qutubuddin Ansari, the now-familiar face of Gujarat genocide, met Ashok Mochi, the Bajrang Dal leader who was pictured brandishing a sword during the riots, at a conciliatory event organized by the Kerala unit of CPM in Kannur, so many enthusiastic locals made a beeline to meet and greet the duo. Later, they told the media: “So many people came to see us here. But we couldn’t make out their religion.”

It was their epiphanic moment; a realization, and a far-cry from the greatly polarized and communally compartmentalized state they hail from. No doubt, they were in thrall of the distinctive characteristics of Kerala.

It is precisely this entrenched social system that helped Kerala fend off Sangh Parivar from pulling the state into the national quagmire of cow, its latest political tool, after the due expiration of the shelf value of Ram Mandir and Love Jihad. Primetime TV debates saw demagogic BJP leaders justifying the Dadri killing. But that cut no ice with the Kerala civil society. The many public beef fests conducted by Left student unions across the state saw crowds swarming and relishing the spicy beef served hot.

The BJP’s primetime-news warriors won’t be keen to admit it, but the fact is that beef is considered a secular (and succulent) meat in Kerala! And Hindus, obviously, are no exception when it comes to basking in this delectable beef journey. Undoubtedly, they will collectively show their impulsive middle fingers to anyone who will lecture them to skip their favorite parotta-beef combo. They prefer beef ecstasy to communal ecstasy and invariably scorn anyone who tries to hard sell the Sangh Parivar’s latest election tool in cow form.

Definitely vegetarians, a relative minority, do exist and they remain so not because they are intoxicated by any RSS ideology, but out of personal or religious reasons.

And, the Hindus (and other communities as well) in Kerala are mature enough to show political propriety and social sobriety to take this meat off their dining tables if eating it truly, madly and deeply hurts the religious sentiments of any Holy Texts; but they are unlikely to succumb to the poll pranks of RSS’s political face BJP.

K Surendran of BJP, one of the many ‘leaders’ whose only ticket to political glory is his almost-daily nocturnal appearances on TV primetime news, fell into a hot soup after a photo of him apparently munching parotta and beef in a restaurant went viral, making him the butt of massive trolling and online ridicule. He immediately went on defensive mode, saying that it was onion curry, not beef.

Thank God something like onion existed lest he wouldn’t have been able to make a deft use of it in order to easily extricate himself from the gastronomy-induced political predicament he found immersed in.

Parotta-beef is a staple diet of Keralites. But parotta and onion curry is as weird a combo as Mother Teresa and Hitler! And the culinary connoisseurs of Kerala have knighted Surendran for adding this exotic culinary combination into the dining tables. And fervent efforts (GPS-Google included) to locate the restaurant selling this rare onion curry met with little success!

A social media user expressed his dismay over Surendran’s discovery in an online forum this way:

“It looks like he is eating parotta, I am from Kerala and I never been to a restaurant that offers parotta and Onion curry....it is always parotta and beef curry.....so he is most likely lying....most people in Kerala eat beef....then again i think its more Buffalo meat than beef.”

History teaches us that Kerala Hindus have shunned regressive practices like untouchability et al a long time ago, much before RSS reared its ugly head, and embraced modernity and civility, thanks to a wave of social reforms and renaissance movements and the good works of Christian missionaries. And efforts to airdrop the North Indian version of the caste system and all its concomitant paraphernalia including the cow-is-the-mother dogma into the state may not fetch the desired results, though it is a fact that BJP has made inroads here. But despite everything, it continues to be a liberal bastion till this day.

So Surendran need not to worry about the food on his plate as long as he lives in Kerala. He can eat whatever he wants in a place like this, even though his party’s attempt is to take away that very personal freedom.

(First published in http://www.countercurrents.org/firos191015.htm. This article has been included in a book, The Political Economy of Beef Ban, published by Peoples Book Shop)

BJP’s Latest Antibiotic Tablet For Kerala

If there is one place which has kept the Hindu right at a safe distance for such an annoyingly long time period, it is Kerala. The RSS and its political face BJP has not yet been able to make any ripples in the placid social waters of the state, though its power-hungry leaders have been salivating at the prospect of penetrating into this constituency for the past so many years.

All attempts by the Hindu right to convert the state into a place reeking of high-level of communal toxicity have effectively been thwarted thanks to the existence of renaissance-induced social indices in the state. These fundamentals have till date acted as a strong deterrent, like a moat that protects a fortress from its destructive enemies, against the purveyors of hate politics.

But ironically now, attempts are being done to turn the tides of this renaissance. Standing at the vanguard of this regressive bid is Vellappally Nateshan, the general secretary of SNDP Yogam – a socio-cultural movement founded by the 20th century social reformer Sree Narayana Guru – which endeavored to emancipate the Ezhava community from the abyss of the oppressive Hindu caste hierarchy.

Guru tried to give some semblance of dignity and self-worth to the Ezhavas, derided by the so-called upper-caste groups as dirt; untouchables at the bottom of the Hindu caste system, they were barred from even touching their feet on public roads where dogs strolled happily with their head high.

Now, Vellappally has joined hands with the same dark forces that once oppressed and persecuted the same people, whom he claims to represent now. He appeared to have found the perfect bedfellow in Modi as they met for a SNDP-BJP political alliance in New Delhi. Both are shysters with a hopelessly high level of self-aggrandizement and dictatorial hormones to boot.

Through this incestuous intercourse with the BJP, Vellappally is mocking at the Ezhava community’s epic struggles in the past to restore their dignity; he is taking the community to a moribund and mephitic future, from where redemption will be hard to achieve. 

Part of social engineering experiment by the crafty Amit Shah, the BJP state unit is trying to woo other Hindu groups as well to gain political entry in Kerala.

In fact, the stage has been set for communal polarization in the state quite some time now with the state BJP leadership and Vellappally peddling the absurd theory of Hindu marginalization in the state: the ludicrous hypothesis that Hindus are being marginalized economically by successive government policies. Vellappally and Company, along with his newly minted bedmates in the state BJP, has been parroting this theory on primetime news hours like the mysterious incantations of a shaman.

In this frenzied bid by the BJP, ably abetted by the SNDP, to polarize communities on religious lines exists the elitist Muslim League with its motley of self-serving professional politicians and wholesale religion sellers, whose outlandishly self-centered political histrionics have been causing irritants even among the moderate-thinking, secular Hindus of the state for quite some time now. The very existence of communal parties like Muslim League, which sticks out a sore thumb in Kerala’s secular polity, gives the Hindu right a much-needed weapon to spread its poisonous if-they-can-why-not-us theory among the secular Hindus in the state.

NSS (Nair Service Society), an organization of supposedly upper-caste Nairs – who once stood above the Ezhava community in the Hindu caste pyramid – has distanced itself from this new-found ‘Hindu unity’. For NSS and its general secretary G Sukumaran Nair, Vellappally and SNDP are still untouchables. Earlier efforts to forge an SNDP-NSS alliance met with little success.

And Vellappally’s Hindu unity (Nair-Ezhava unity) dream will continue to remain a pipe dream, at least in the foreseeable future. Part of the reason for this is the fact that underneath SNDP’s lofty talks of Hindu unity lies the stark reality of the strong undercurrents of mutual, deep-seated hatred between the majority of Nairs and Ezhavas. In spite of the renaissance, old racial prejudices and caste consciousness refuse to die down and still linger on in a very subtle level even today, one of the prime reasons why the so-called Hindu unity remains an unattainable proposition for the BJP. In fact, no political pranks by the BJP so far has worked as an antibiotic potent enough to eradicate the caste scourge still lurking inside the minds of the majority of these two communities. While a majority of the Nairs still consider superior to the Ezhavas (and, of course, rest of the supposedly low cast groups) without readying to let go of the untouchability past, the latter harbor the wounds of subjugation their forefathers were subjected to at the hands of the former.

The fact is that the fundamental values that make Kerala unique are still intact and strong. The Ezhavas (majority Left supporters) are unlikely to succumb to the whims and political fancies of Vellappally. Except for a bunch of sidekicks and yes-men who swarm him, majority of Ezhavas are perceptive enough to see through his real intentions. What the state’s political pundits watch with great keenness is whether the largely secular and Left-oriented Ezhava community will fall for Vellappally’s devious political games for ephemeral gains at the altar of hate politics.

(Originally published in http://www.countercurrents.org/firos041015.htm)