NEW DELHI: Sensing a likely erosion in its Hindu vote bank in the wake of more than three months of the Sabarimala imbroglio, the ruling CPM in Kerala has changed gear. After keeping out the minorities from its much-trumpeted women’s wall on 1 January, the CPM-backed Committee for Protection of Renaissance Values has now decided to include Muslim and Christian outfits into it. The committee will form units at district and taluka levels and hold mass conventions to woo the minorities. The wall, though formed in support of entry of women of all ages at the Lord Ayyappa shrine, was meant to counter the Sangh Parivar politically. It was represented by various bodies, mostly lower caste Hindus. This had prompted the Opposition then to term the wall as “communal” in nature. Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam (SNDP) general secretary, Vellappally Natesan, who is president of the renaissance committee, said there was an allegation that the campaign had avoided Muslim and Christian organisations. “In Kerala, Christians and Muslims too have contributed for renaissance values. Hence we decided to welcome them,” he told newspersons after a committee meeting presided over by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. However Natesan made it a point to add that the committee has no political agenda behind accommodating minorities. Only a day before, the same Natesan had predicted that BJP would gain from the Sabarimala agitation and loss for Congress-led UDF. According to him, while the CPM-led LDF would walk out of the situation unharmed, “the BJP will gain from it…they will get a lot of UDF votes.” Natesan, a wily manipulator, hastened to add that the Yogam, representing the powerful Ezhava community with 23% vote share, will not support any front in the coming Lok Sabha elections. “Members of the Yogam can cast their votes the way they want. The Yogam has no association with any party,” Natesan said. His son, Tushar, is state president of Bharat Dharma Jana Sena, an ally of the BJP-led NDA in Kerala. Sena is a nascent political outfit floated just before the last State Assembly election in 2016.
The state CPM, and Pinarayi Vijayan in particular, has every reason to keep Natesan in good humour. That is why he was brought in to lead the renaissance committee and thereby make a clear divide among the Hindu community. Natesan’s antagonism against the upper caste Nairs is well known. In fact SNDP under his stewardship has a running battle against the Nair Service Society leadership. CPM, though not ready to admit it openly, knows that the party, despite Natesan’s prediction, has alienated a majority of Lord Ayyappa “devotees” from its ranks by its actions in Sabarimala. In fact, it has immensely hurt the majority of them. This was not the calculation last September when the government vowed to implement the Supreme Court order striking down a ban on the entry of women in the age group of 10 to 50 to the Lord Ayyappa temple. Though the court never set any deadline, the Left Front government was in a hurry to see women enter Sabarimala. “The party thought that it could cash in on the ruling and win over Hindu women by allowing them into the shrine. It never expected that women in such large numbers would take to the streets opposing their own entry into the shrine,” said a senior party leader. This had prompted the party and the government to soft-pedal on the issue of women’s entry and divert it to as a struggle for women’s equality and so called second renaissance. This too is not going to gain much in the form of votes. It is evident that the party will have to fall back on the minorities to bridge the gap, but only time can tell whether or not the party will succeed in weaning Christian and Muslim votes away from the UDF. The Muslim League and the Kerala Congress, which represents a majority of the Christian community, are still with the Congress.
Most interesting is the fact that this unknown entity of “devotees” is keeping even the BJP and Sangh Parivar guessing.
At the height of its “Save Sabarimala” campaign, BJP thought that it could gain politically from the struggle. The state party president had even gone on record saying Sabarimala was “a golden opportunity for the party”. Once things have settled down, it now seems, that may not be the case. One is that the state BJP is still faction-ridden and lacks cohesiveness and a firm leadership. Whatever advantage the party had was lost due to its hasty decisions regarding shutdowns and the violence witnessed during those protests against government actions. This had forced even the NSS to keep a distance from the Parivar, not that it has gone back to the CPM fold. Political observers are not ruling out the possibility of this “devotee” vote going to the Congress in large numbers. Even some of the surveys that have come out early this week point to such a possibility.
Still BJP may turn out to be the biggest gainer from Sabarimala in the sense that the party may substantially gain in at least five Lok Sabha constituencies—Thiruvananthapuram, Pathanamthitta, Thrissur, Palakkad and Kasaragod. In these places BJP stands a good chance to push the CPM to the third place. In a way, BJP’s gain will be at the cost of CPM and in all probability not Congress. Whatever may be the case, Lord Ayyappa devotees are going to play a major role in which way Kerala votes this general election.