Who are the Victims in Kerala: Hindus or Muslims?

 

 

 

Who are the Victims in Kerala: Hindus or Muslims?

 Shrikant G. Talageri

 

[I had posted this article yesterday, 7/11/2022, but it seems to have become mysteriously unavailable. So I am posting it again].

 

A Muslim writer-director from Kerala, Ali Akbar, converted to Hinduism and took on the name Rama Simhan. On being urged by many Hindus to make a film on the Moplah Riots of 1921, where large-scale massacres of Hindus took place in certain Muslim-dominated parts of Kerala as part of the Khilafat Agitation by Muslims fighting (against the British) for the reinstatement of the Turkish Khalifa (who had been unseated by the British and allies), he produced a truly wonderful film "1921: Nadī Se Nadī Tak" (which, as I have written elsewhere, was not just a worthy successor to Vivek Agnihotri's The Kashmir Files, but far surpassed it in historical objectivity and artistic depiction), and I wrote a review of the film on 8/8/2022 as soon as I was honored by the privilege of seeing a preview of the film in a private theatre in Mumbai:

https://talageri.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-kerala-files-1921-nadi-se-nadi-tak.html

The film has been completely stonewalled by the BJP government at the Centre, to the extent that one may believe it was never ever made, and, as expected, the bhakts are completely silent on this issue and completely complicit in this persecution of a Kerala Muslim who had the jurrat to reconvert from Islam to his ancestral religion. And the stonewalling and silence will continue in full force when he is assassinated by the Islamists who have already issued death threats to him.

 

I have written on this issue in two articles till now. But today, suddenly, I wondered whether I had perhaps got the wrong end of the stick. Perhaps it is not the Hindus who are, or ever were, at the receiving end of violence and persecution in Kerala, but the Muslims. I was going through my old notes taken from newspaper reports and articles from the late eighties, when I had developed the bad habit of keeping notes on items of interest, and documenting, in a notebook, the views and reporting on various items of political interest from different newspapers and magazines. It was, incidentally, also the time I was formulating my first book on the AIT, and taking copious notes from various sources on different aspects of that historical problem, which then became my primary preoccupation.

There I came across the notes that I had taken from an article in the RSS/BJP Parivar magazine, Organizer, in its issue of 27/11/1988, titled "BJP/RSS Workers protect Muslims from Marxist Violence in Kerala". Reading this hair-raising article, I realized that I was wrong both about the religious identity of the victim community in Kerala as well as in thinking that the perfectly understandable soft-corner of the BJP/RSS towards the Kerala Muslims is some new phenomenon. That article revealed the truth about the problems faced by Muslims as a persecuted and terrorized community in Kerala.

So I felt it my duty to present the facts, as testified by the RSS/BJP Parivar, about Muslim victimization in Kerala. My appeal to my readers is: don't be swayed by historical accounts of the Moplah riots of 1921, by present-day news reports about Islamic politics and militant armies in Kerala, or by the following statistics regarding the comparative percentages of Hindu-vis-à-vis -Muslim population in Kerala (we can only speculate about the possible 2021 figures, as the census has been wisely postponed):

 

	1951	1971	1991	2001	2011
HINDU	61.59	59.41	58.15	56.16	54.73
MUSLIM	17.53	19.50	21.25	24.69	26.56

 

If someone tells you there were 3.51 Hindus in Kerala for every Muslim in 1951, but that, already by 2011, there are now 2.06 Hindus per Muslim, and that by 2011 itself the number of Hindus per Muslim have reduced by 41.31 per cent, give the Hindu chauvinist a cold look. All these things are irrelevant in comparison to the sufferings of the Muslims of Kerala, documented, at least for the year 1988, by none other than the RSS/BJP Parivar in their official English mouthpiece.

The events in the article start with the peaceful protest march on 17/9/2088 by the Muslim Youth League, to protest against the Marxist government's failure to arrest a rich Muslim who had murdered a poor Muslim: so you see, the Muslim Youth League had no communal intentions at all behind their march. Despite police requests, a CPM MLA passed by the procession in his car. Seeing him, the poor protesters "got infuriated and attacked the car and the glass panes were broken and the CPM MLA got minor glass injuries from the broken glass pieces": all perfectly understandable and "minor". "Then started an orgy of violence let loose by the CPM cadres against Muslims, with the aid and connivance of the police. The total tally of the dead came to eight. Property worth one crore was looted and sixteen houses damaged. For a period of a month and a half there was total failure of law and order and members of the minority were kept terrified by the attacks of the Marxists and the police".

The article relates that buses and jeeps were stopped by the Marxists, and the Muslims weeded out and stabbed. Sounds familiar? The article specifically tells us that Hindus even of the BJP were spared, but even Marxist Muslims were attacked. A house with a widow and two children was set on fire. There are vivid descriptions of how Muslims were hunted down like animals! All the while, the article reports how BJP-RSS workers did their best to protect the hapless Muslims.

But there is more: "Again, on October 17 1988, the Muslim League organized a peaceful march to the DIG of police in Calicut" They then assembled in a maidan where their leaders were addressing them. Then the "Police cordoned the maidan, closed the gates and began lathicharging the 5000 strong crowd….. Some people ran into the neighbouring mosque for protection. But the police threw stones at the mosque so that the glass window panes were all broken".

Elsewhere in the article, there is a description of Marxists desecrating two mosques in Kummangode and Nadapuram: "Even the Holy Quran was torn to pieces and they passed urine in the mosque".

There is also a thrilling description of 5 brave Muslims fighting off and driving away a crowd of 200 (surely Hindu) Marxists.

Under pressure from all sides, the Marxist state government had to order a judicial inquiry. The article proudly tells us: "The BJP has demanded that the proposed inquiry should cover the entire series of incidents of what happened in Nadapuram as well as in Calicut, and also that compensation should be given to those who lost properties and suffered injuries, over and above the kith and kin of those who died in the incidents".

Wow! This RSS-BJP Parivar article really opened my eyes to the truth about different communities of Kerala and about the role of different political parties in that state.

 

So, my advice to various people:

1. To the Hindus of India: do not spread false propaganda against the hapless Muslims of Kerala. Recognize that they are the oppressed people of Kerala.

2. To the Muslims of Kerala: open your eyes to the truth, and recognize who are your true friends and who are your true enemies in Kerala. How could you have been so stupid as to vote so continuously for these murderous Marxists, while ignoring your RSS/BJP saviors?

3. To Rama Simhan: repent before it is too late. Reconvert back to Islam, and accept whatever punishment is meted out to you for your earlier treachery. Destroy all copies of your jhoothi film "1921: Nadī Se Nadī Tak", apologize to everyone for falsifying history, and now produce a new film "1988: Nadapuram Se Calicut Tak" recording the tragic but thrilling history of the events described in the above RSS/BJP Parivar article.

4. To the BJP Central Government: After Ra… — sorry, a born-again Ali Akbar — produces the film "1988: Nadapuram Se Calicut Tak", please give him a National Award for it, declare the film tax-free at the all-India level, and if possible, make it compulsory viewing for all your ignorant critics in India and abroad.