How can an educated, informed society allow itself to be cajoled into a blind alley, by wilful politicians? This is precisely what is happening in Kerala for the last one month and will continue to unfold for a few more days till the votes in Neyyattinkara byelection to the state assembly are polled. It was all let loose by the gruesome political murder of T P Chandrasekharan, a rebel-Marxist leader in Kozhikode district. The killers were by no means economical with their weapons. Cuts and slashes, numbering several dozen were found on the body. Though the Marxists blame it on hired goons, why should they waste enormous energy on unnecessary mutilation which was sure to arise public ire? The leader who was fearless (reckless, rather!) in the face of threats was claimed to be ideologically motivated and corruption-free.
When the din subsides, we must review the situation further. What was it that differentiate a Chandrasekharan from a Jayakrishnan Master, who was brutally hacked down in front of his students whom he were teaching while the blade slashed through his body? Or for that matter the countless cases of political murders for which Northern Kerala is so notorious? Clearly, something was different this time, otherwise the media and Congress-backed politicians wouldn’t have aroused such hue and cry for a martyred leader who was not even a Congressman.
Rewind to the sensational swearing-in of Manjalamkuzhi Ali, the fifth minister of Muslim League in the ruling UDF. Congress ate dust in front of the powerful Muslim lobby and surrendered meekly before the diktats of communal leaders who saw secularism as another tool for clinging on to power. Voting enmasse, for their own candidates, this lobby is bent on hacking democratic process to insignificance. Uncomfortably for UDF, the byelection to Neyyattinkara came close on the heels and some ruse was desperately needed to divert public attention from the fiasco. The LDF promptly obliged by killing of an opponent, which is one of their areas of specialisation as boastfully owned up by its Idukki district secretary. Chandrasekharan murder case will first be neatly tucked away into the inner pages and then put out altogether from newspapers, once the byelection got underway on June 2.
An unfortunate sideshow of the issue was stoppage of a poem by Prabha Varma, a Marxist fellow-traveller and the resident editor of the party’s organ, titled ‘Shyamamadhavam’ by the periodical Samakalika Malayalam. Its editor, S Jayachandran Nair, took strong exception to the poet’s alleged justification of the murder in some other publications. With a pompous editor’s note, he stopped the publication of the poem after just three instalments which startied from the issue dated May 18, 2012. Perhaps Jayachandran Nair would do more justice to the readers for the trash regularly being published in his journal. Most of the articles can be stereotyped into anti-liberalistic, anti-industry, anti-American, pro-Palestinian to the verge of Al Qaeda-like propaganda and pro-Maoist, who wreak havoc in India’s eastern forests. The editor must understand that readers willingly suffer all this junk, only because the magazine is liberally endowed with literary gems once in a while. With the stoppage of Shyamamadhavam, which is a soliloquial treatise on Lord Krishna who is introspecting on the unjustified ways he used to win the Kurukshetra War. This is a good literary work unseen for a long time in Malayalam (at least, among those I have read!). Of course, the party’s organ has decided to continue the publication, but who would read that magazine, which questions the judgment and intelligence of a reader?
The readers obviously lost this time too.
