Author: Rajeev PI
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: July 25, 2006
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/story/9248.html
Introduction: CPM secretly sent MP to get
Mahdani declare poll support; MP says if I had said I was MP, they wouldn't
have let me in
If the DMK government in Tamil Nadu is arranging
for 1998 Coimbatore blast accused Abdul Nasser Mahdani's Ayurvedic massages,
the Left and the Congress in Kerala have been doing the stretching-prostrate
at his feet.
Three months ago, the CPM sent T K Hamsa,
its MP from Manjeri, on a supposedly discreet mission to Coimbatore to get
Mahdani to make his outfit, the People's Democratic Party (PDP), openly pitch
for the Left in the Assembly polls. This was vital for the Left to build temporary
bridges with a reasonable chunk of the Muslim votebank that wouldn't touch
it.
Hamsa did an undercover job - careful even
to keep his popular name under wraps. And once this visit was exposed, the
Left refused to confirm that he had gone as its official emissary.
When asked to explain this, Hamsa told The
Indian Express: "The party leadership did not ask me to meet Mahdani.
I went on my own because his human rights were being seriously violated, I
wanted to express my sympathies."
So why didn't he identify himself? "I
didn't tell anyone I am an MP because jail officials would not have let me
in if I did. I went in as a common man."
Not just Hamsa.
Another emissary from the Left at Coimbatore
jail was the rebel Muslim League man in the CPM camp, T K Jaleel, who later
won from Kuttipuram with substantial PDP help.
But did the Left woo Mahdani or was it vice
versa? ''What does it matter? The reality is the Left was greatly helped in
this poll by both Mahdani's personal charisma and the PDP's organizational
strength,'' Poonthura Swaraj, Mahdani's second in command, told The Indian
Express.
This is not the first Left overture to Mahdani,
though. In the early nineties, Marxist guru EMS Namboodiripad surprised Kerala
when he compared this fire-breathing cleric on crutches with Mahatma Gandhi,
saying he could not be untouchable to the Left because he believed in his
religion.
That was when this man looked like he would
straddle a good deal of the Muslim political space that the Muslim League
in the Congress fold during the post-Babri anger was beginning to vacate.
Muslims in Kerala had traditionally leaned away from the Left, and EMS's revelation
was when the CPI(M) was in one of its deep ideological ferments over deciding
on its approach to the elusive Muslim vote bank.
To avert trouble, Mahdani was arrested on
a communal incitement charge - he used to get charged with that often - and
was thereafter promptly handed over to Coimbatore police to be made an accused
in the blasts case.
This was while EK Nayanar's CPI(M)-led Government
was in power. The Left, of course, hastily washed its hands of even slamming
the Congress for sidling up to him in two successive polls.
Eight years later, the man accused of masterminding
a serial blast that killed 59, and maimed many more is now a political idiom,
a human rights symbol, and a significant tilter of fortunes in Kerala politics.
The PDP had grown large enough not to worry
any more about its congenital taint - it is the re-worked version of the Islamic
Sevak Sangh, a barely concealed communal outfit that Mahdani ran before it
was banned.
Top on the PDP's political agenda, naturally,
has been getting its supremo released from jail. The Congress-led UDF garnered
its votes in the 2001 polls promising to do just that.
A K Antony, and then his successor Oommen
Chandy, did make some noise about their doing everything to persuade the then
Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa to let him out on parole.
That did not, however, wash well with the
PDP - especially not after the Tamil Nadu Government submitted to the Chennai
Court a faxed missive from the Antony Government that clearly said letting
Mahdani out would endanger law and order in Kerala.
''The Congress Government cheated us. It was
their faxed missive that Jayalalithaa used to clamp a ban on Mahdani's movement
outside of the jail. We can't forgive them for that,'' Poonthura Siraj affirms.
The PDP was surely assuming a key political
profile, while leveraging a slew of human rights outfits to join the chorus
for Mahdani's parole on health grounds - the man had a leg blown off early
in his career by an RSS bomb, and was a hypertensive diabetic. In September
last year, a bunch of suitably armed men boarded a Tamil Nadu government bus
leaving Kochi, shooed out all passengers and set it aflame, shouting slogans
for him.
Soon, the 2006 polls were coming up and almost
every political leader of some consequence was speaking for Mahdani. V S Achuthanandan,
then the opposition leader, was going to town about how he had written to
Jayalalithaa seeking an audience to discuss Mahdani but didn't get a reply.
Chandy was talking about his ill luck at not
being able to make Amma budge, and how the giveaway fax that his Government
sent was actually a mistake.
That was when President A P J Abdul Kalam
came down to Kerala. The state MLAs, both of the Left and the Congress bandwagon,
immediately drew up a petition and submitted it to Kalam, demanding Mahadani's
release - more than 100 out of the state's 140 MLAs signed it.
More was to follow, on the day of Holi on
March 15, the Congress-led Government's Water Resources Minister Thiruvanchoor
Radhakrishnan tabled a resolution in the Assembly. It urged the Centre to
"intervene on humanitarian grounds in the case of Mahdani, languishing
under trial in Coimbatore Central Jail for the last seven years'', and for
''urgent steps to provide good medical treatment to him".
Now, the Opposition-Left wanted to do one
better. It asked for the resolution to be made to read that Mahdani be released
on parole, not just given medical treatment. This was incorporated and passed
- not a single MLA opposed it.
The next few weeks put him in even more important
light. The PDP was angry with the Congress, but had still not agreed to incline
Left.
Days before the Assembly poll in May, Mahdani
broke his silence to send a statement from his cell exhorting his ranks to
work for the Left - for the first time.
The Left won comfortably in many Muslim pockets
that it could never have dared to hope for earlier. The last few weeks had
seen Left ministers and leaders making a beeline for Mahdani's home to meet
and promise his wife to get him out, tagging TV cameras along.
Achuthanandan talked to Karunanidhi urging
to get him out but the latter, it seems, has gone only halfway. As of now,
he's getting the massages.
rajeev.pi@expressindia.com
