‘For centuries, Nair and Syrian Christian feudals were partners in maintaining Kerala’s caste oppression’
Against the backdrop of the RSS cozying up to the Kerala church establishment, Prof G. Mohan Gopal says there is a crying need for a new political movement in Kerala that will represent the interests of SEBCs, Dalits and Tribals and ally with the Muslims to safeguard Kerala from being taken over by the former feudals
Kerala goes to the polls next month. Over the past few years, the efforts of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to enhance their role in Kerala politics haven’t gone unnoticed. In Kerala, any statement that stokes up anti-Islamic sentiment will benefit only the Sangh Parivar. Early this year, the synod of Syro-Malabar Catholic Church issued a statement decrying ‘love jihad’ and condemning the killing of Christians by radical Islamists in Nigeria on Christmas day. The RSS-BJP has also taken an active interest in resolving a longstanding property dispute between the Syrian Orthodox and the Syrian Jacobite Churches and more recently in ‘saving’ a 1000-year-old Syrian Orthodox church from being razed for the widening of a national highway. While the church seems to have been their focus over the last few months, the RSS-BJP has been equally invested in making inroads into the Ezhava community, the largest Hindu social group, into which Narayana Guru was born and which has a history of being staunchly anti-brahmanical. Prof G. Mohan Gopal, a former vice-chancellor of the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru and one of India’s foremost legal scholars, is also a keen observer of Kerala’s sociopolitics. In an interview with FORWARD