In the midst of the popular Onam festival in late August, northern Kerala became the scene of violent confrontations. In August, an activist from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was killed in the Kasaragod-district, while an activist from the BJP was killed in the Thrissur-district. Both parties immediately claimed that representatives of the other party were responsible for the deaths.
What followed was several days of unrest. Activists from both parties threw home-made bombs at each other’s homes and were involved in fights and stabbing. Paradoxically, the violence can be understood as a consequence of democracy.
Political commentators were quick to diagnose the unrest as an expression of intensified competition between the two oppositional parties CPI(M) and BJP in Kerala, where there is a seemingly increased support for the BJP pending the State Election in 2016. BJP seems to be gathering support at the expense of CPI(M) in certain areas. There are also several indications that BJP nationally is showing an increased interest in Kerala. In the Congress-run state, an obvious strategy is to undermine the Communists, who are already struggling with political support.
However, violent confrontations between Marxist left-wing and right-wing Hindu nationalists is not a new phenomenon in northern Kerala. Rather, political violence has been part of the landscape since the 1970s. According to anthropologist Ruchi Chaturvedi, between 100 and 200 party activists have been killed and 4,000 activists brought to trial for complicity in everything from murder to assault.
Political violence in the area has also been thoroughly commented by the press over the years and the violence has often been categorised as expression of “medieval” or “archaic” demeanor and persistent traditions.
Based on long-term fieldwork among grassroots activists from both CPI(M) and the BJP, Chaturvedi argues in a recent article for understanding the politics of violence in a conspicuously different way, namely as generated by and through democratic practices.
Political parties can pose emotionally strong communities and form powerful notions of “equality” between members. Such communities have potentially explosive boundaries which can be manifested in situations characterised by political competition. Both left-wing and right-wing activists explained to Chaturvedi that the use of violence was connected to “love” and loyalty to their comrades.
Further, Chaturvedi points out that the majority of left- and right-wing activists in northern Kerala belong to the same group of former untouchables. This undermines a possible argument that the lines of conflict are about caste or class-based rivalry. Moreover, Chaturvedi argues that underlying ideology does not seem to be a plausible explanation.
A number of scholars have pointed out that a lot of the democratic politics in post-colonial India have consisted of creating and maintaining political -- and moral -- communities where individual identities are subordinated or attemptedly dissolved in collective wholes. By pointing to these factors as contributing to the understanding of spiraling violence in northern Kerala, it becomes clear that it is necessary to research the connections between the most unpleasant aspects of political practice -- violence -- and the most pleasant -- love, fellowship, community.