Why do Muslim organizations and a large section of the Muslim population in kerala continue to rally behind the UDF and Congress, even when there is visible evidence of these parties engaging in compromises or tacit understandings with the BJP, while simultaneously accepting the UDF’s claim that the CPM is aligned with the BJP? How can this apparent contradiction be explained?
This paradox becomes intelligible only when we move beyond surface-level electoral accusations and examine the deeper structural, psychological, and historical forces shaping political behaviour, particularly within Kerala’s distinctive political field. What appears as inconsistency or confusion is in fact a patterned response produced by long-term memory, fear, and narrative mediation rather than by a detached assessment of alliances and governance records.
For a large section of Muslim organizations and voters, political choice is guided less by objective analysis of alliance structures and more by the perception of immediate protection. The BJP–RSS combine is widely experienced as an existential ideological threat, rooted in majoritarian nationalism and cultural homogenization. Against this background, Congress and the UDF are symbolically positioned as the principal national counterforce to the BJP, despite their visible contradictions and compromises. The CPM, by contrast, despite its strong and consistent record of minority protection in Kerala, is often framed—especially through national narratives—as ideologically flexible and tactically ambiguous. This produces a cognitive shortcut in which Congress is seen as a party that may compromise covertly but can never become the BJP in essence, whereas the CPM is suspected of openly compromising if tactical balance demands it. Such perceptions persist even when they are contradicted by empirical evidence.
Historical memory plays a decisive role in sustaining this outlook. Congress occupies a unique place in minority political consciousness as the party that led the freedom movement, institutionalized secularism, and embedded constitutional safeguards. It is associated less with social transformation and more with civilizational continuity. For minorities, especially Muslims, Congress is remembered as a protector during moments of crisis, while the CPM is remembered as a systemic transformer. In periods of acute identity insecurity, systemic transformation appears abstract, whereas symbolic protection feels immediate and reassuring. Under such conditions, political judgement is shaped more by memory activated through fear than by present-day data.
This dynamic is reinforced by an asymmetry in propaganda vulnerability. The allegation that the CPM is secretly aligned with the BJP works not because it is true, but because it exploits certain ambiguities: the CPM’s parliamentary tactics, its issue-based voting, its engagement in federal negotiations, and its consistent refusal to employ emotive identity-based language. The Left’s insistence on class-based and constitutional arguments leaves it exposed to suspicion in a climate dominated by affective politics. Congress and the UDF, on the other hand, benefit from emotionally powerful narratives such as “only we can stop the BJP” or “vote splitting helps fascism.” These slogans are easy to communicate, difficult to counter emotionally, and are repeated persistently through community networks. At the same time, Congress’s own compromises with the BJP—whether through state-level arrangements, silence on critical issues, or a gradual soft-Hindutva drift—are normalized as political compulsion or downplayed as tactical rather than ideological. What emerges here is a clear case of asymmetric moral accounting.
The role of community leadership further deepens this contradiction. Many Muslim organizations operate through elite-mediated politics in which leadership negotiates access, representation, and concessions. Historically, Congress has been more willing to offer symbolic inclusion through positions and recognition, while the CPM has focused on policy inclusion without extensive identity-specific accommodation. As a result, organizational leadership often gravitates toward Congress, even as large sections of the community materially benefit from Left policies. Fear-driven narratives, however, lead many of these beneficiaries to vote for Congress despite their lived experience of Left governance. This creates an internal contradiction within the community itself, between material interest and symbolic reassurance.
When a community feels under sustained threat, fear-based voting tends to override rational evaluation. Political thinking shifts from analysis to risk minimization. The central question becomes not who has most effectively resisted communalism in structural terms, but who is least likely to betray the community symbolically. In this terrain, Congress survives not through performance or consistency, but through emotional inertia and historical familiarity.
The role of the Muslim League has been central in anchoring large sections of the Muslim community to the Congress-led UDF, functioning as both a political bridge and a gatekeeper of minority alignment. Historically positioned as the principal representative of Muslim interests within Kerala’s parliamentary framework, the League has cultivated a strategy of negotiated security rather than ideological confrontation. By embedding itself firmly within the Congress alliance, it has projected Congress as the indispensable vehicle for minority protection, access, and representation. This has allowed the League leadership to translate community anxiety into electoral consolidation, reinforcing the belief that proximity to a nationally recognized “secular” party offers greater safety than autonomous or Left-oriented alternatives. Over time, this arrangement has institutionalized a pattern in which Muslim political loyalty flows not directly from policy outcomes or governance records, but through elite-mediated assurances of protection and relevance. In doing so, the Muslim League has played a decisive role in normalizing Congress as the default political home for Muslims, even when Congress’s own secular commitments have weakened or drifted toward soft Hindutva, thereby sustaining the very paradox that now shapes minority political behavior in Kerala.
The growing influence of political Islamist formations such as the SDPI and Jamaat-e-Islami has contributed significantly to the gradual alienation of sections of the Muslim community from Left politics by reshaping political consciousness around identity-centric and civilizational narratives. These organizations frame politics primarily through the lens of religious assertion, moral victimhood, and community exclusivity, which stands in fundamental tension with the Left’s universalist, class-based, and constitutional approach. By portraying secular and Left politics as inadequate, indifferent, or even hostile to Muslim identity, they cultivate suspicion toward the Left’s emphasis on class unity and its refusal to engage in religious symbolism. This ideological framing subtly redefines political loyalty as a matter of communal solidarity rather than shared material interests, making Left politics appear abstract, insufficiently protective, or culturally distant. Moreover, by interpreting social conflicts predominantly as religious confrontations rather than structural outcomes of capitalism and authoritarianism, political Islamists weaken the Left’s capacity to mobilize Muslims around common struggles with other oppressed groups. Over time, this shift does not empower the Muslim masses materially, but it deepens political isolation, narrows the horizon of solidarity, and reinforces a defensive identity politics that benefits elite intermediaries while eroding the Left’s long-standing relationship with Muslim working people.
At a deeper, dialectical level, the paradox reflects a contradiction between form and function. In form, Congress appears secular, national, and familiar; in function, it is often weak, compromising, and indirectly enabling the BJP. Conversely, the CPM appears in form as principled, ideological, and systemic, while in function it has been consistently anti-communal in governance. When fear intensifies, form overwhelms function in shaping political choice, and symbolic reassurance outweighs structural effectiveness.
This paradox persists despite mounting evidence because it is sustained by repetition rather than reasoning, identity anxiety rather than class analysis, short-term electoral calculations rather than long-term structural assessment, and narrative power rather than governance records. Until minorities experience a deeper sense of structural security—rather than merely episodic electoral reassurance—this pattern is likely to continue.
In essence, Muslim support for the UDF and Congress despite their compromises with the BJP, alongside suspicion toward the CPM despite its consistent anti-communal practice, is not irrational. It is a fear-conditioned, historically inherited, narrative-driven political response shaped by identity insecurity and elite mediation rather than by structural political analysis.
Minority voting behaviour in Kerala and at the national level differs not merely in degree but in underlying structure, shaped by distinct historical experiences, material conditions, and forms of political insecurity. In Kerala, Muslims live within a social environment marked by relatively high literacy, strong public institutions, a long history of Left governance, and comparatively low levels of everyday communal violence. Minority communities are demographically substantial and socially rooted, which creates a sense of relative security. Politics here is experienced as competitive rather than existential. As a result, minority voting behaviour, while influenced by fear at times, can also accommodate considerations of governance quality, welfare delivery, local leadership, and class interests.
At the national level, the situation is qualitatively different. Minority insecurity is not episodic but structural. Muslims across large parts of India encounter open majoritarian rhetoric, communal violence, legal and administrative targeting, and sustained media demonization. The state itself is often perceived as ideologically aligned with majoritarian nationalism. Under such conditions, voting ceases to be a programmatic or ideological exercise and becomes an act of political self-preservation. The dominant question is not who governs better, but who can prevent further marginalization or violence. This produces a defensive, consolidation-based voting pattern centered on the “lesser evil.”
These contrasting conditions shape the role of the Congress party in different ways. In Kerala, Congress is one among multiple credible contenders for power. The Left, particularly the CPM, has governed repeatedly and demonstrated administrative capacity and minority protection in practice. Congress is therefore evaluated comparatively, alongside its record, alliances, and governance failures. Yet it retains symbolic value among minorities as a familiar and historically secular force, which often cushions it from harsher scrutiny. Nationally, however, Congress functions less as a trusted agent and more as a symbolic refuge—the only nationally visible non-BJP platform capable of aggregating opposition. Its weaknesses, compromises, and ideological drift are often tolerated because alternatives are either fragmented or electorally non-viable.
This divergence is also visible in attitudes toward the Left. In Kerala, minorities possess lived experience of Left rule. The CPM is seen as a real governing alternative, not merely a protest force. Criticism exists, particularly regarding the Left’s reluctance to engage in identity-based political language, but distrust is not absolute. Nationally, by contrast, the Left is perceived as too weak and marginal to offer meaningful protection, leading minorities to avoid “risking” their votes on parties that lack immediate defensive capacity. This is less an ideological rejection than a pragmatic response to vulnerability.
Community organizations further mediate these patterns. In Kerala, Muslim organizations are institutionalized and politically sophisticated, capable of negotiating with multiple parties and influencing electoral narratives. This creates space for elite-mediated political choices, which may not always align with the long-term structural interests of the community. Nationally, minority organizations operate under greater pressure and surveillance, often focused on damage control rather than political bargaining, which reinforces cautious and conservative electoral behaviour.
Media ecology deepens this contrast. Kerala’s relatively plural media environment allows competing narratives to coexist, making propaganda contestable even if not fully neutralized. Nationally, a largely majoritarian media ecosystem amplifies fear and delegitimizes minority concerns, hardening defensive voting into a near-permanent condition.
Seen dialectically, the difference can be summarized simply: where minorities experience structural security, they retain the capacity for political reasoning and evaluation; where they experience structural threat, they retreat into symbolic shelters and tactical consolidation. Kerala occupies an intermediate position between these poles—secure enough to permit debate, yet insecure enough to sustain fear-driven paradoxes. This is why contradictory beliefs, such as overlooking Congress’s accommodations with the BJP while accepting claims that the CPM is aligned with it, can coexist without causing cognitive rupture. National minority voting is shaped by fear of annihilation; Kerala minority voting is shaped by fear of betrayal. Both distort political judgment, but in fundamentally different ways.
Whether the CPM’s strategy helps to dissolve this paradox or inadvertently reinforces it depends on how its political practices are interpreted within a fear-saturated and narrative-driven environment. In substantive terms, the CPM’s strategy in Kerala has consistently worked to protect minorities through governance: strengthening public institutions, resisting communal polarization, enforcing the rule of law, and ensuring relatively equitable access to welfare and development. These actions have objectively limited the social and political space available to majoritarian forces. In this sense, the CPM’s strategy clearly helps minorities in material and institutional terms, reducing the conditions under which communal politics can flourish.
However, the same strategy often worsens the narrative paradox at the level of perception and political meaning. The CPM has historically privileged structural intervention over symbolic communication, assuming that correct policies and secular administration will naturally translate into political trust. In a context where fear shapes political judgement, this assumption proves inadequate. By treating minority protection as a normal function of governance rather than as a consciously articulated political commitment, the party allows its actions to remain politically under-signified. What is not named and repeatedly affirmed becomes vulnerable to distortion, especially when adversarial narratives are emotionally charged and relentlessly circulated.
The CPM’s commitment to class-based politics further complicates this dynamic. While theoretically sound, its reluctance to directly address identity-based fear leaves a gap between lived experience and political language. Minorities who experience targeted insecurity often seek explicit acknowledgment of that insecurity before they can engage with structural explanations. When the CPM responds primarily with abstract constitutional or economic arguments, it risks appearing detached, even when its policies are objectively protective. This does not negate its strategy, but it limits its capacity to counter fear-driven narratives.
Tactical decisions at the parliamentary and federal levels also contribute to ambiguity. Issue-based cooperation, federal negotiations, or tactical voting are legitimate components of a complex political strategy, yet they are rarely explained proactively to mass audiences. In the absence of clear, anticipatory communication, such actions are easily reframed by opponents as ideological compromise or covert alignment with the BJP. Thus, a strategy intended to maximize political leverage can, paradoxically, feed suspicion when it is not embedded in a transparent narrative framework.
At the organizational level, the CPM’s reliance on cadre-based structures and mass movements has been a historical strength, but where sustained engagement with minority social spaces weakens, elite intermediaries fill the interpretive vacuum. This allows external narratives—often hostile—to define the meaning of CPM actions. The problem here is not the party’s refusal to engage in identity brokerage, but the unevenness of its everyday presence in minority cultural and social life.
Taken together, the CPM’s strategy both helps and worsens the paradox. It helps by materially constraining communal forces and preserving secular space through governance, law, and welfare. It worsens the paradox by underestimating the role of fear, symbolism, and narrative coherence in contemporary politics. Without abandoning its ideological foundations, the CPM would need to supplement its structural strategy with sustained narrative articulation, visible acknowledgment of minority insecurity, and proactive explanation of its tactical choices. Until then, its objectively anti-communal practice will continue to coexist with persistent suspicion—helping minorities in reality while failing to fully convince them in perception.
For the Left to break this narrative trap, especially in Kerala, it must act dialectically rather than defensively. The problem it faces is not merely one of misinformation or electoral misrepresentation; it is rooted in fear, historical memory, and the unequal power of political symbolism. As a result, the trap cannot be dismantled through fact-checking alone or by repeatedly citing governance achievements. What is required is a qualitative shift in how the Left communicates, organizes, and symbolically positions itself, without abandoning its foundational commitments to class politics, constitutional secularism, and social justice.
One of the Left’s central weaknesses lies in the gap between its actions and their public meaning. While it has consistently protected minorities through governance—by strengthening public institutions, ensuring legal safeguards, and resisting communal pressures—these actions are often left politically unarticulated. In a climate shaped by fear, silent protection is easily mistaken for indifference. The Left must therefore make its protective role visible and explicit, framing every intervention against discrimination or communal violence as a conscious political act rooted in constitutional ethics. Protection must not merely exist; it must be named, explained, and owned.
Closely linked to this is the Left’s hesitation to confront Hindutva with sufficient moral clarity. In seeking to avoid identity populism, it often retreats into abstract language that fails to acknowledge the lived fear of minorities. Yet recognition of fear is a prerequisite for political trust. The Left must clearly name Hindutva as a threat to constitutional democracy and minority rights, while simultaneously refusing to mirror communal rhetoric. This is not a dilution of class politics but a necessary mediation between structural analysis and lived experience. Silence or excessive abstraction creates a narrative vacuum, which adversaries readily exploit.
Another factor sustaining suspicion is the opacity surrounding Left tactical decisions at the parliamentary and federal levels. Issue-based voting or strategic negotiations are easily portrayed as opportunism when they are not explained in advance. To counter this, the Left must practice strategic transparency, contextualizing its tactics within a clearly articulated anti-communal framework. When political choices are explained proactively and in accessible language, the space for rumor and misrepresentation shrinks. Transparency itself becomes a form of political defense.
Equally important is the need to shift from elite-mediated engagement to mass-level trust-building. The Left has traditionally relied on grassroots organization rather than elite brokerage, but in minority contexts this strength weakens when everyday engagement is absent. In such gaps, community elites come to dominate political interpretation. Rebuilding trust requires sustained presence through neighborhood committees, youth and women’s collectives, cultural initiatives, and issue-based movements that address everyday concerns such as education, housing, employment, and dignity. Trust is not generated during election campaigns; it grows through shared struggles over time.
The Left must also recognize that it has ceded too much symbolic terrain to its opponents. Congress retains minority loyalty partly because it functions as a civilizational symbol of protection, regardless of its actual performance. The Left, by contrast, has relied almost exclusively on material outcomes and rational argument. To break the narrative trap, it must cultivate its own symbolism of security—rooted in constitutional values, social solidarity, and collective resistance to injustice. Public acts of solidarity, visible legal interventions, cultural expressions of pluralism, and consistent defense of victims can generate emotional resonance without resorting to communal politics.
A deeper correction lies in integrating identity-based injury into class analysis. The Left has often treated communal fear as secondary to economic exploitation, but in reality the two are inseparable. Communal targeting functions as a tool of class fragmentation under contemporary capitalism, dividing working people and weakening collective resistance. When the Left articulates minority suffering as a structural component of class domination rather than a separate issue, it neither dismisses identity nor absolutizes it. Instead, fear is transformed into political understanding.
Finally, the Left must abandon episodic communication in favor of long-term narrative consistency. Fear-based narratives operate continuously, while Left responses often appear only during elections or crises. Breaking the trap requires patient repetition of principles, positions, and explanations across time, platforms, and generations. Political trust is cumulative; it cannot be improvised or periodically activated.
At its core, the task before the Left is to transform fear from a force of political fragmentation into a basis for higher coherence. This requires neither denying fear nor exploiting it, but sublating it—acknowledging insecurity while offering a structurally grounded path beyond it. Only when minorities experience the Left not merely as an efficient administrator but as a consciously protective, narratively present, and emotionally intelligible political force embedded in everyday life will this narrative trap begin to dissolve.
The CPM’s approach toward Muslim community organizations and their often divisive or particularistic demands must be guided by a careful balance between principled engagement and firm constitutional boundaries. Neither uncritical accommodation nor outright rejection is politically or ethically viable. What is required is a dialectical strategy that recognizes the material and psychological roots of such demands while refusing to fragment secular-democratic politics along communal lines.
To begin with, the CPM must approach Muslim community organizations not as monolithic entities or mere vote banks, but as heterogeneous social formations shaped by class differentiation, historical insecurity, and leadership mediation. Many divisive demands do not arise from communal ideology alone, but from accumulated experiences of exclusion, discrimination, and fear. The party must therefore start from a position of listening and dialogue, acknowledging the conditions that generate these demands without conceding their political form. Recognition of insecurity is not the same as endorsement of communal solutions.
At the same time, the CPM must clearly and consistently draw a constitutional red line. Any demand—whether from Muslim, Hindu, or any other community—that undermines secularism, gender justice, equality before law, or social unity must be rejected openly and reasoned publicly. Ambiguity here is damaging. Quiet accommodation breeds mistrust among broader society and reinforces the perception that politics is a competition of communal bargaining. The Left’s strength lies precisely in its ability to say “no” on principled grounds while explaining why that refusal ultimately serves the long-term interests of the community itself.
Crucially, the CPM should reframe the terrain of engagement away from identity-exclusive demands toward shared material and civic concerns. Issues such as education quality, employment, housing, healthcare, protection from discrimination, and access to justice disproportionately affect Muslim working people, but they are not communal in character. By consistently redirecting dialogue toward these structural issues, the CPM can transform community negotiations into class- and citizenship-based struggles, weakening the hold of divisive identity politics without dismissing lived grievances.
Another essential element is bypassing exclusive reliance on elite community leadership. Many divisive demands gain prominence because organizational elites act as intermediaries, translating fear into bargaining chips. The CPM must expand direct mass-level engagement with Muslim workers, women, youth, and students through unions, local committees, cultural forums, and social movements. When people experience the party as present in everyday struggles, the authority of elite-driven communal narratives diminishes organically.
The party must also be willing to politically critique communal leadership, not as an external adversary but as part of an internal social contradiction. This critique should be framed carefully: not as an attack on the community, but as an exposure of how identity-based bargaining often benefits a narrow leadership layer while leaving the masses structurally vulnerable. Such critique gains legitimacy only when combined with consistent defense of minority rights against majoritarian aggression.
Importantly, the CPM should integrate questions of identity injury into its broader class narrative without absolutizing them. Communal targeting is a mechanism through which neoliberal and authoritarian forces fragment the working class and divert attention from economic exploitation. By explaining divisive demands as symptoms of structural marginalization rather than as authentic community interests, the CPM can re-politicize them in a progressive direction.
Finally, the CPM must practice long-term consistency. Engagement with Muslim organizations should not intensify only during elections or crises. Continuous dialogue, principled refusals, transparent explanations, and visible solidarity against communal violence must become routine. Over time, this builds credibility even when disagreements persist.
In essence, the CPM should neither chase communal demands nor dismiss them. It should sublate them—recognizing the fear and injustice that produce such demands, while transforming them into struggles for universal rights, social equality, and democratic coherence. Only such an approach can protect minority interests without reproducing the very communal fragmentation that the Left seeks to overcome.
If the objective is to expose the Hindutva leanings and accommodations of the Congress in a politically effective way, the CPM must proceed carefully. The task is not to shout accusations—which often backfire—but to systematically reveal contradictions between Congress’s secular claims and its actual practices, using evidence, coherence, and moral clarity. This requires a strategy that is factual, sustained, and structurally framed, not polemical or episodic.
First, the exposure must be grounded in documented patterns, not isolated incidents. Congress’s Hindutva drift is real but often subtle: soft-Hindutva rhetoric, temple-centric symbolism, silence on lynchings, selective opposition to BJP laws, and state-level tactical understandings with BJP where it suits electoral arithmetic. These must be presented as a consistent trajectory, not as moral lapses of individual leaders. The argument should be that Congress has gradually internalized the ideological terrain set by the BJP, accepting majoritarian cultural codes while offering minorities only symbolic reassurance.
Second, the CPM should frame this exposure in constitutional terms, not partisan rivalry. The critique should not sound like “Congress bad, CPM good,” but rather: Congress’s compromises normalize Hindutva and shift the entire political spectrum rightward. The emphasis must be on how soft Hindutva weakens secularism structurally—by legitimizing majoritarian language, depoliticizing violence, and converting minority rights into negotiable concessions. This framing protects the CPM from appearing opportunistic or anti-opposition.
Third, the Left must highlight Congress’s asymmetrical secularism. Wherever Hindutva mobilization occurs, Congress often responds by imitating its cultural symbolism rather than confronting it ideologically. This includes temple runs during elections, avoidance of minority rights language, and selective outrage. The CPM should contrast this with a principled secularism that neither appeases nor imitates religious identity, but defends equal citizenship consistently. The contrast must be shown through parallel examples, not abstract claims.
Fourth, exposure must be linked to concrete consequences for minorities. Soft Hindutva is often dismissed as harmless pragmatism. The CPM should demonstrate how this pragmatism translates into real harm: delayed justice, muted opposition to discriminatory laws, failure to defend victims forcefully, and erosion of constitutional norms. When minorities see that symbolic compromises have material costs, the emotional shield around Congress weakens.
Fifth, the CPM must avoid attacking minority voters or organizations for supporting Congress. The exposure should be directed upward, toward Congress leadership and strategy, not downward toward fearful communities. The tone must be explanatory, not accusatory. The implicit message should be: your fear is real, but Congress is not addressing it honestly. Moral condescension will only strengthen defensive loyalty to Congress.
Sixth, the exposure has to be continuous and patient, not election-centric. One-off statements or press conferences cannot counter years of narrative accumulation. The CPM needs a sustained pedagogical campaign—through speeches, pamphlets, social media, cadre education, and mass discussions—that repeatedly explains how Hindutva advances not only through BJP aggression but also through Congress accommodation. Repetition, not rhetorical brilliance, is what reshapes common sense.
Finally, the CPM must combine critique with positive contrast. Exposing Congress’s Hindutva leanings will fail unless the CPM simultaneously demonstrates what uncompromising secularism looks like in practice: firm opposition to communal laws, visible defense of minority rights, refusal of religious symbolism in governance, and consistent class-based solidarity. Only when people can see a credible alternative does exposure translate into political realignment.
In essence, the CPM should expose Congress’s Hindutva leanings not as a scandal, but as a structural political drift with dangerous consequences. The goal is not to delegitimize Congress as an opposition party, but to make clear that secularism cannot survive through imitation and silence. Hindutva advances both through aggression and accommodation—and it is this uncomfortable truth that must be patiently, rigorously, and publicly established.
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