The Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] and the Congress scrambled to decipher how the Nair Service Society’s (NSS) canon of political equidistance would bear on the outcome of the byelection in the high-profile Puthuppally Assembly constituency on September 5.
The NSS has often used the equidistance doctrine to navigate the eddies of Kerala politics deftly, even as it has sought to broadcast the image of being above the cut and thrust of domestic politics and firmly on the middle ground.
The NSS’s often inscrutable position has compelled politicians to make a beeline for its headquarters in Perunna, hoping to tap into the community’s formidable social heft during elections.
CPI(M) State secretary M.V. Govindan said the NSS’s equidistance has not always translated into political neutrality. He said no one social organisation could tip the electoral scales. “Nevertheless, they have some votes, which political parties covet. It’s not as if the CPI(M) candidate visited social leaders seeking boons,” he said.
CPI(M) candidate Jaick C. Thomas said the NSS’s equidistance line meant it had put paid to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) attempt to pull it into the Sangh Parivar “divisive” political orbit.
Congress leader Rajmohan Unnithan, MP, claimed NSS’s equidistance policy hewed to UDF politics. “The NSS’s now-defunct political arm, the National Democratic Party, was part of the ruling Congress coalition in 1982. The NSS has an umbilical link with the UDF,” Mr. Unnithan said.
NSS response
NSS general secretary G. Sukumaran Nair appeared to tread a fine line when major television channels called on him on Monday to read the political tea leaves in his latest statement. Mr. Nair said the NSS’s retreat from an overt campaign to defend the Hindu faith against the backdrop of Speaker A.N. Shamseer’s take on science and religion did not mean that the “wounds they inflicted had healed”. The issue would reflect in the byelection, he said. Mr. Nair’s statement sounded ominous for the CPI(M).
Nevertheless, the ruling party found solace in the words of the Metropolitan Trustee of the Jacobite Church, Joseph Mar Gregorious. “We have a sincere and effective Chief Minister who deemed it unfair to wrest control of Jacobite churches based on a Supreme Court order. The Church will reciprocate the empathy. But it would not dictate to the laity whom to vote for,” he said.
The position of social organisations that claims to represent the interests of crucial voting blocs could inform the Puthuppally bypoll, perhaps on the same scale as other mainstream issues.
