The high-profile police case against Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar for taking to social media to allegedly incite hate between different faiths in the immediate aftermath of the murderous blast at an evangelical prayer convention at Kalamassery in Ernakulam on Sunday has triggered a touchy political debate in Kerala.
In a Tuesday post on X (formerly Twitter), Mr. Chandrasekhar alleged the criminal case was an act of political retaliation by INDIA bloc partners Rahul Gandhi and Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan for exposing Hamas’s (a militant organisation that controls Gaza in Palestine) link with violent radical outfits in Kerala.
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) State president K. Surendran stated that the government had pandered to religious extremists by foisting a false case on Mr. Chandrasekhar.
In stark contrast, Mr. Surendran said, the government had tacitly endorsed a Hamas leader’s virtual address to the cadres of the youth wing (Solidarity Youth Movement) of the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind in Malappuram last week.
“The Kerala police have no case against the organisers of the event who gave a public platform to a terrorist leader to spew communal venom,” Mr. Surendran said.
The BJP claimed that the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] State secretary, M.V. Govindan, linked the blast to the Palestine issue.
The Congress petitioned the police to prosecute Mr. Govindan for inciting communal enmity without moving a similar plea against Mr. Chandrasekhar.
Mr. Govindan said he perceived a Congress-BJP gambit to “counterbalance the gravity” of Mr. Chandrasekharan’s “incendiary statement” by “working in tandem” to throw misplaced analogies into the political scale.
Mr. Govindan said he inferred initially that an attempt was underfoot to divert public attention from Kerala’s solidarity with Palestinians and demanded a thorough investigation. He claimed he did not jump the gun to broadcast a schismatic message or divisive bias against any group.
Mr. Govindan seemed to find an unlikely ally in the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) general secretary P. M. A. Salam.
Mr. Salam said there was no equivalency between Mr. Chandrasekhar’s “incendiary statement” that “cast a particular community under an ominous suspicion” straight away after the blast and Mr. Govindan’s tame observation.
The political fencing also revolved around the real-world consequences of online hate messaging, especially in a fraught socio-political climate, and pushed society’s fear of digital hatred spilling onto the street into the forefront of the State’s civic debate.
