A.K. Antony's plain-speaking on the dangers of political arm-twisting by the leadership of the economically well-entrenched and well-organised minority communities in Kerala has set the cat among the pigeons and is snowballing into a crisis that could rock his chair.The Muslim League is thinking of pulling out its ministers from the government. The ruling allies, perennially dependent on Christian vote banks and the powerful Bishops, have turned against the Chief Minister. The Opposition CPI(M) has seized the opportunity to buttress its criticism of Antony as a closet Sangh Parivari. Even the state BJP unit, after some initial dithering, has called the CM’s statement a ploy to woo the Hindu voters away from the Hindutva fold. And Antony’s own nervous followers in the Congress are either stunned into silence or are secretly cursing their leader for bringing the house down on them.Among the state’s irrepressible Left-leaning intellectuals, Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer has been the lone voice that says Antony deserved to be heard. Apart from him, only the pro-BJP leadership of the SNDP (Sri Narayana Dharma Paripalana Sangham, claiming to represent the backward caste Ezhavas) and the politically reticent NSS (Nair Service Society, espousing the forward caste Nair cause) have supported the Chief Minister’s views.But public opinion in the state is less polarised than what the opinion makers’ shrill cries would suggest. Even those who think that Antony has chosen the wrong time to bare his heart, with religious extremists of all hues busy stoking fires in strife-torn Marad, credit him with a rare courage of conviction and grant him the right to hold to his truth.‘‘Only he could have said this’’ is a public refrain that rises above the high-decibel controversy. And there is no mistaking that it is this emerging civil society audience that Antony was addressing on his return to the state from his party’s crucial pre-poll Shimla conclave.It is not for the first time that Antony openly counselled restraint to the minorities. He had said so and survived in the more trying circumstances following the demolition of the Babri Masjid. More recently, he advocated a departure from the politics of patronage that he believes has taken Kerala to a developmental dead-end. The openly practised patronage of communal, casteist forces by the Right and the ‘‘partyism’’ of the doctrinaire Left have reduced the citizen to a pliable beneficiary and the political leader to the status of the led.If Kerala’s achievements — land reforms, falling birth rate, high literacy and human longevity — were products of an era of broad-based social reforms and welfare measures, the present slide in quality of public services and the growing public debt and public cynicism have a great deal to do with the patronage politics. To read his remarks solely in the context of an adamant League setting a deadline for the return of Muslim residents to Marad would be missing the woods for the trees.
