The other reason for caution is the attempt by the NDF to deny its suspected Coimbatore connection. Some of its members were arrested for alleged involvement in the bomb blasts that shook the textile city of Tamil Nadu over a year ago. By expelling them subsequently, the NDF has not erased evidence pointing to its involvement in incidents of minority extremism in both Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Post-Coimbatore police investigations have made clear that communal terrorism, like its ultra-Left counterpart,cannot be effectively combated within the boundaries of single states. The warning, thus, is not addressed to Kerala alone. But, the lesson, and this needs to be emphasised, does not concern only law and order exercises or the targeting of one particular type of communalism.

It would be simplistic to treat the incidents at Coimbatore as violence occurring in a vacuum, and not trace them back to Tamil Nadu's communal conflicts over which political parties have chosen to keep a tacit and tactical silence through the years. In much the same way, the minority extremism that worries the Marxists in Kerala would not have grown to its present proportions without support from the political establishment and provocation from the majority community. It follows then that minority communalism cannot be fought with any degree of success without denying space and succour to its alleged adversary. `Fundamentalisms' of the majority and minority kinds have always fed on each other. This is the fundamental fact that needs tobe faced -- in Kerala and elsewhere in the country.