A decade and a half ago, before the first of his many brushes with the law for his communally charged speeches after the Babri Masjid fell, Abdul Nasser Mahdani was little more than a local cleric in Kollam with a particularly fiery tongue, running an orphanage on the side.

Then suddenly, he was in the news, busy mopping up the disgruntled from the soft-pedaling Muslim League, roping in the angry young men in the community, to launch the Islamic Sewak Sangh (ISS), an extremist outfit taking off from the RSS to take on the RSS. The post-Babri angst was building up in Kerala and Mahdani, one leg blown away in an RSS attack, never had to look back. Not even after the ISS was banned and he had to rally his men into a new outfit with a political face, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).

He grew so rapidly that some nine years ago, the late Marxist ideologue E.M.S. Nambuthiripad spoke of this man in the same breath as Mahatma Gandhi. Two years ago, the Kerala Assembly passed an unprecedented unanimous resolution that the Congress moved, seeking his release from jail where he was an undertrial in the 1998 Coimbatore serial bomb blasts case.

Last year, he was almost the Left’s poster boy in an important assembly bypoll, even from jail. And now, two days after acquittal in the blasts case, Mahdani is Kerala’s most sought-after Muslim politician, for both coalitions.

In the early days, Mahdani’s USP was his promise of a fighting alternative for the dismayed ranks in the community’s only cohesive outfit of consequence, the Muslim League. Mahdani projected his outfit as a counter to the League that had appeared to tone down its post-Babri Masjid outrage to keep its place in the Congress-led UDF that ruled Kerala in 1992. If his ISS had a non-political and clearly extremist pitch, with the PDP, Mahdani began consolidating the community’s fringe elements into a vote bank.

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