The AICC may have wasted much time in rushing a senior emissary, Vayalar Ravi, on Monday to humour the Muslim League, its coalition partner in Kerala, with workers of both the parties burning down a few of each other’s offices in Nadapuram and the local Congress actually calling a hartal against the League.

Ravi talked peace and urged Aryadan Mohammed, Congress leader and former minister, to stop the harangue, after meeting the League supremo at Malappuram on Monday. The League leadership is still to respond, though its leaders have condemned their ranks for attacking Congress offices.

But that may not be enough to bring back on track the relations between the two bigger partners in the state’s United Democratic Front. Sparked off in adjacent Malappuram, which, for the League is more than just its only base of consequence despite its drubbing there by the Left in the last polls, the latest Congress-League spat was bound to rankle. Muslim-dominated Malappuram is where the League can’t afford to let things ride, however trivial. What rubbed the League the wrong way was Aryadan’s remarks to his partymen that the Congress probably could make the League follow its trail in Malappuram, if Congressmen seriously tried to use the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme to make some easy political gains.

The League was quick to see it as an upstage move, condemned the remarks and things soon deteriorated to a slanging match. The League is led by its unquestionable supremo, Panakkad Syed Mohemmedalai Shihab Thangal, and things reached a head after a provoked Aryadan suggested that the Government should take a close look at how Thangal had made his wealth. Aryadan’s son and parallel movie-maker Aryadan Shoukath added to that saying Thangal, who famously distributes not just political and social wisdom but magical water and beads as well to the crowds thronging his home daily, should be questioned the same way the Left Government was now probing fake godmen statewide.

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