Cleric for all seasons

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.

The Muslim League’s slide had become pronounced by the late 1990s. Over 24 per cent or nearly one out of every four Keralites is Muslim, and the win-lose margin between the state’s Left and Congress coalitions is often below two per cent. But outside of the crumbling League, the community has no significant rallying platform of its own. No outfit can survive outside of the coalitions either.

Sensing Mahdani’s potential, Nambuthiripad, steering the Kerala...