political violence, community and its limits in kannur, kerala (contributions to indian sociology)

Political violence, community and its limits in Kannur, Kerala

Ruchi Chaturvedi

This article analyses communities that the blue-collar, backward caste, local-level workers of the party Left and the Hindu Right have forged amongst themselves in the Kannur district of Kerala. Its particular focus is on members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI (M)). For more than four decades, members of the CPI (M) and the Hindu Right have been involved in an intermittent but occasionally intense conflict. Their conflict highlights how modern practices of political mobilisation and competition condition the formation of close-knit antagonistic masculine unities regardless of the ideological affiliations in question; its violent context foregrounds affects and emotions that characterise life in such fraternal communities. While such unities have become central to the enactment of collective agency in many contexts, strong limits mark these communities. Not just those outside a community, but also those within it apprehend these limits. Violent experiences emerge as idealised modes of imagining communion with members of one’s community, as well as forces that individuate them. Biographies and narratives of Left- and Right-wing workers who once sought close integration with their respective communities but now live apart from them, illuminate the already present limits of commonality and unity possible in modern political communities.

Keywords: violence, community, democracy, masculinity, backward castes, Kerala

IIntroduction

In May 2013, Chitralekha, a dalit woman auto driver in the Kannur district of Kerala, published an account of her recent experiences in the dalit and adivasi women’s online blog Savari. The account—published in English

Contributions to Indian Sociology 49, 2 (2015): 162–187SAGE Publications Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DCDOI: 10.1177/0972063415575821

Ruchi Chaturvedi is at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Email: [email protected]

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Contributions to Indian Sociology 49, 2 (2015): 162–187

and Malayalam—detailed the ways in which members of the local auto drivers’ union attached to the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI (M)) and police personnel had colluded to harass her and her family members. This 2013 account was just the latest in a series of reports of harassment and violence that Chitralekha has faced in a male-dominated field in the last 10 years.1 In 2010, the Feminists Kerala Network docu-mented and elaborated the context of such violent harassment (Christy and Rowena 2010).2 It held the auto drivers’ union affiliated with the CPI (M), its members or ‘foot soldiers’ who tended to behave in a ‘casteist and masculine manner’ and, in many respects, the CPI (M) itself responsible for the harassment (ibid.). According to the network, collectives of such youth affiliated with the CPI (M) and its unions, while being members of groups deemed backwards, ‘use masculine violence to counter all new assertions by Dalits and women’ (ibid.).

This article revolves around another set of violent acts that the so-called foot soldiers of the CPI (M) in Kannur have been involved in. For more than four decades, intermittent but often dramatic violence has accom-panied the conflict between CPI (M) members and local-level workers of other political parties and formations—especially the Hindu nationalist

1 Since the turn of the century, many members of lower caste groups such as the Thiyyas have attained greater economic and social mobility and visibility in political parties, especially the CPI (M) (see note 4). And while the position of adivasi and dalit groups has also improved in the last few decades, they continue to suffer from various forms of social discrimination and material deprivation. The failure of land reforms in Kerala to endow dalit groups with productive assets has especially affected their socio-economic status. Furthermore, in a context where dalit and adivasi groups are at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder and their numbers are not significant enough to make an electoral dent in any party’s fortunes, they have continued to languish at the lower rungs of the Left party that has historically claimed to represent them. Since the 1980s, their demands for land and social recognition have become much louder and assertive. They have sparked confrontations between landless dalits and adivasis, on the one hand, and union members (many of them Thiyya) affiliated with the CPI (M) holding state power, on the other. Such confrontations took an especially threatening form in Chengara in 2008. On other occasions, the once backward but now assertive Thiyya party workers of the CPI (M) have targeted and harassed dalit women like Chitralekha, several rungs lower than them on the socio-economic and political ladder. See Devika (2013), Sreerekha (2010) and Rammohan (2008).

2 See C. Christy and Jenny Rowena. 2010. ‘Background on the history of violence against Chitralekha and the decision to set up a fact-finding team’, cited in Nivedita Menon, ‘“Living outside the track”: A woman worker’s struggle against caste and patriarchy in Kerala’. Available at http://kafila.org/2010/02/25/living-outside-the-track-a-woman-worker’s-struggle-against-caste-and-patriarchy. Accessed on 29 August 2014.




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Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh and Bharatiya Janata Party (RSS–BJP) combine. Local-level workers of both groups have been the alleged agents as well as the victims of this violence. Indeed, since the late 1970s, more than 4000 workers of the Left and Hindu Right have been tried for acts ranging from criminal intimidation, attempt to murder and murder of members of the opposing party.3 At some points, over the years, this rashtriya sanghar-sham (political conflict) between the two groups produced just a sense of foreboding that something terrible might happen; at other times, it generated confrontations between workers of the two groups involving everything from fisticuffs to knives and daggers. And, at still other times, it led to murders of many Communist Party and Hindu Right wing workers in a matter of a few hours and days. Such violence has occurred in the course of confrontations over displaying party colours and symbols on walls and trees, during election time at polling booths and counting centres, when supporters switch allegiances between the two groups to keep equal scores of those attacked or killed, and to seek vengeance.

It is notable that like most union members who attacked Chitralekha, a significant majority of CPI (M) and RSS–BJP workers who have been charged with and suffered different forms of violence directed against each other belong to the same formerly untouchable community of Thiyyas.4 These workers in the lower echelons of the Left and the Right make their

3 My computations are based on records of trial court judgements archived at Kannur District Court, Tellicherry. Media accounts speak of 2000 ‘clashes’ through the 1980s and 1990s: Mary John, ‘Political murder tally 118 in Kannur’, New Indian Express, October 1999; 127 political murders took place in Kannur in those two decades (K.M. Tampi, ‘A Bleeding District in Kerala’, The Hindu, December 1999); 142 political murders from 1980 to 2000 (see P.P. Sasindaran, ‘Akramarashtreeyam Pinnaampuram’ [On the Backstages of Political Violence], Mathrubhumi, December 2000).

4 In the ritual hierarchy, Thiyyas, the largest sub-group of Hindus in North Kerala while placed below the Namboodris, Nayars and other artisan castes, were placed above dalit groups such as Cherumas, Pulayas and Nayadis (Awaya 1998). While the percentage of landowning Thiyyas was relatively small, by early 20th century, an elite group had emerged amongst them deriving their position from education, employment as lawyers and civil servants, involvement with trade and commerce, and setting up of factories. What the emergent Thiyya elite brought with them were new ideas and practices of caste equality, which in turn played a significant role in the emergence and consolidation of the Communist movement in north Kerala (Menon 1994). Large sections of Thiyyas, however, continue to engage in blue-collar occupations and make up the lower echelons of both the Marxist Left and Hindu Right. For a nuanced reading of the complicated structural position and history of self-identifications amongst Thiyyas, see Abraham (2010) and Sarah Sam (2014).





livings largely through various forms of blue-collar jobs such as masonry and carpentry, or as daily-wage labourers in the construction industry.5 A number of them are also unemployed or partially employed. Their similar social backgrounds suggest that antagonisms between workers of the two groups cannot be reduced to caste, class and ethno-religious identities. Furthermore, the very disparate ideologies of the two groups have not always sufficed to prevent a flow from Left to Right and vice versa; indeed, at some junctures in this long conflict, various members of the two groups have also switched sides.

The web of meanings, emotions and affects underlying antagonistic political communities of the Left and Right in Kannur cannot then be easily mapped on to divisive ethno-religious histories and ideological disputes. Nevertheless, we encounter members of the two groups who have organised themselves into masculine fraternities and communities that share forms of commonality imbued with notions of sameness and possibilities of being strongly united with one another; their experience of fraternal commonality goes hand-in-hand with vengeful hostility towards opposing groups. Competition for popular and electoral support in small neighbourhoods, towns and villages of the region conditions this antago-nism just as it has structured the ‘muscular politics’ of backward caste ‘foot soldiers’ of political parties in other parts of the country including the CPI (M) in West Bengal and the Hindu Right in Maharashtra, Gujarat and elsewhere (Eckert 2002; Hansen 2001; Michelutti 2008; Ruud 1999; Shah 2002).

5 The relationship of these young Thiyya men to the CPI (M) is illustrated in the article through their biographies and narratives. Historically, the relationship was played out in a public domain that was, from the 1930s onwards, suffused with ethically inflected pronouncements about communism and Marxism as emancipatory, ‘millenarian’ ideologies (Menon 2006: 36). Translated into local idioms, these ideologies promised not just freedom from feudal landlords and capitalists but, very importantly, freedom from caste inequalities (Menon 1994). Autobiographies of local Communist Party and socialist leaders who rose to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s further illustrate the historical character of that relationship (Gopalan 1973; Kurup 1985). The relationship between local-level workers and party leaders may be described as one where young men from upper caste landed families became new agents of upliftment and who, to use J. Devika’s words, allocated to themselves the ‘moral right’ and agency for uplifting these ‘hapless’ poor (2010: 806). Lower caste Thiyya communities of peasants and so-called coolies were amongst the groups that Kannur’s communist and socialist leaders so came to organise and mobilise. Old unequal relationships were thus entwined with the new egalitarian ethos to create novel political communities in the mid 20th century Kannur in particular and Kerala in general.





The violence between local-level workers of the Left and Right in Kan-nur then appears as an ‘exceptional typical’ phenomenon (Levi 1991: 113; Peltonen 2001) or that apparently anomalous and discordant phenomenon, which sheds light on what is general and typical: namely, ways in which competitive democratic practices influence the drive for creating cohesive, homogenous communities amongst the rank and file, the so-called plebian members of various political parties, and condition the accompanying antagonism and violence between them.6 In his well-known work on col-lective violence in South Asia, Stanley Tambiah also reflected on the rela-tionship between violence, community formation and modern democratic politics when he observed how ‘divisive substance codes of blood and soil’ have been mobilised as calls for ‘collective entitlements’ have been made in the ‘process of persuasion and vote getting’ (Tambiah 1996: 261). Other scholars, amongst them Arjun Appadurai (1998), E. Valentine Daniel (1996), Veena Das (1995), Thomas B. Hansen (2001) and Oskar Verkaaik (2004), have described the very emergence of militant communities armed with a cohesive group identity—often among the formerly disadvantaged groups—as a response to confusing, alienating, often overwhelming the socio-economic and political environments. They point out how shared symbols and practices have come alive together with aggression against perceived others in uncertain environments marked by palpable anxiety about given social realities and identities (Daniel 1996: 67). The partition and formation of the two nation states of India and Pakistan in 1947 was marked by some of the most dramatic instances of such violent search for

6 Kannur’s history of an activist, competitive political culture that I outline below and discuss in detail elsewhere (Chaturvedi 2007) can enable us to understand how it became a particular site for such violence. Various journalists as well as the eminent historian have called for examining the political violence in Kannur as a vestige of its medieval martial and clan-based culture (see Rajan Gurukkal, ‘Murder in Malabar’, Indian Express, 8 March 2008). They so seek to account for the exceptional aspects of the violence between local-level workers of political parties in Kannur. While not disputing the existence of an archaic and medieval martial ethos or its echoes in contemporary Kannur, I stress another genealogy that takes cognisance of that violence as an exceptional-typical and not just an exceptional [or particular to Kannur] phenomenon. I thus stress the entailments of modern democracies and their relationship to social life in Kannur; for, it is in the context of the latter—during public demonstrations, while defending principles of justice and egalitarianism, party formation and elections, competition for civic recognition and popular support—that we historically encounter exceptional and typical expressions of machismo, bravado, the drive for creating well-knit communities of support amongst local-level party workers, as well as troubling concerns about victory and defeat and the pain and agony associated with them.





cohesive and pure identities anchored in shared signifiers and communica-tive logics. Its history sharpens our analytical eye. For, the terrible violence of the time was also preceded by the emergence of antagonistic translocal Hindu and Muslim identities in an atmosphere of schismogenetic rivalry (Bateson 1935) where each group reproduced the other’s mobilisation practices while competing for public visibility and electoral victories.7

This history of competing constituencies, identity formation, violent nationalisms and moral self-definitions has repeated itself in several other contexts.8 Details of the consequent violence differ in different contexts but the processes of community formation underlying collective violence often resemble each other (Chatterji and Mehta 2007; Ghassem-Fachandi 2011; Nandy et al. 1998; Varadarajan 2002). Popular and electoral politics in postcolonial India has repeatedly presented us with comparable versions of this process: here too, the capacity of various groups to emerge as co-hesive and loud ‘speaking beings’ (Ranciere 1999: 26) has been anchored to and buttressed by their capacity to emerge as moral communities—held together by a shared sense of solidarity and signifiers (Chatterjee 2004; Michelutti 2008; Narayan 2011; Nigam 2000). Left- and Right-wing workers in Kannur have similarly forged moral communities.

While commenting on the nature of the Hindu Right-wing communities in Kannur and their relationship with political violence there, this article especially focuses on the relationships that local-level CPI (M) workers have forged amongst themselves.9 These communities in Kerala—bound

7 See especially Gilmartin (1998). One of the earliest formulations of schismogenesis maybe found in Bateson (1935) where he describes it as progressive differentiation between groups where each drives the other along a similar path, leading to extreme rivalry and hostility.

8Achille Mbembe’s (2006) comments on the ways in which elections and democratic institutions have accentuated local differences in parts of the African continent are also apposite here. Mbembe notes that while elections and what he calls ‘the dramaturgy of democracy’ make violence and killing unnecessary in the struggle to obtain power (2006: 313), democratisation and the vying for access to resources through administrative structures has also generated greater localisation and, in Mbembe’s words, ‘clearly contributed to the resurgence of conflicts over autochtony and to heightened tensions between a locality’s autochtonous peoples and migrants and outsiders’. ‘Solidarities based on genealogico-territoriality’, he writes, ‘are being reinterpreted, and rivalries and conflicts internal to local communities relaunched’ (2006: 317).

9 I specifically focus on Hindu Right-wing workers of Kannur elsewhere (Chaturvedi 2011).





by ties of friendship, camaraderie and fictive kinship cultivated over a lifetime in party affiliated clubs and organisations or shakhas—have emerged in the context of intense rivalry for presence in people’s ev-eryday lives, in the public sphere and for votes. But unlike violence in many other such contexts, attachments that have conditioned the violence between local-level Left- and Hindu Right-wing members have not been heightened by ethno-religious differences; as noted earlier, work-ers of the two groups in Kannur share similar religious, caste and class backgrounds. Nevertheless, their respective feelings of community and commonality generated over a period of time in small villages, neigh-bourhoods and among friends and colleagues have strongly contributed to the conflict between workers of the Marxist Left and Hindu Right in Kerala. A language of camaraderie, friendship, feeling akin to and being one with fellow party members via competitive vengeful violence has often accompanied it.

At the same time, communities anchored on ideas of likeness and having a common being are marked by strong limits. These limits are apprehended and felt as much by those within a community as those who are outside its bounds. Both aspects—the attempts to constitute strong communities whose members seek to be, as if, of one essence or consub-stantial with another, and the palpable limits of such communities—are pervasive features of modern polities. These twin aspects of modern po-litical communities, and the affects that accompany them, are at the heart of my analysis in this article. They start unravelling as we begin to focus on the political workers’ narratives about their violence, locate them in their biographies and the history and politics of the region in particular and the country at large.

IIContemporary history and CPI (M) workers’ biographies

As noted earlier, local-level workers of the two groups who are the protagonists of this conflict and whose biographies and narratives I am discussing here are members of the same, formerly untouchable but now upwardly mobile community of Thiyyas. The principle of social and po-litical equality, and dynamics of popular politics and electoral democracy have come to mark their lives just as they have conditioned the public and everyday life of members of many so-called backward castes across





the country (Chatterjee 2011; Corbridge and Harriss 2000; Jaffrelot and Kumar 2009; Pandian 2007; Rao 2009). While ‘the logic of democratic equality’ has not radically reconstituted relations between the elite and subaltern classes in the country, it has produced a strong impetus among many social groups to thrust themselves into the public sphere and seek a ‘real redistribution of dignity’ (Kaviraj 1998, 2010: 277). Kerala with its history of peasant struggles, social and educational reforms and suc-cessive communist governments has especially witnessed the emergence of an egalitarian ethos.

As participants in an ‘egalitarian public’ (Lukose 2009: 133), young persons in Kerala have often decried their identification with given low caste statuses. This ‘disidentification’ (Ranciere 1999: 35) is a key move by which members of groups such as Thiyyas have sought to redraw their relationship with the larger socio-political whole on more equal terms. Over the decades, they have also joined the Communist parties, especially the CPI (M), in large numbers and announced themselves as workers and peasants rather than members of a particular caste or status group (Menon 1994); from the late 1970s onwards, many young men of the region, including those from lower class and caste backgrounds, began veering towards the Hindu Right wing.10 Since then, they have

10 In their rich ethnography of village life in south Kerala, Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella (2000) describe how caste differentiations marked the rise of the Hindu Right in that region in the 1980s and 1990s. A large number of CPI (M) supporters in the village they studied were lower caste Izhavas (akin to the Thiyyas in north Kerala) and Pulayas, whereas upper caste Nairs often associated with the RSS. Disputes around public rituals and festivals between Nair families and lower caste Izhava and Pulaya communities at times translated themselves into disputes between the Hindu Right and the Left (ibid.: 181–83). That said, just as in north Kerala, in the south too, the Hindu Right had a certain draw for young men from lower caste groups such as the Izhava. Osellas attribute that draw to the Hindu Right’s ‘strong pan-Hindu rhetoric’, its claims to propagation of a shared culture and identity associated with a common motherland (ibid.: 217). Furthermore, RSS sponsored activities—shakhas, camps, festivals—afforded lower caste Izhava youth the opportunities to closely interact with young members of the upper castes as well as participate in physical, intellectual and spiritual practices associated with them. A veneer of integration was thus created in spite of the fact that the core membership of the Hindu Right wing was made up of orthodox, caste conscious upper caste individuals. Furthermore, many amongst the Izhava were skeptical about the claims of CPI (M) of being an egalitarian organisation and frequently pointed towards the upper caste status and disposition of its prominent leaders (ibid.: 213). These factors played an important part in drawing many young men to the Hindu Right in Kannur as well, especially in the post-Emergency period. For more details, see Chaturvedi (2007: chapters 1 and 3).





appeared in the public sphere, in protests and demonstrations as workers of Left parties and in smaller though significant numbers as members of Hindu Right-wing groups.

As members of these groups, especially the CPI (M), or various affili-ated unions, and on behalf of various sections of the population ranging from agricultural and construction workers to college students, state em-ployees and residents of the region, these young men have articulated a variety of public demands. Over the decades, the demands have included better wages, employment, water rights, public education, electricity and sanitation amongst other things. Their demands for such rights and entitle-ments have sometimes appeared as ends in themselves; many times they have also served as attempts by different social groups to reconfigure their relationship to the larger whole. As noted earlier, some such emergent col-lectives have vested themselves with the moral qualities of community, complete with real or fictive kinship bonds and symbols, rituals and other collective representations. In Kerala and other parts of the country, such groups have also been facilitated by and articulated themselves through various political parties.

We know that political parties in a democracy gain legitimacy and ascendancy through two crucial interlinked routes: on the one hand, by appearing as expressions of the so-called ‘general will’ and embodiments of that subject of popular sovereignty called ‘the people’; on the other hand, by securing a countable version of the general will—namely, by obtaining an electoral majority. This is the particular kind of politics which I speak of in this article and that which lower caste local-level workers or blue-collar ‘foot soldiers’ of the Left and Right in Kannur have embodied in their respective ways. In other words, they have enacted a politics that occurs at the junction marked by members of various formerly margina-lised groups’ thrust to be visible and be heard, their demands for welfare and entitlements, various political parties’ attempts to articulate these demands and gain popular and electoral support, and the formation of close-knit communities.

Central to my account is the biography of one such local-level CPI (M) worker, Preman, which illustrates the nature of such politics, the communities that get formed in its wake, the hierarchies that underlie them and the ways in which they condition the worker’s violence. Preman’s biography and narratives about life in the party and the workers’ violence reveal many strands of fraternal kin-like communities amongst members and supporters of





the Left in Kannur, their peculiarities and the manner in which they resemble political communities in other parts of Kerala and elsewhere.11

When I first met Preman in 2002, he was in his mid to late 30s; like many of his friends and associates in the CPI (M), Preman worked as a partially employed construction worker and daily wage labourer. Com-pared to members of adivasi and dalit groups, Thiyya local-level CPI (M) workers like Preman enjoyed better status in the region. That said, Preman and his family were struggling to make ends meet. His family, including his elderly parents, wife and three children, lived in a dilapidated, small two-room house; they possessed no land other than the one on which their house stood. For most of the year, Preman was only partially employed and often unemployed, and the family was largely dependent on the earnings of his wife who worked in a state-run day care centre.

Nevertheless, Preman believed that the various CPI (M)-led govern-ments and their welfare-based development model had prevented the family from suffering utter abjection that they might have in another context.12 Not only was his wife employed in one of the many day care and health centres instituted as part of this model, but one branch of the family also lived on the hutment land that they had received follow-ing the CPI (M)-led land reforms in early 1970s. Preman’s father was extremely ill now; however, in his younger days, he too had been an active member of the party, propounded its egalitarian principles and participated in jatha (political procession) and demonstrations.

In fact, following the promulgation of the 1969 Land Reform Act, Pre-man’s father had travelled to Alleppey and other parts of Kerala to take part in the ‘land grab movement’, a movement led by CPI (M) volunteers to forcibly implement the provisions of the Act—encroach on government and

11 Biographies, autobiographies and self-narratives, albeit written ones, have been an important resource for scholars of modern Kerala’s political and public sphere (Devika 2006, 2010; Menon 2006). For two insightful reflections on biographies and self-narratives as resources for analysing history of modern Kerala, see Arunima (2004) and Kumar (2012).

12 In many respects, Preman was echoing both the party rhetoric and the social science literature on Kerala. While the welfare state has a long history in Kerala, it was considerably strengthened under several Communist governments. The party and social scientists, especially in the 1980s, thus hailed its developmentalist character and the ‘Kerala model of development’ that had achieved high points on all the indexes of well-being without the stimulus of an industrial revolution. In J. Devika’s words, ‘Within Kerala, communists have claimed the major share of credit for progressive state policy and politics; the “Kerala model” literature reiterates the claim in international arenas’ (2010: 801).





private lands, take forcible possession of 10 cents (4356 sq ft) of land around a family’s hut and erect fences, etc. Preman’s father was amongst the nearly 5000 people arrested for these crimes at that time.13 And while land reforms devolved only hutment and not productive land on selected beneficiaries, Preman and his father hailed the movement and its achievements.

Their affinity for CPI (M) also stemmed from the fact that for many years, Preman’s father worked as a beedi (a type of cigarette) roller in a factory that was part of an important beedi cooperative established by and closely associated with the party.14 If modern democratic life is tied to the thrust for equality, then land reforms, governmental welfare and employment in places like beedi cooperatives were ways in which it translated itself in people like Preman’s life. Both his conditions of life and his dispositions and inner self have been influenced by a thrust for equality and visibility that was articulated through the party’s activities and its welfare-based development policies. Indeed, Preman had been drawn into the party’s children wing (bal sangham) as a young boy and lived a script that many young boys of his caste–class background from the region have also lived in 20th century Kerala. Like them, Preman acted in plays to mobilise and organise the masses; Niranjana’s famous novel Chirasmarana (1977), on the martyrs of the 1940s’ peasant struggle in north Kerala was, according to Preman, his favourite book.

From a young age, he and his friends and colleagues in the party would go from house-to-house during elections, canvassing for their candidate and the party. Or they would travel around the area with megaphones holding mini election rallies. Preman helped start the ‘Red Star Volleyball Club’ in his village that many young men affiliated with the party were active in and he had been part of various ‘actions’15 to, in his friends’ words, ‘defend’ the party. In other words, he had been active in actions to

13 The Land Reform (Amendment) Act came into force on 1 January 1970. As T.K. Oommen in his study of the agrarian movement in Kerala tells us, the Act was designed to distribute excess land under the ownership of the government, public endowment and private individuals to the landless. Encouraged by these provisions publicised in advance, peasant and labour unions initiated the ‘land grab movement’ in December 1969. See Oommen (1985: 124–42) for an overview.

14 Kerala Dinesh Beedi Cooperative was established in 1969 with considerable logistic, financial and moral support from the CPI (M) led state government and the party’s leaders (see Issac and Raghavan 1998).

15 English words such as ‘action’ often found their way in the party workers’ Malayalam narratives.





aggressively ward off persons, signs and symbols of the opposite group. And thus, his friends came to describe Preman as a ‘fighter’ in the service of the party.

On his part, Preman regarded himself as a ‘social worker’. That role was closely sutured to his identity as a party worker. According to Preman, the degree of his involvement in the lives of fellow party workers and the so-called ‘party families’ often became exceptionally intense. Describing that involvement in the course of a conversation, Preman talked about how party supporters and neighbours came to his house at all hours of the day. He noted, ‘Someone needs blood, someone asks for some other help…. The branch secretary (of the party) sends them to me’. His role and self-representation as a ‘social worker’ demanded that Preman be involved in the lives of his neighbours and present and potential party supporters—in their everyday concerns, health, well-being and various rites of passage; he thus appeared as a small but critical conduit in the local networks of pastoral care. In the age of governmentality, these practices of pastoral care have also been closely tied to the work of enhancing forces supportive of a party such as CPI (M) that has, over the decades, especially emphasised its welfare-based developmentalist agenda.

But to return to Preman for now and his profile not only as a ‘party worker’ and a ‘social worker’ but also as a ‘fighter’ for the party: indeed Preman’s accounts of ‘actions’ on the party’s behalf were frequently ac-companied by descriptions of the local topography of the conflict between local-level CPI (M) and Hindu Right-wing workers. According to Preman, members of the RSS–BJP cadre often made their presence felt in the next village by painting tree trunks and walls in public spaces in their party colours, inscribing the words ‘RSS’ or ‘BJP’ on them, or just standing around in the village square. But if they ventured towards Preman’s vil-lage and sought to make their presence felt there, they were likely to be ‘attacked’—beaten and intimidated—by him and/or his fellow CPI (M) workers. That was one of the typical forms that the competition and conflict between members of the two groups has taken over the years.

On other occasions, as Preman explained on another day, he and his friends had violently reacted against members of the Hindu Right as a form of vengeful reprisal. A compulsion or an imperative was built in here as well. In this instance, the compulsion to deliver an equal or harder blow was entwined with the relationships that Preman and his fellow party workers had formed with each other and with their local leaders. Preman





was quite categorical: ‘To attack a person I am fond of is not correct.’ Reprisal was posited as an obvious reaction here and those who attacked one’s friends and leaders became the ‘hated’. In Preman’s words, ‘(if) opponents come to murder this man (referring to Sumesh, a close friend and local leader) then how can I love those adversaries…. The hateful should be hated.’16

Like Preman, his close friend and local CPI (M) leader Sumesh be-longed to a Thiyya family albeit one where professional success of various members had enabled the family to enjoy a comfortable middle-class life. The very genial Sumesh had risen from the ranks and been recently ap-pointed to an important position at the district office of the party. Local leaders like Sumesh have replaced paters and patrons of yore in many places. In some ways, the new leaders are even socially equal to the activ-ists on the ground and people they mobilise. At the same time, such local leaders emerge not only as shepherds guiding their flock, but also as big brothers leading and commanding it. A sense of camaraderie, friendship, brotherliness and even love (or sneham as I describe elsewhere) inflects their accounts of relationships with each other.17

Indeed, as noted earlier, it was while referring to Sumesh that Preman had made his emotive observation about conflict between various groups

16 The last set of Preman’s words verukkappedentavare verukkappeduka thanne cheyyanam might also be translated as ‘the people who rouse aversion should be despised’.

17 In other work I have discussed the place of sneham in Hindu Right-wing workers’ narratives in detail. It might however be instructive to discuss some of its key features here. In the first instance, it is important to distinguish sneham as love from romantic love. Osella and Osella describe sneham as more akin to love between siblings, friends and neighbours, parents and children than just amorous love (1996: 51). It is said to flow between equals as well as received by dependents to be repayed with devotion and service. Amongst non-intimates, its capacity to buttress hierarchical ties becomes more pronounced as Osellas illustrate through their ethnography of gift exchange and facilitation of binding ties of sneham between Nair landlords and Pulaya agricultural labourers in south Kerala. These relations do take on a patron client character (ibid.: 53–57). Friendship, love and sneham between local-level leaders like Sumesh and party workers like Preman are both different from and like the relationships that Osellas describe. It might be more accurate to say that they share features of the different kinds of sneha bandhams (ties/relationships of love) that they describe. There is intimacy and equality in the relationships between local-level party leaders like Sumesh and workers like Preman, and there are also hints of inequality, obligation and a compulsion to repay with devotion and service that marks them. Such layered relationships then become embodiments of the complex career and character of the principle of equality in places such as India.





when he noted that ‘(if) opponents come to murder this man (Sumesh) then how can I love those adversaries…. The hateful should be hated’. This discussion of love, hate, relations with fellow workers and leaders of the party and Preman’s explanation of how he found himself drawn into inter-party conflict resonates with a statement he made in another conversation a few days later. While once again discussing his relation-ship to the party and its members and networks with my research assistant and me,18 Preman noted, ‘To tell you the truth, it [the party/CPI (M)] is in my blood from early childhood—from the age of thirteen. Even in times of trouble, I would not like to be away from party organisation and its different families’.

We might regard the statement as hyperbolic. At the same time, mem-bership in the CPI (M) was quite literally in Preman’s blood; his father had been an active party member who had not only participated in collective actions like the ‘land grab movement’ in the early 1970s, but had also been involved in violent clashes with workers of other opposing groups in the 1960s. Now three–four decades later, Preman’s role as a party worker included his activities and vision of himself as a ‘social worker’ as well as his violent encounters, especially with members of competing groups as a ‘fighter’ of the party.

The metaphor of blood ties also suggests something else: namely, a vision of affinity modelled on filiation, being not just akin but as if of the same substance or body. As I have discussed elsewhere (2007, 2011), organicist notions and language invoking consubstantiality are much bet-ter developed amongst members of the RSS–BJP combine in Kannur; at the same time, local-level CPI (M) workers also occasionally articulated such ideas, especially as they came to find inspiration for their vision of a political community in the family. In the midst of communities of mutual support and in the face of competition for popular and electoral support, this ‘regime of sameness’ (Gandhi 2005: 30) is reassuring. Equality is

18 My assistant Pradeep, an anthropology student at Kannur University, contributed greatly to the research process. His easy and trustworthy demeanour and the fact that he was a serious young man from the district helped to mitigate the sense of self-consciousness that some male workers apparently felt walking, travelling with and talking to me, an urban female researcher. In many other ways too, the ethnographic research, conversations and vignettes I draw on in this article were conducted in collaboration with Pradeep. See Middleton and Cons (2014) for important reflections on the question of ethnographic assistance, collaboration and authorship.





hence envisioned with those viewed as alike and politics becomes about the assertion of this self-same subject, community or party made up, amongst other things, of familial worlds.19

Such communities of filial care and fraternal camaraderie formed in the backdrop of competition for popular and electoral support are not rare or exceptional in postcolonial democracies; they have, however, taken noticeable forms in Kannur. Indeed, the fraternal and familial world of local-level CPI (M) workers contains many distinct features. Unlike members of Hindu Right-wing communities or members of other so-called backward communities that have become politically significant (Hansen 2001; Michelutti 2008), CPI (M) workers do not often emphasise common ethnic origins and mythico-religious fathers or mothers.20 Furthermore, to draw on Juliet MacCannell’s words, the family portrait is repainted in many communities that uphold modern egalitarian ideals (1991: 11). The emergence of a new egalitarian ethos in Kerala has also meant respite from traditional patriarchs and feudal overlords for many. However, fraternities or masculine communities of friends and comrades have emerged in their place. But here too, acts of everyday care, spatial proximity and temporal density of lived relationships have often got enmeshed with the ‘romance of self-repetition, similarity, resemblance, the order of the same’ that, as Leela Gandhi notes, even the most ‘radical communities of difference’ founded upon solidarities of class, gender or race are not immune to (2005: 28). The community of friends has thus seemed like family and extensions of self; the community of male comrades has appeared as a ‘regime of brothers’ that, in fact, seeks to absorb women in its protocols. Just as it did in Kerala and other parts of the country since the early decades of the 20th century (Alter 1992; Kumar 2012; Valiani 2011), a ‘political culture of virile contestation’ (Kumar 2012) in the aid of such a community has emerged among the local-level CPI (M) workers of Kannur who make up these fraternities.

19 Frequent references to the party and fellow party workers as family, kith and kin circulate amongst CPI (M) workers and local leaders in Kannur and other parts of Kerala.

20 While common ethnic origins are not a key referent of CPI (M) ideology, communist participation in the united Kerala or Aikya Kerala, writings from that times as well as the CPI (M) stalwart E.M.S. Namboodripad’s many tracts on communal life in Kerala are just some instances of the ways in which communists also posit Kerala and Malayalis as a proud coherent and cohesive cultural community.





IIIHindu Right-wing violence, community and beyond

It is this culture of masculine assertiveness among local-level party workers—directed at members of opposing groups but also other mar-ginal communities of dalits and women—that the Feminists Kerala Network invoked and I highlighted in the opening paragraphs of this article. My particular analytical focus in this article, however, is on the affective flows, love, hate, camaraderie and commonality underlying the regime of brothers that local-level workers of the Left and Hindu Right and their respective colleagues and friends form amongst themselves. As I noted earlier, while the violence between the two groups occurred both to equal scores and retaliate against an attack on a colleague or local leader, calls to so react, be equal or more equal than others have been enmeshed in the language of love and hate. If Preman spoke of his fondness for the local CPI (M) leader, Sumesh, and contempt for those who might attack him, RSS–BJP workers located such affects, emotions and the impulses to violence in the much written about local units or shakha. Here they meet and interact at least once a day for a regimen of physical and ideological training consisting of drills, games and debates about national and local sociopolitical questions (Anderson and Damle 1987; Basu et al. 1993). Describing their intersubjective relations and the subjectivities forged through such interactions, a relatively senior RSS or Sangh (as the RSS is popularly called) worker noted that:

Our minds are so affected….Our relations with Sangh workers are even stronger than our relations with other family members….We meet other workers regularly. If you reside in the same area, go to the shakha then relations become really strong. When something happens to any one of them, then it affects the heart and mind a lot.

And, while talking more directly about their relations with other Sangh members and their violence, another RSS worker observed:

It is hard to say what kind of people they are—the ones who commit murders. At the same time, their willpower inspires them to do so. At that moment, such courage and power comes. It happens unknowingly.





It is a ‘spirit’. Through the evening shakha and the bal shakha (children’s shakha), when 20–25 people get together, stand around and discuss different things, a ‘team spirit’ enters all of them. To sit around the shelter, just talk about anything, that is all there is to it.

The idea of ‘team spirit’ thus articulated the Hindu Right-wing work-ers’ sense of being encompassed in their larger, general whole. It was a whole that RSS–BJP workers tried to thread together through their well worked out mobilisation practices or ‘service activities’ that included organising medical and blood donation camps, assistance with bank loans and founding of hostels and various educational facilities for children from lower income families (Chaturvedi 2011). And, it was a whole that they evoked through organicist concepts such as chaitanya (life-force) that further vivified the nature of RSS–BJP workers’ affinities with each other. While in practice Muslims and Christians are not seen to share it, the concept of an apparently universal life-force is central to the RSS workers’ understanding of themselves. Indeed, it allows them to speak of recognising one another through what they count in themselves. Love, in their minds too, is born of such similarity and unity.

As for their violence: in the Hindu Right-wing worker’s narratives about it, love impels it. And at the same time, violence (enacted and/or suffered) occasions the realisation and experience of affinity and love for one another (Chaturvedi 2011). Underlying and affirmed in that act of violence is the ‘love’ that they feel for each other and for the community that is the RSS. While ideas of love and unifying life-force were seen to bind RSS–BJP workers to one another, vengeful violence further realised those ties. In terms reminiscent of Durkheim (1984), retributive violence became a means of asserting and experiencing solidarity and oneness with one another.

Analysing the relationship between experiences of solidarity, one-ness and violence, Jean-Luc Nancy reminds us that the modern age has in fact justified millions of deaths for the sake of radical, revolutionary and nationalist battles. It has not only viewed them as instances where the yoke of one kind of oppression or the other may be thrown away, but also as moments in which people commune with one another and realise themselves as part of a larger community (1991: 13–14). Nancy notes that if communities are believed to be anchored on alikeness and similarity, then





it is death and violence that seem to assure the most complete communion between different beings. Deaths of the ones we claim an affinity to allow us to forget their peculiarities and their always already given separate-ness from us. Our union with ‘our own’ is then said to become even more complete in vengeful violence—spurred because ‘we’ or one of/like us has been attacked.

The essence of such a community is both what is said to exist in the people who constitute it and their expressions in their larger collective being as more than a sum of its parts. As has often been noted, many mod-ern discursive spaces—from nationalistic rituals to the romance for the rural idyll—echo the nostalgia for lost experience of close-knit fraternal, familial communities and communion in the modern secularising world. It is then perhaps a testimony to Hindu Right and Left-wing workers in Kerala’s own modernity that they too speak of their communities as what resides in them and flows through them ‘like blood’. In the backdrop of their communities and violence is the search for these workers’ visibility, presence, democratic legitimacy for their parties and them, and competi-tion for popular and electoral support.

IVCommunity, its limits and anti-communitarian

possibilities

As for Preman, the CPI (M) worker who is a key protagonist of this article, things have taken a slightly different turn. Over the years, Preman failed to rise up in the party ranks. He was recognised as a ‘fighter’, one who had been involved in several violent encounters with workers of the Hindu Right, but things went awry when he was convicted and was about to be imprisoned in a case of destruction of the opposition party’s property. Preman explained what transpired in vivid detail. He noted:

When an incident happens, when some workers are involved in an ‘action’, then it is the local branch secretary’s job to secure bail for them. And if someone is remanded to judicial custody, then all the things you need before going to jail have to be taken care of: afternoon meals, towel, toothpaste, soap, if someone smokes then a few smokes,





all this should be obtained before the police jeep shows up to take you away. It is the branch secretary’s responsibility to do all that.

But the last time Preman was arrested, the branch secretary failed at these tasks. In fact, Preman’s father had to secure the bail money with the help of a neighbour. Angry and indignant at this turn of events, at a time when his mind was already ‘restless’, Preman had got drunk and publicly insulted the branch secretary. For this misdemeanour, he was suspended from the party.

Such cracks in political communities are hardly unique. But what it reminds us of are everyday discordances in political communities that hinder the integration of individuals into their collectivities and hamper the possibilities of dissolution of the ‘I’ into the ‘We’. If violence as an action impelled by the spirit of the whole can help transcend an indi-viduated sense of separateness, if an individual’s experience of enacting violence can be subsumed in the conviviality of a community, then such sublation had been curtailed in Preman’s case.21 In fact, as I pointed out, he was suspended from the party for his misdemeanours. Over time he became even more distant and removed from the party and his friends and colleagues therein.

I wish to narrate one more story about fissures in the whole—this time, the whole that is the Hindu Right-wing community. Indeed, the attendant sense of separateness was even more palpable amongst Hindu Right-wing workers such as Rajeevan and Aravindan who I got to know over the years. Both Rajeevan and his older brother, Aravindan, had been active in the RSS–BJP combine from a very early age. They were strong, confident young men who commanded respect amongst their local circle of friends and colleagues in the Hindu Right. In 2002 when I first met them, their trials for murders of CPI (M) workers in two different instances were about to begin. Over the years, however, Aravindan had become increasingly reticent and silent. Unlike his brother though, Aravindan was acquitted at the district court.

On the other hand, Rajeevan was convicted in the lower courts and spent five years in prison. He was eventually acquitted upon appeal to

21 For an ethnographic account of such apparent sublation especially amongst members of the Hindu Right in Kannur, see Chaturvedi (2011).





the High Court. While prosecutions, convictions and acquittals are not proof of complicity or lack thereof, Rajeevan had made allusions to his participation in violent encounters in the course of our conversations. What he also talked about was the toll that life in the RSS–BJP and the fear of impending punishments had taken on him and his family. Individualising penal processes and punishment had limited possibilities of seamless integration with the community. Due to the brothers’ long-running trials, construction work on their house was stalled and for many years, the fam-ily lived in a half-built structure. Furthermore, the alleged involvement of two sons in murder and attempts to murder cases and their upcoming trials had an extremely adverse effect on their father’s health. Their father died while Rajeevan was in prison.

But upon being acquitted after five years in prison, Rajeevan was seeking communion of another sort, namely, he was looking to get married. There too he encountered hindrances. With their much larger pool of supporters and families sympathetic to the Party, CPI (M) workers in Kannur found it much easier to find matrimonial alliances as opposed to Hindu Right-wing workers. Furthermore, even amongst RSS–BJP supporters, a worker involved in violent encounters did not have complete acceptance. Nevertheless, after ‘seeing’ 72 eligible young women, Rajeevan’s wedding had been arranged with the 73rd girl.22

This was July 2009. The wedding was to take place in September. But new problems emerged around this time. The cycle of vengeful violence was now playing itself out and the local CPI (M) workers had recently threatened Rajeevan with grave physical harm. He was now looking to move towns, hide, go ‘underground’ for some time. The Sangh was providing money and assistance for the move. The assistance was on its way, but flows of solidarity and support are not always unfettered and quick to come by. In those fearful, isolating days, Rajeevan too was talking of perhaps leading a quieter life less burdened by responsibilities assigned to him as a Sangh worker—responsibilities of forging close-knit ties, ‘fighting’ in the name of his community and enacting it, in a competitive setting, through violence. Disjunction and separation from his political community seemed imminent for Rajeevan.

22 It is common amongst workers of the Marxist Left and Hindu Right to seek grooms and brides not only from among the members of the same religious and caste community but also among the same political community.





But yet again, such a turn of events is not peculiar to Preman or Rajeevan. Such cracks might even be regarded commonplace in political communities that in other moments seem to suffuse individual identities and animate and guide their dispositions and actions. These cracks particularly mark the biographies of workers like Preman and Rajeevan who are low in the caste, class and organisational hierarchy. Like many other Left- and Right-wing workers, the two of them had also spoken about community as that common being whose substance they shared in, which imbued them with its own character but was also inherent in them. They too had abided by it, experienced and exalted in it. Increasingly, however, everything seemed more tentative; relationships within their community seemed less seamless, and more inhibited and restrained.

While Preman and Rajeevan were being consigned to their private lives, subtracted from the public sphere and their larger political com-munities, another generation of local-level workers had begun taking their place in their respective groups. However, one contemporary of theirs, Saleem, charted a different course. I will conclude my article with his brief biography and the ways his current location, life and actions present a picture of communities without similitude, without affects associated with communitarian ‘love’ and the search for commonness and union. In other words, it allows us to glimpse what, with Leela Gandhi (2005), we can call an ‘anti-communitarian community’.

I met Saleem very late in the course of my field research. I had however heard about him for a long time. Renowned for his girth, size and notoriety as an aggressive sort, Saleem had begun associating with CPI (M) leaders of the area when he was just 14; they became his personal and political mentors. That was in 1978. Involved in a rioting case and charged with ‘destruction of public property’ during a demonstration, Saleem soon dropped out of school. But he continued in the party’s youth wing, became a full-time ‘volunteer captain’ of the local cadres and was subsequently elected as a municipal councilor. In fact, his rise through the party ranks occurred during periods of intensified conflict with the RSS and its affiliates. There were several ‘attacks’ and ‘counter-attacks’, and murder and attempt to murder charges followed. But Saleem managed to get acquitted in all these cases.

However, for several years now, he too has become distant from the party. Reprimanded, apparently after he tried to co-organise some public events with the Muslim League [who the CPI (M) did not want to ally with at the time], Saleem began feeling dislocated in the midst of the party’s





political community.23 But unlike Preman and Rajeevan, he did not retreat to the private sphere; instead, together with several friends and associates, he runs a visual arts association, promoting them in schools as well as in a charity that provided relief during natural disasters.

Saleem’s story and his present associations are also not very unique; nevertheless, I want to draw attention to some of its features. For, Saleem occupies an interesting position or one might even say that he remains in an important state of dislocation. Like many others, Saleem had also envisioned himself as one with the party and imagined as a superior, tran-scendent entity. In fact, he often stated that he was essentially a Communist. But over time, the sense of being so closely related to the party has depleted. He was now aligning and trying to forge networks with a disparate set of people, amongst them members of the Indian Union Muslim League.

Saleem has sought alliances with members of the League but vari-ous biographical details prevent him from actively participating in the League’s own search for ascendancy amongst the minority Muslim population. Nevertheless, today Saleem evokes various tenets of Islamic philosophy alongside CPI (M) stalwarts and even Lenin as his guiding lights. Indeed, he maintains a vast archive of photographs of national and local Marxist leaders that he exhibits proudly. At the same time, he also fumbles amongst narratives about the party’s past and its future, just as he fumbles while discussing his association with the Muslim League. With a sense of dislocation in the midst of both groups, he remains a minority in multiple ways.

But this very sense of dislocation and a certain ‘insufficiency’ (Nancy 1991: 35) of communion with larger entities like parties and political com-munities have generated the need to consistently communicate. Seamless unity or communion with a larger group is no longer possible for Saleem.24

23 While an account of the long and circuitous relationship between the CPI (M) and the Muslim League is outside the scope of this article, it is notable that Saleem’s attempts to reconcile his status as a religious minority with his party affiliation became an important reason for his fallout with the CPI (M). Saleem’s fallout with the party may also be seen as an instantiation of a long-running tension between class-based ideology of the CPI (M) and its struggles to address caste, religious and gender-based discriminations. That said, CPI (M)’s claims to secularism and opposition to the Hindu Right wing have found some purchase with Muslim youth and their socio-cultural formations in Kannur and other parts of Kerala.

24 As Nancy observes, an uneasy sense of dislocation acts against the possibility of fusing with or being suffused by a larger community. Where possibility of communion recedes, communication can occur (1991: 25).





However, he has not become insulated as an individual but communicates as an uneasy other to many people; from that condition of exposure, un-easiness and insufficiency, not feeling utter oneness with anybody, Saleem carries on—together with a wide range of friends and acquaintances—with his emergency relief and visual arts for school projects.

There is no notion of shared essence here, there are few people who are akin to each other, few family-like bonds between those who claim to be alike and certainly none that dissolve the ‘I’ in a ‘we’. Neither can Saleem offer us another easy alternative way of doing politics since he himself sometimes wonders about and misses the fervour and effectiveness of a cohesive moral community as a socio-political agent. Nevertheless, his uneasy, exposed (dis)location reminds us of the conditions in which ‘anti-communitarian communities’ (Gandhi 2005) and anti-communitarian politics may be forged.

Acknowledgements

I want to acknowledge the Centre for Humanities Research of the University of the Western Cape for the fellowship award that facilitated the writing of this article. While I am now based at the Department of Sociology, University of Cape Town, all credit for this article is attributed to CHR, UWC. Thanks to Francis Cody, Suren Pillay, Nicky Rousseau, Simona Sawhney, Nina Sylvanus, the journal editors and anonymous referees for their comments.

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