Wednesday, Apr 08, 2009
Thiruvananthapuram: Israel is the spice of this election season and a subject close to the heart of politicians in Kerala. Nearly 27 per cent of the State’s population is Muslim and the people, especially in the Muslim-dominated northern districts, have a long history of association with the Arab world and sympathy to the Palestinian cause.
India’s growing ties with Israel, especially the Indo-Israel missile deal signed a few days before the announcement of the Lok Sabha elections, have become an embarrassment for the Congress and the Muslim League in Kerala, partners in the UPA Government at the Centre as well as the Opposition United Democratic Front (UDF) in the State.
Therefore, no sooner was the former UN Under Secretary-General and author Shashi Tharoor declared the Congress candidate in Thiruvananthapuram, than an article he wrote in January in the context of the Mumbai terror attacks for Project Syndicate (which distributed it to over a hundred newspapers around the world) came in handy for the ruling CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) and the anti-League Muslim fringe parties in Kerala to beat the Congress and the Muslim League with.
As it appeared several days later in an Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, the article was titled “India’s Israel Envy”, and very soon was being read in India in the context of Israel’s action in Gaza. Mr Tharoor has since been trying to explain that “it was not his title,” that the article was “not about Israel,” and that he had only been trying to tell those in India who were arguing for such an Indian strike in Pakistan that “we are not Israel and we should not do what Israel has done.”
In an interview to Business Line (excerpts of which were published on March 31), Mr Tharoor said: “Within a week of the article appearing in Israel and so on, a number of my Arab and Muslim friends said, look, ‘you have opened yourself up to a misunderstanding.’ Therefore, in my monthly printed column, I issued a statement saying that it was a misunderstanding and it was not on purpose. It has taught me a lesson as a writer not to write on something that was an ongoing situation when the situation itself was likely to evolve beyond the ordinary. So that is the one mistake for which I am willing to apologise.”
But the damage was done and the issue snowballed into a major controversy, threatening the fortunes of not just Mr Tharoor in Thiruvananthapuram but of many UDF candidates. Some fringe Muslim groups, with pockets of influence in many districts, have since declared support to UDF candidates in many constituencies, but not to Mr Tharoor.
Many anti-League parties such as Abdul Nasir Maudany’s PDP have, along with the CPI(M) and the LDF, launched a campaign in Kerala to expose what they term the Congress and the Muslim League’s fondness for Israel.
On March 28, the CPI(M) also sought to bring the air defence missile deal that India has signed with the Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) into the centre-stage of the Kerala election scene while demanding a CBI inquiry into the alleged kickbacks involved in the form of “business charges totalling Rs 600 crore.”
Missile deal
The targets of these allegations were obvious and the Defence Minister, Mr A. K. Antony, flew down on April 3 to launch his election campaign and reply to these allegations. Mr Antony said the deal was transparent and a result of talks going on since 2002; that it had been approved at several levels including finally by the Cabinet Security Committee and that it contained an integrity clause that allowed any future government to take stringent action, including legal, to recover the cost and debar the company from any future transactions for a period.
But Mr Antony has left too many questions unanswered, including why India signed the deal with the same company involved earlier in the Barak missile deal corruption scandal (during the NDA rule), as the CPI(M) Polit Bureau member, Mr Sitaram Yechury, pointed out here on Monday.
With ten days to go for the April 16 polling in Kerala, Israel has become a key campaign issue in all the 20 constituencies of the State, with the LDF leaders explaining the implications of India’s huge Defence purchases from Israel on the Palestinian people, how Israel had been benefiting economically from India and how, therefore, India was also becoming responsible for the killings of Palestinians by Israel.
But the Opposition UDF is countering these charges, saying the missile deal has been brought up by the CPI(M) merely to divert attention from the SNC-Lavalin corruption case, which is now before the Kerala High Court, with the CPI(M) State secretary, Mr Pinarayi Vijayan, as one of the accused. (The case relates to the award of contract for the rehabilitation and modernisation of three hydro-electric projects in Kerala in the mid-1990s.)
“The CPI(M) is raising the allegation against the missile deal because the UDF had already made the Lavalin case a major election issue in Kerala,” the Opposition Leader, Mr Oommen Chandy, said a few days earlier in Kozhikode.
Tough election for LDF
The prospects do not appear as rosy for the LDF in Kerala this time as they were in 2004 and the CPI(M)-led coalition is engaged in a tough contest in almost all the 20 constituencies in Kerala, where a significant factor that would decide the fortunes of the two Fronts is the mind of the minorities.
Even though the Indian Union Muslim League often claims to be the representative of all Muslims in India, it has so far remained only as a party of the Muslims of Kerala. Yet, ever since the Muslim majority Malappuram district was established by a Communist government in 1969, the Muslim League had managed to have two representatives in Parliament, from the two constituencies in the district, Ponnani and Manjeri (now renamed Malappuram after the delimitation exercise).
But that tradition was broken in 2004, with Manjeri voting for a Muslim candidate fielded by the CPI(M) instead.
It was an election in which all the 17 Congress candidates who contested from Kerala lost and the UDF had, therefore, only one representative in the last Lok Sabha — the IUML’s Mr E. Ahmed. Winning from the only other remaining League stronghold, Ponnani, he went on to become the Minister of State for External Affairs in the Manmohan Singh Government.
In this election, the CPI(M) is bent on breaking the monopoly of the Muslim League in Ponnani as well, the last remaining League bastion, and defeating Mr Ahmed in Malappuram too, with the support of the PDP and other anti-League forces.
There is also a sizeable section among the population in the 20 constituencies which considers Saddam Hussein a hero, George Bush a villain and Israel the arch enemy of the people of the Muslim world. Hence, the unlikely focus on Israel as a mobilisation strategy in Kerala.
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