The caste politics in Kerala shows no signs of waning, in fact, it is getting more pronounced

A flippant statement by one of the caste leaders in Kerala has shocked the people in the State. G Sukumaran Nair, general secretary, Nair Service Society, declared the other day that Shashi Tharoor, the Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram is the only Prime Ministerial candidate in the country as he was a Tharavadi Nair (Malayalam for aristocratic Nair). The Nair community constitutes 18 per cent of the electorate in the State and the NSS is a privately held cabal of caste leaders specializing in vote trading during the time of election. Sukumaran, who declares himself the Pope of Perunna (the headquarters of NSS) also claims that the entire Nair community dances to his tunes. He had claimed that Ramesh Chennithala, who hails from the community was appointed as home minister in the Oommen Chandi-led Government (2011-2016) at his bidding. Sukumaran’s latest version was that V D Satheeshan, who too is from the Nair community, got elected to the assembly following his diktat to the voters. It is true that all candidates, irrespective of the party to which they are affiliated, call on community leaders to solicit their support during the elections. It looks like the pleading by the politicians has gone over to the head of Sukumaran, societal dross.

What he has done is Constitutional impropriety by declaring that only candidates born in a particular caste were eligible to be elected to the top job in the country. Tharoor became a Member of Parliament not because he was born into a Nair family. All people in the country have aristocratic lineage and categorization based on aristocracy is communalism of the worst kind. R Sreelekha, the first woman IPS officer from Kerala, recounted a shocking experience with the NSS leaders in 1984 when she went for an interview for the post of lecturer in a college run by the society. Though she was the top rank holder in the University as well as in the interview, the then general secretary had asked her to pay Rs 25,000/ as a bribe for the job. It was a princely amount and Sreelekha bluntly refused to pay the bribe. She asked the gentleman if this was the kind of service they rendered to the community; she was told that the money was meant for NSS leaders. Caste leaders like Sukumaran should be prosecuted and banished from society to make our national psyche clean and pure. They should be taught the basics that people are not commodities.