Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Thursday defended Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] leader A.K. Balan’s controversial remark that the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (JIH) would control the Home department under a Congress-led government.
Mr .Vijayan also sought to give the contentious comment a contemporary political context, stating that Mr. Balan had only held a mirror up to the Islamist organisation’s increasingly pernicious influence within the Opposition United Democratic Front (UDF).
Mr. Balan’s statement sparked a controversy on Wednesday, with Leader of the Opposition V.D. Satheesan and JIH emir P. Mujib Rehman separately accusing the former Law Minister of being a propagandist for the Sangh Parivar. Mr. Rehman compared Mr. Balan to racial hate-spewing Nazi publicist Josef Goebbels.
Mr. Vijayan said the JIH had attempted to distort secular criticism of the Islamist organisation’s pursuit of a theocratic State as a reproach of Muslims to corral Hindu votes. “The propaganda won’t pass muster with Kerala voters,” he said.
He said the JIH’s political tack dovetailed with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) gambit to cast any condemnation of the Sangh Parivar as a censure of Hindus. He said Islamist organisations and the RSS shared a symbiotic relationship, with each drawing political sustenance from the other.
