Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has faced personal abuses throughout his public life. Reactionary sections are incensed not just at his political positions, but also because somebody from the thiyya / ezhava caste, a community of former untouchables with traditional occupations such as coconut plucking and toddy tapping, has risen to become the Chief Minister of the State.
Casteist abuses against Pinarayi Vijayan reached a crescendo after the 28 September 2018 verdict of the Supreme Court’s constitution bench which allowed women of all ages to enter and pray in the Sabarimala temple. The Kerala government declared that it would implement the court verdict, and the right-wing led by the RSS-BJP and supported by the Congress, began raucous protests against women’s entry in the temple.
Videos and images attacking Pinarayi Vijayan on caste-lines have been shared widely by right-wing hordes in the past few months. At the press conference on Thursday, 3 January 2019, Pinarayi Vijayan responded to such attacks.
As journalists asked him about the casteist abuses targeting him, Pinarayi Vijayan said, “Yes, that’s a new trick. They keep reminding me about [the traditional occupation of] the caste. That “you belong to that caste”. Long back, when the chaturvarnya system prevailed, the rule was that somebody from a particular caste could do only certain occupations.”
“I have often said, my father was a toddy tapping worker. My elder brothers used to do toddy tapping. So there are some people who wish that Vijayan also should do only toddy tapping. That is pointless.”
“Also, some of them say that even my father, grandfather and great grandfather won’t be able to do what I’m trying to do,” the Chief Minister added after a pause. “It’s true that they wouldn’t have been able to do it. They are people who used to go about daily life enduring various kinds of hardship. They weren’t involved in public matters so much.”
“But those times have changed. These are new times. It will be better if these people realise that.”
See the video clip here:
The video of a woman from Pathanamthitta abusing the Chief Minister on caste lines had gone viral in early October 2018. “That chova *@#$%*@ should be beaten and his face broken,” the woman said in the video. (Chovan is an offensive term for ezhava.) Following widespread protests, another video of the woman apologising for the fiasco was also released. The Aranmula police had filed a case against the woman.
Then on December 22, Janmabhoomi daily, the BJP mouthpiece, published a casteist cartoon against Pinarayi Vijayan.
The caption for the cartoon column titled “Driksaakshi” (“Eye witness”) said, “You should have known while making somebody who ought to have climbed coconut trees your leader”.
The widespread outcry against the cartoon forced the paper to make an announcement on Facebook saying that the cartoonist had been fired, but later it deleted the post.
The success of the massive Vanitha Mathil (Women’s Wall) with the participation of 5.5 million women on 1 January 2019 has given a big boost to the efforts of the CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front to carry forward struggles for gender equality – struggles which the Left considers the continuation of the earlier social reform movements against entrenched caste oppression. The LDF government had taken the lead to organise the Women’s Wall, in association with 176 community organisations, against regressive attempts to lead society backwards.
Pinarayi Vijayan himself had taken the lead in the political and ideological campaign to take forward the legacy of the Kerala renaissance, by addressing massive crowds across the State from mid-October onwards. The first of these speeches, delivered at Thiruvananthapuram, has been by now come to be regarded as a historic one.
Watch the final 20 minutes of the speech, with English subtitles, here:
