Height of double standards

The CPI(M)’s selective secularism has long treated Hindu customs as dangerous while shielding minority faiths and its own red orthodoxy.

In Kerala, where portraits of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin still gaze down from village halls and red flags flutter undisturbed from coconut palms, it is no surprise that Hindu symbols have long provoked official censure.

But of late, the barometer for Hindu ‘intolerance’ in the state governed by Pinarayi Vijayan’s Communist Party of India (Marxist) has risen drastically. Saffron flags, devotional songs, temple rituals have been increasingly cast as ‘political acts,’ especially if they echo the cadence of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

Hinduism is now under increased surveillance with the government turning temples into ideological minefields. The latest controversy over a devotional song linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), sung at a temple festival, offers more than just a local cultural skirmish. The CPI(M)’s attempt to reengineer Hindu religious life under the guise of secularism, while granting safe passage to symbols and slogans drawn from its own ideological arsenal, underscores a deeper malaise long plaguing Kerala’s ostensibly ‘secular’ ethos.

In April this year, the singing of an RSS ‘gana geetham’ (devotional song) at the Manjippuzha Sree Bhagavathy Bhadrakali Temple in Kottukkal had triggered a flurry of complaints and condemnations. A member of the temple’s advisory committee lodged a formal complaint, prompting the police to investigate. That the song was sung on audience request and without overt political messaging did not matter. Nor did it help that the musical troupe was not affiliated with the RSS but had merely included the song at the urging of a local sponsor.

But just weeks earlier at the Kadakkal Devi temple, revolutionary songs in praise of the CPI(M) had been performed during a religious festival. The irony is inescapable: ‘red’ slogans are welcomed into temples, but ‘saffron’ hymns are chased out.

This double standard hardly new. In 2023, the Kerala police ordered temple organisers in Thiruvananthapuram’s Vellayani to remove saffron flags and bunting for the annual Bhadrakali festival and replace them with multi-coloured decorations, citing potential law-and-order concerns. The order came despite the status accorded to saffron as a sacred colour in Hinduism, standing for purity, sacrifice and transcendence. At the time, a number of Hindu outfits decried the move as part of a broader campaign on part of Vijayan’s government to dilute and deracinate Hindu symbolism under a secularist cloak. But the campaign nonetheless continues.

That same year, the Kerala High Court ruled that saffron flags associated with the RSS could not be installed at temple sites, while claiming that temples should remain apolitical spaces. But the ruling has been applied selectively. The red flags of the CPI(M), whose hammer-and-sickle imagery draws from a foreign and explicitly atheistic tradition, are routinely seen in temple festivals, especially in northern Kerala. The CPI(M)’s own mass organisations, such as the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI), have at times marched through temple towns with party flags, chants and banners in hand.

Historically, the CPI(M) in Kerala has always walked a tightrope between its ideological atheism and the cultural religiosity of its electorate. For decades, it sought to ‘reform’ Hinduism through the lens of class struggle, using temple boards and cultural institutions as tools of ideological engineering. In the 1980s and ’90s, the party promoted ‘rationalist’ interpretations of Hindu texts and supported so-called ‘progressive’ temple reforms. Yet, paradoxically, this same party never dared interfere with the rituals of other faiths.

When protests erupted in 2021 over the film ‘The Kerala Story,’ which dealt with alleged religious conversions of Hindu women, CPI(M) leaders dismissed it as “Sangh propaganda.”

Even more revealing was the 2018 Sabarimala controversy, when the CPI(M)-led government deployed thousands of police personnel to enforce a Supreme Court verdict allowing women of menstruating age to enter the famed hill shrine. The move, carried out in the face of widespread opposition from Ayyappa devotees, was seen not as a defence of judicial authority but as a blunt instrument to force ‘modernist’ ideology into ritualistic practice. Despite protests flaring across the state, the CPI(M) remained unmoved, branding all its critics as ‘communal.’

The party’s defenders argue that it is merely upholding constitutional secularism and ensuring that temples are not politicised. But this defence collapses under scrutiny. For one, the state continues to exercise vast control over Hindu temples through Devaswom Boards, whose members are political appointees. These boards often act as ideological enforcers rather than neutral custodians. No such control exists over mosques or churches, which manage their own affairs. For another, the idea that saffron is inherently political is disingenuous. Saffron pre-dates the RSS by millennia. To treat it as a partisan emblem is to distort both history and faith.

Temples are subject to intense monitoring, while Marxist pageantry enters sacred spaces without protest. If temples are truly to be apolitical, then all ideological incursions must be banned, red as much as saffron. Anything less is hypocrisy masquerading as secularism.

Kerala is often hailed as a model for literacy, health, and progressive governance. But its so-called secularism has essentially translated as state-sponsored hostility to Hindu identity. The CPI(M)’s zeal to exorcise one colour from the cultural fabric while allowing another to thrive betrays a deep ideological insecurity. It suggests that the party fears saffron not because it is political, but because it speaks a language of devotion that Marxist materialism cannot comprehend or co-opt.