The RSS has now started finding virtue in these landlords and project them as benevolent patrons of the peasants. In sharp contrast to the historical facts, they have started presenting the peasant struggles as a Muslim attack on Hindu landlords.
The worst observation in this regard has come from senior RSS activist and former BJP general secretary Ram Madhav. On Thursday, he described the Moplah rebellion of 1921 as ‘one of the first manifestations of the Taliban mindset in India’, and criticised the LDF in Kerala for celebrating it as a revolution.
It is obvious that he looks at the struggle as a terrorist movement. No sane person claiming himself to be an outstanding intellectual could stoop so low to malign a movement. Only a person with an acute sense of hatred towards Muslims could utter this nonsensical term. Besides, it also underlines that he has no understanding of India’s political economy and agrarian situation during the colonial rule.
It has often been perceived as one of the first nationalist uprisings in southern India. It has even been described as a peasant revolt. In fact, in 1971, the then Kerala government had included the participants of the rebellion in the category of freedom fighters.
The BJP is against glorifying the massacre as a freedom struggle, and is opposed to giving freedom fighters’ pensions to the participants. The BJP wants the relief to go to the dependents of the victims of the “jihadi massacre” instead.
Malabar fell under British rule in 1792. By then, the Moplahs, once a prosperous trading community, had been reduced to penury as the English and the Portuguese wrested control of maritime commerce. Further, Malabar’s landlords under the British were almost exclusively Hindu.
Throughout the 19th century, the Moplahs would revolt against this order, attacking either the Hindu landlords or European bureaucrats. Between 1836 and 1919, there were 29 such “outrages”, as British chronicles from the time describe these uprisings. Whether the uprisings were a reaction to Malabar’s oppressive land system or driven by religious fanaticism was debated even at the time by British officials. The historian Stephen Dale explains how the two elements mixed to create violence:
“For whereas the lower Hindu castes were part of a hierarchy in which an oppressive Nambudri landlord was also a social and religious superior, the Mappillas as Muslims would identify the same Nambudri as an unbeliever and could invoke Islamic tenets to justify a challenge to his authority.”
Meanwhile the Railways has removed a painting of the 1921 Moplah Rebellion from the station of Tirur town in Kerala’s Malappuram after the Bharatiya Janata Party protested. In October 2017, the BJP’s state chief Kummanam Rajasekharan had said the rebellion should not be celebrated.
The BJP is of the opinion that depicting the “unprovoked massacre of Hindus as part of the Independence struggle is an insult to history as well as the majority community in Kerala”. The Sangh Parivar had often played to hilt this narrative as part of the BJP’s agenda of mobilising Hindu vote banks in Kerala. The Parivar version has also gained ground in tune with the emerging polarisation in the state.
In the run up to the events marking 100 years of the rebellion, the BJP, highlighting the ‘loss’ incurred to the Hindu side in the riot, claimed that temples had been destroyed and thousands of people (Hindus) had been killed.