Karat: Down memory lane

Chennai, Dec. 13: When Prakash Karat presided over a three-hour Christmas carol session at his old school here last evening, it wasn’t difficult to read between the lines.

At a time iconoclasts and Hindu outfits are locked in a snowstorm of controversy in the state, the Marxists won’t be riding the one-horse sleigh of atheism.

Political circles believe the message is that although the CPM frowns on religious belief, it would not join those intent on hurting believers’ sentiments.

This is what the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK), an anti-Brahminical social outfit that backs the ruling DMK, is accused of doing. Last week, it installed a statue of the atheist social reformer, Periyar, in front of the Sri Ranganathaswamy temple gates in Srirangam.

Within days, the statue had been damaged by activists of the Hindu Makkal Katchi, a Sangh parivar outfit that has so far contested only local polls. The DK retaliated by attacking several temples and replaced the damaged statue with a new one.

But DK chief K. Veeramani’s expectation that the Marxists would join his “anti-God and anti-superstition” campaign was to be dashed.

State CPM secretary N. Varadarajan declared that no one should be allowed to defile statues of public leaders in a democracy, but added that the backlash was equally unjustifiable.

Karat’s presence at the Madras Christian College School function, four days ahead of a conference called by the DK at Srirangam, seems to be an oblique message to the DMK government to try and cap the controversy.

The CPM general secretary’s sudden arrival in the state, however, took even party cadre by surprise. The party played it down, saying he was merely attending “an old boys’ reunion”. Karat had studied through school and college at the MCC.

The CPM boss seemed to enjoy the carol singing where he was the “guest of honour”, school sources said. “He sat through the nearly three-hour programme,” a fellow alumnus said.

Karat made a brief speech, too, on various global problems. “The thrust of his speech was on peace,” a source said.

The CPM leader interacted with other distinguished alumni, such as tyre-maker MRF’s managing director, K.M. Mammen, and chatted to his former classmates.

The state government, rattled by the past few days’ violence, has arrested over 30 people from both sides. HMK office-bearer Jayashankar was booked an hour after he briefed the media at Chennai press club.

The Sangh outfit, however, is likely to see Karat’s latest move not as a concession to religious sentiments overall but as a bout of minority “appeasement”.

“Would the DK have considered installing such a statue before a prominent mosque or church?” HMK state president Arjun Sampath has asked.

If the CPM has disappointed the DK, so has the BJP let its parivar partner down. The state BJP has criticised the government for letting the statue be installed before a temple, but its national leadership has refrained from raising the matter in Parliament.