PK Yasser Arafath interview: In Kerala, Hindutva-building was painstakingly patient

The BJP’s growing presence in Kerala over the past decade reflects not a sudden surge, but the cumulative outcome of quiet, long-term efforts that have been unfolding in the state for several decades. For almost a century, Kerala’s public intellectuals and critical thinkers largely viewed Hindutva politics as an anomaly—an outsider to the region’s political and cultural sensibilities—until that perception began to shift in recent years. The leadership transition from K Surendran, who has been significantly instrumental in expanding the party’s grassroots base, to businessman Rajeev Chandrasekhar raises questions about the extent to which the party can now reshape public perception. Yet, it is important to note that the BJP has never been able to rely on a charismatic state-level leader to mobilise popular support in Kerala. The current appeal is largely tethered to national leaders like Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, while state leaders often function more as intermediaries with the national leadership than as autonomous charismatic figures. This is why, unlike in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, BJP leaders from Kerala have rarely been known outside the state.

The Christian church, as we know, is not a homogeneous entity in the state, and its denominational differences are clearly reflected in their varied responses to Hindutva politics—something the Parivar organisations are acutely aware of. The Parivar has been engaging in sustained dialogue with church establishments across denominations, and the effects of these engagements are now beginning to surface in the state. Unlike the northern states, the Parivar has adopted a more patient and incremental expansionist strategy in Kerala—a region that, in my view, offers particularly fertile ground for the growth of Hindutva ideology in the future, due to both historical reasons and sociological developments. Surprisingly, many intellectuals and social commentators have overlooked this slow and calculated expansion, mistakenly perceiving it as an emergence from a political vacuum. 

It is true that such categorisations have historically been a concern for all the communities and ideologies subjected to them, both within Kerala and beyond. However, BJP and other Parivar organisations in Kerala no longer foreground these statements in their political discourse. The Syrian Christian Church and its allied associates in Kerala, being a highly influential denomination with wealth and land, is well aware of the 20th-century formulations of these categories.. What is often overlooked—or deliberately unacknowledged by intellectuals, whether from the Left or the Centre—is the inherently discursive nature of Hindutva, particularly in its southern manifestations. While its normative contours are widely debated, the Parivar strategically redefines Hindutva across spatial and temporal contexts.

One significant faction of the Christian Church, shaped by this discursivity and motivated by the material and symbolic privileges at stake, is now amenable to alignment with the dominant political order. Though this development may appear shocking or anomalous to some, it is historically consistent with patterns of religious and ideological co-option, despite the categorisations by Golwalkar in his book, Bunch of Thoughts. Like other successful ultra-nationalist ideological formations, Hindutva has mastered the selective articulation of its tenets—foregrounding certain elements while obfuscating others—to effectively engage potential allies. Examining the discursivity, particularly in south India, of Hindutva is thus critical for understanding how it has managed to appeal to a heterogeneous set of communities, many of whom might otherwise resist association with a seemingly rigid ideological project. To ignore this would be to adopt an ahistorical and reductive reading of Hindutva’s evolving strategies in Kerala.

One of the distinctive advantages of the Kerala Hindutva lies in its cultivation of a discreet but ideologically potent intellectual section in the state. It produced formidable ideologues such as P Parameswaran, the long-serving director of the Bharatheeya Vichara Kendram, R Venugopal, former chief editor of Kesari, and J Nandakumar, among others. These figures exemplify what I characterise a consciously slow, painstakingly patient project of Hindutva-building. This is marked by a strategic self-effacement that has been keeping them largely invisible to the wider public gaze. Unlike in North India, where overt religious assertions are commonplace, the RSS in Kerala has largely refrained from aggressively targeting Christianity, at least in recent years. While its influence persists within the inner circuits of the Sangh Parivar, the public face of Hindutva has been deliberately recast in the figure of the ‘harmless leader next door’—a consciously curated persona. Such curated leaders such as PK Sreedharan Pillai and CK Padmanabhan have achieved a degree of mainstream acceptability, even among sections of the Muslim community, constructing an image of ideological sophistication and social respectability.

The Kerala BJP has demonstrated a pragmatic and innovative strategy: insulating everyday party activities from the overt presence of core RSS functionaries. This tactical invisibilisation has proven to be an effective mode of ideological experimentation. As a result, Hindutva ideology has extended its cultural and political influence into segments previously considered unlikely allies, including a section of Catholic youth and Christian right wing organisations such as the Christian Association and Alliance for Social Action (CASA).

In Kerala, the strategies of Hindutva project have diverged significantly from their northern counterparts, at least until recently. They have been more subtle, abstemious, and methodically embedded—almost scientific in their modes of percolation. While the RSS has long maintained a strong organisational presence in the state, it remained ingeniously obscured from the public gaze, as I pointed out earlier. This is one of the reasons why several prominent figures—whom Malayalees never imagined aligning with the Sangh Parivar—have recently affiliated themselves with the BJP. More sophisticated than in many other parts of India, Hindutva in Kerala has functioned polyphonically, generating multiple voices around a single issue or constellation of concerns, often in apparent tension or contradiction. Politically attuned Malayalees might grasp the longue durée strategy behind this Hindutva polyphony, but for the broader public, it serves as both a reassurance of ‘normalcy’ and a mechanism of cultural connect. When people are led to perceive this proliferation of positions not as contradictions but as expressions of legitimate diversity, they are more likely to find a place for themselves within it—without fully disavowing or detaching from their socially valued identities, whether as artists, athletes, or movie stars. Polyphony, in this context, has been structurally integrated into Kerala Hindutva as a critical political and affective stratagem.

Unlike in North India, Kerala has an integrated demographic character, shaped by a long history of mutual interdependence and social sharing. Prior to the digital revolution, the BJP remained largely an urban party, with minimal presence in rural Kerala—barring a few pockets in places in districts like Kannur and Palakkad. In the last two decades, the proliferation of digital technology and the dissemination of visual media have expedited its rural expansion, particularly in areas where Leftist parties have neglected grassroot level politicking. While one would agree that divisive narratives and actions have undeniably emerged within the state, their traction remains limited, and continuously challenged through fact checks and counter factuality in a politically conscious and socially literate state that Kerala is.

There is a growing sense that both the Left and centrist political formations have reached a saturation point in their capacity to deliver on historic and social promises. In contrast, the BJP is increasingly perceived as a vehicle for social mobility and professional growth. Malayalam digital platforms actively circulate and amplify these new imaginaries of upward social as well as status mobility.

In Kerala, Muslims have historically never constituted an electoral or emotional constituency for the BJP, and until recently, the same was true for Christians. What most electoral analysts often fail to emphasise about the last parliamentary elections (2021) in the state is that approximately 26 percent of Hindu voters cast their ballots for the BJP, despite the party fielding weak candidates in many constituencies. This trend underscores that it is not local figures but Narendra Modi’s personal charisma and the larger Hindutva discourse at the national, and global level that has been influencing voter behaviour. A widely acknowledged aspect of this shift is the BJP’s substantial acceptance among lower-caste Hindu voters, which has disrupted their traditional allegiance to the LDF alliance. If the BJP manages to influence even 8 to 12 percent of the Christian electorate in the future, it could radically change Kerala’s electoral landscape, especially if the party continues to consolidate its support among lower-caste Hindus. The NDA’s rise from a 10.3 percent vote share in the 2014 parliamentary elections to 19.2 percent in 2024 represents a dramatic shift, and the BJP’s targeted engagement with Christian communities—particularly the Syro-Malabar Church—is evidently yielding results. However, several evangelical denominations and organisations like the Kerala Region Latin Catholic Council (KRLCC) and the Jacobite Church have explicitly distanced themselves from the BJP.. Surprisingly, both the LDF and the UDF appear to be unaware of the sheer scale and global reach of the political, and ideological machinery they are up against, often outsourcing the task of countering it to cyber activists.

This analytical blindness in Kerala stems from a long-standing tradition of maintaining an academic “cordon sanitaire,” as many scholars of populist movements have noted. By consistently ridiculing, dismissing, and intellectually undermining Hindutva for over a century, dominant political parties in the state have inadvertently facilitated its gradual entrenchment—echoing Arkotong Longkumer’s argument in his widely debated book The Greater Experiment: Hindutva and the North East in which he traces how such neglect has enabled the deeper institutionalisation of Hindutva in regions once considered impermeable.

In its many forms, Hindutva has, until about a decade ago, pursued a subtle, adaptive, and remarkably patient penetration into Kerala’s sociopolitical fabric. For over a century, it has remained an elephant in the state’s political room, quietly emulating its earlier Northeast experiments of the 1960s, which have since been replicated across Kerala’s frontier communities. The extent of its success in Kerala’s Christian belts, however, remains uncertain, as there is a notable surge of dissenting voices within the state’s dynamic social and cyber spaces. Yet, should the project succeed, it will likely embolden similar efforts along coastal Karnataka—particularly in strongholds like Mangalore and Udupi—and potentially send a symbolic message to the Northeast as well. As I suggest, this polyphonic Hindutva, drawing on Christophe Jaffrelot’s notion of a ‘division of labour’ within the Sangh Parivar, operates through multiple registers. One can already observe a growing discourse among certain Syrian Christian denominations and their political representatives, framing themselves as genealogically Hindu and Christian—a lineage narrative that the Parivar has strategically mobilised to cultivate alliances. Notably, some popular Christian leaders frequently invoke these shared pasts as a basis for political affinity. What stands out is that while both Christians and Muslims in Kerala share broadly similar conversion trajectories in the state, the Parivar has refrained from applying this genealogical strategy to Muslims.

As I pointed out earlier, there is a recurring expression of anxiety among other parties regarding the shifting vote patterns among the Ezhava and Tiyya communities in Kerala, a process that has been unfolding over a considerable period, yet, has not been addressed by these parties. Beyond the constituencies you identified, there has been notable electoral growth for the BJP  in other constituencies as well, often contingent on the projection of candidates perceived to possess direct access to Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. This is a result of a century long patient work, and for over half a century, the Sangh Parivar has effectively articulated a narrative that positions Sree Narayana Guru, one of the prominent anti-caste reformists of Kerala, and SNDP, the organisation he founded, within a broader Hindu framework, periodically provoking internal friction within SNDP factions. The tensions peaked in the late 1990s with clashes between a Parivar-aligned faction and a minority faction led by Swami Swami Saswathikananda who met with a controversial accidental death in 2002.

The SNDP’s influential current President, Vellappally Natesan, has become a paradoxical political figure—publicly supporting both Narendra Modi and Pinarayi Vijayan, simultaneously. While Natesan actively campaigned for a few BJP candidates in the 2024 elections, his son Thushar Vellappally contested as an NDA candidate through the SNDP-aligned Bharat Dharma Jana Sena (BDJS), signalling a strategic repositioning within the Ezhava political imaginary. Given that the Ezhavas constitute nearly 23 percent of Kerala’s population, the BJP’s recent inroads—especially among southern Kerala’s Ezhava constituencies—reveal a reshaping of affective and electoral allegiances that not only unsettles the LDF’s traditional support base but also fractures the UDF’s historically shared claim to subaltern caste representation.

In the post-poll survey conducted by CSDS-Lokniti after the 2024 parliamentary elections, approximately 32 percent of Ezhavas voted for the BJP, alongside 5 percent from the Christian community. This marked a significant and unsettling shift for rival parties, particularly given the 10-point increase from the previous assembly elections (2019), where 53 percent of Ezhavas had supported the Left and only 23 percent had voted for the BJP. Yet, this trend has not started with Modi. In their seminal work Social Mobility in Kerala: Modernity and Identity in Conflict (2000), globally renowned scholars Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella traced this shift to the ‘increasing popularity of the RSS among young Ezhavas,’ for whom “caste considerations” have become secondary, and they want to be part of a broader imagined community of Hindus—united by shared traditions, cultural repertoires, and a common sense of belonging to the motherland.

Doesn’t it? In my understanding, it certainly does. For instance, in the 2019 parliamentary elections, the BJP already emerged first in Nemom (Trivandrum) and made significant inroads in several other constituencies.

By 2024, it led in three assembly segments in Thiruvananthapuram parliamentary constituency, building directly on its earlier gains. If it secured second place in seven constituencies in 2019, it went on to become the leading party in eleven and retained second position in nine others—consolidating and expanding many of the segments where it had first broken through. This trajectory suggests not merely electoral consistency but a structural expansion of its base. I am not sure this is just a transient phase. Modi remains a decisive ideological and affective force for the BJP in the state—whether one embraces or resists him—and he actively accelerates the party’s growth by visiting the state frequently.