The general strike called by a cluster of organisations to protest the “anti-Muslim” provisions of the Citizen (Amendment) Act seemed poised to disrupt life in some measure in Kerala on December 17.
Initial reports of restiveness, minor street confrontations between demonstrators and police and attacks on public transport buses have trickled in from Kasargod, Kannur, Kozhikode, Malappuram, Wayanad, Alappuzha and Thiruvananthapuram.
Strike supporters vandalised KSRTC buses, impeded vehicular traffic, staged sit-in demonstrations, waved flags, charged the police, toppled traffic barricades and forced the closure of shops across the State.
The protests have impeded inter-State bus operations linking Kerala to Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Students and white-collar professions rely heavily on the long-distance services to travel to destinations in Bengaluru, Coimbatore and Chennai from Kerala and back. However, train and airline services remained mostly unaffected.
Hartal unlawful: police
The State police had on Monday declared the “impromptu” hartal call by the Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI) and allied organisations under the aegis of the Joint Action Council as “unlawful”.
However, the announcement had scarcely deterred demonstrators who took to the street in sizeable numbers on Tuesday morning.
A television capture of the police removing a woman protester from the road in Kannur appeared emblematic of the emotive nature of the agitation.
She shouted that the loss of the right to soil and land was worse than death and protesters had the “protection of Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan”.
(Mr Vijayan had repeatedly termed the controversial law as biased against Muslims and said Kerala would not implement it. However, he had also stressed that any sectarian or violent protests against the Act would work to the advantage of those who seek to enforce the law that ran against the grain of the country’s secular Constitution.)
70 persons detained
The police have initiated sweeping preventive arrests.
The detentions unfolding across the State overwhelmingly targeted the SDPI, the Welfare Party and the Popular Front of India workers.
A senior official said the police had so far detained 70 persons, a majority of them in north Kerala. The region had witnessed widespread violence in April 2018 when a set of organisations called for a “flash hartal” on the social media to protest the rape and murder of a minor Muslim girl in Kathua in Jammu and Kashmir.
In the wake of the Kathua protests, the State police had arrested over 950 persons, a large number of them SDPI workers, on the charge of promoting religious enmity, attacking police officers, vandalising property and disrupting Government function.
The police were monitoring social media, particularly Whats App networks that were widely used by fundamentalist organisations on either side of the religious spectrum for orchestrating the Kathua riots and later the “Save Sabarimala” campaign in Kerala last year.
Mainstream parties keep off
Mainstream political parties and major Muslim social organisations had dissociated from the SDPI hartal.
The Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Congress and the Indian Union Muslim League, which had joined hands to protest the law, had termed the SDPI hartal as sectarian and communally divisive.
Kanthapuram A. P. Aboobacker Musliyar the general secretary of the All India Sunni Jamiyyathul Ulama had said Muslims did not support the SDPI that exhibited “extreme character”. E. K. Sunni faction and the Jamaat-e-Islami had also distanced themselves from the strike.
The action council has exempted Ranni in Pathanamthitta taluk from the hartal so as not to hinder the Sabarimala pilgrimage.
It said hartal supporters would not stop the vehicles of pilgrims bound for Sabarimala.
However, the action council had on Monday urged citizens to shun travel, avoid work and boycott educational institutions to express their solidarity with the “black law” that “sought to relegate Muslims as second class citizens and deny citizenship to naturalised migrants and refugees in the name of the Islamic faith”.
