Sufiya Madani of the PDP has been granted conditional bail by the Ernakulam Sessions Court Judge after a tense wait following her arrest on 17 December. She was remanded to judicial custody by the first class magistrate court at Aluva which had refused her bail. Meanwhile, the mainstream media went on a speculation-spree, even publishing ‘evidence’ that she had abetted terrorism and violence — the burning of a bus owned by the Tamil Nadu Road Transport Corporation at Kalamassery in 2005 during protests against the PDP leader Abdul Nasser Madani’s (Sufiya’s husband) continued detention in the Coimbatore jail .

Alarmed at the media-trial which came on the heels of the media’s frenzy over ‘Love Jihad’, concerned Malayalee intellectuals came together to criticize the media’s reportage, citing many other recent instances as well, as blatantly anti-Muslim and anti-dalit, and to prevent the violation of her rights. The petition was widely circulated and counts major intellectual figures in Kerala among its signatories. The petition reminds us rightly of the grave injustices suffered by Abdul Nasser Madani, through his long incarceration, which are still uncompensated or even acknowledged.

It is important, I think, at this moment, to anticipate that Muslim-baiting strategies in Kerala are bound to be more complex, given that the Muslim minority in Kerala has had a history of deep and unquestionable engagement with democratic politics, and after the Gulf migration, are not resource-deficient in total. There is much internal difference in these matters within the community,which, I think, influences anti-Muslim strategies — all of Kerala’s Muslims cannot be attacked so easily with the usual blunt weapons of Hindutva terrorism or state security.

Going by the news reports of the arrest and the legal proceedings, there seems to have been little violation of rights in the arrest– at least when compared to the unspeakable violence unleashed on the tribal leader C K Janu after the police firings at Muthanga some years back, or the horrors borne by dalit women in Varkala, or the terrible eviction of sex workers from the Bangladesh colony at Kozhikode sometime back. This could perhaps be expected, given the fact that the Madanis have been openly supported by the more powerful sections of the CPM in power. This support is also not surprising — and is bound to be quite solid — precisely because the CPM is at present the coming-together of various forces of depoliticising in the state. The Madanis are of use precisely here, given the strong anti-political tinge of the Madanis’ version of Islam, which has not been subject to serious rethinking in the PDP, as far as I know.CPM State leaders have been openly supportive and critical of the NIA’s intervention, and on the ground, the DYFI and the PDP cadre came together in their ‘social agenda’ of moral policing. The target was a particularly offensive Congress leader, but as usual, the mode of dealing with his unspeakably vulgar comment against leaders of the CPM and the PDP was not to expose its politics, but to catch him in an act of alleged ‘social contamination’.The media has also been careful in their reporting to reveal how proper process has been observed in the arrest and after.

It may be necessary to weigh the investments of the CPM in the PDP and the calculations of benefit by the Congress leadership as well,and it appears to me that these  give Sufiya an advantage that her less-powerful Muslim sisters or dalit women do not enjoy, not to speak of sexual minorities and sex workers who are abjected in the Malayalee public.However, this advantage is effectively cancelled out by the fact that a bus-burning incident has been treated as an ‘act of terror’ and inflated beyond all proportions by both the police and the media.A CPM leader did point this out and remark that if that were the case, then a great number of respectable politicians of all hues ought to be charged for anti-national activity by now.  In fact, if Sufiya Madani was involved in some way in the arson incident during the protest, she must be punished according to the law, but I do not see how that becomes an anti-national terrorist act. The question of her alleged association with terrorists needs to be probed apart. For me the clubbing together of Sufiya Madani’s alleged proximity to terrorists and her alleged involvement in the arson case represents a serious shrinkage of political space for Muslims, which in fact parallels the shrinkage of their social space, which happened in and through the Love Jihad frenzy.

And it is also evident that the advantage that she clearly enjoys within Kerala’s political field cannot really protect her as long as the shrinkage of political space available to Muslims continues.Many pro-Muslim friends who find the kind of Islam that the Madanis represent unacceptably rigid have been reluctant to take a position, though they would support a human rights appeal on her behalf. I would say that even if her formal rights are not violated in the judicial process, she may still be wronged. The resort to ‘security’ and emergency’ violations of democracy can only produce greater harm than good; it only covers up our reluctance to oppose the rigidness of the Madanis’ version of Islam politically.

Also, evidently, the Madanis’ strategy of seeking refuge with the CPM does not seem to be working as expected. The bigwigs in the CPM may protect individuals, but they are certainly not working to ensure adequate political space to articulate the concerns of the Muslim community in the State.As far as the protection of the human rights of an individual are concerned, Sufiya Madani stands a better chance, than say, the poor Muslim woman-job-seeker trying to migrate for work. But despite the huge, huge advantage of the former over the latter, the ongoing contraction of political space makes her chance, too, rather slim.