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On Saturday, the All India Congress Committee (AICC) had decided that the party should wait for the Centre to firm up details of the proposed Bill on UCC and should not walk into the BJP “trap”.
On Monday, KPCC chief K Sudhakaran said the state unit will meet Wednesday to chalk out a protest strategy against UCC, which he said is part of the BJP’s agenda to “divide the country communally”. Asserting that both AICC and KPCC have the “same stand on the issue”, he said, “The announcement about UCC came in an election year, so it is an election code. This is a matter affecting all sections of society, so we want to marshal all stakeholders in the agitation against the Code.”
Taking on the CPI(M), he said the ruling party is projecting the issue as one that affects a particular community. “Such a move will only help divide people. We want an agitation encompassing all sections of society,’’ Sudhakaran said.
Wednesday’s meeting, he said, will be attended by all KPCC office-bearers, party MPs, MLAs, district presidents and leaders of Congress’s feeder groups. Besides, the Congress-led UDF, which includes the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), also plans an agitation against the UCC.
The UDF will meet on July 10 to chart out the agitation, it was informed.
While the Congress at the national level is on a wait-and-watch mode, the party’s Kerala unit cannot adopt such a policy due to the emerging political situation in the state in an election year. The CPI(M), which leads the governing LDF in the state, has blamed the Congress’s “wait and watch approach” as a reflection of the lack of a firm stand of the party on UCC. The CPI(M) is projecting this approach as the Congress’s “soft Hindutva stand”.
State minister Mohammed Riyas, an emerging CPI(M) leader in Kerala, on Monday said, “The Congress is running away from the UCC issue without taking a stand. It has always compromised with communal forces. On the issue of CAA, too, the Congress did not take a firm stand. That party had always tried to weaken the LDF’s secular stand.”
Another factor that is believed to have prompted the Congress to go on agitation mode in Kerala is the CPI(M)’s decision to mobilise all “like-minded” organisations — including Muslim organisations — for an agitation against UCC. The Marxist party has identified the protest against UCC as an occasion to get closer to various Muslim groups, including SAMASTHA, an organisation of clerics which backs the IUML.
The CPI(M) on Sunday even invited the IUML for a series of seminars against the UCC.
In 2020, during the protest against CAA, CPI(M) had managed to win the support of SAMASTHA, much to the embarrassment of IUML, as well as the UDF. The SAMASTHA has only got closer to CPI(M) on multiple issues since 2020.
On Monday, the Congress took on the CPI(M) over the latter’s stand on UCC and said the LDF government is not sincere in its approach.
Senior party MLA and Leader of Opposition in the Assembly, V D Satheesan, said CPI(M) should have announced the protest against UCC after withdrawing the criminal cases registered against those who had taken part in the protest against CAA. “Both BJP and CPI(M) want to divide society on the UCC and make political capital out of it. Both parties want to make it a Hindu-Muslim issue,’’ he argued.
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