Months after his remarks on “minority appeasement” in Kerala drew outrage, Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana (SNDP) Yogam general secretary Vellappally Natesan has now claimed that backward communities “cannot breathe freely” in the Muslim-majority district of Malappuram, which he described as “a special country and a state with a special section of people.”
Speaking at a meeting of the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam at Chungathara in Malappuram, Natesan said, “I know your issues and troubles. You live in fear among others. facing their jostling, gawking… I don’t think that you can live in Malappuram breathing freely. You cannot even live here after airing your opinions. Malappuram is a special country and it is a state of a special section of people.”
Natesan asked, “So what happened, even though several years after the Independence? Did the backward communities in Malappuram get an iota of the benefits of independence?”
“The Ezhava community does not receive political, economic, or educational justice,” he said.
Referring to a college established by the upper-caste Hindu group Nair Service Society at Manjeri in Malappuram, he said: “Some of you got an education because of that institution. You wonder whether we have got at least a school where you can study and teach.”
“In Malappuram, the Ezhava community faces severe neglect. The only thing they have is the employment guarantee scheme (MGNREGS), and they are treated merely as vote-casting machines,” claimed Vellappally Natesan.
“When others mobilized as vote banks, we could not come together as a vote bank,” he said.
This story was originally published in maktoobmedia.com. Read the full story here.