Bishop Jacob Manathodath of Kerala’s Palakkad district wrote a letter to Communist Party of India (CPI) State Secretary Kanam Rajendran recommending a local industrialist Issac Varghese as a Left Democratic Front (LDF) candidate at Mannarkkad constituency in Palakkad district for the upcoming Assembly elections.
Issac Varghese is a businessman from Kanjikode. He was an active Congress worker until 1992 and is now a district committee member of the CPI-M’s Pravasi organisation.
The bishop’s letter to the CPI State Secretary clearly stated that Varghese is a ‘prominent and respected member of the Christian community, therefore he will get the full support of the community’. The local church as well as the Catholic community will try it’s level best to help him win the seat, the letter says.
CPI candidates won several times at Mannarkkad as Left Democratic Front candidate. But in the last two elections the scenario was completely different.
The Mannarkkad seat was last won by a Christian candidate Jose Baby in 2006, but in 2011 and 2016 elections respectively, N Shamusudden of Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) won.
The CPI leadership and bishop’s house are yet to comment on this matter. According to media reports, Varghese told that the bishop recommended him as he has the chances of winning and he is a deserving candidate.
Paul Thelakkat, a former spokesman for the Syro-Malabar Church, tried to defend the bishop’s actions by claiming rather disingenuously, “In reality the bishop is not publicly asking people to vote for a political party. He is only asking a party to support the candidacy of one of its own members.”
This incident again highlights that religious bodies representing the so-called minority religions of Bharat actively involve themselves in politics and lobby for their respective communities. But if a Hindu religious body so much as makes a comment on prevailing political scenarios or even comments on something affecting Hindus, they are immediately accused of ‘communalism’ by the left-liberal media and intelligentsia.
What is also pertinent is that Communism, an atheist ideology which is usually anti-religion in its practise across the world, has in Bharat allied with fundamentalist Abrahamic religions to attack Hindu Dharma. Indeed, secularism in Bharat is nothing but a thinly veiled anti-majority ideology, used to keep Hindus in check and subservient to the ruling elites.
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