After stroming to power at the centre and winning state after state, Kerala and Bengal remain the last frontiers of Modi's BJP and its idooical mentor the RSS. The entr in both states is hardly going to be easy or bloodless, as we are already witnessing.
Bengal and Kerala take pride in thier intellectual achievements, love football, and have a long and succesful history of Leftist politics. Kerala is still ruled by the Left Front. While Mamatha Bnaerjee's TMC has decimated the Left in Bengal, her politics in many ways mirrors the enemy she fought for decades to overthrow.
Both regimes use cadres to establish a complete stranglehold on society. Both states have seen the most brutal, gratuitous violence as a widely used political tool.
In these seemingly impregnable forts enters the BJP.
But Modi and Amit Shah’s BJP is a different animal. It doesn’t give up.
There have been 14 murders of RSS workers in the last 13 months.
The Left’s nervousness and desperation is not unfounded. Saffron forces have been gaining mainly at the cost of the Left, especially in the south Kerala belt stretching from Kochi to Ernakulam to Trivandrum.
This also triggered one of the most violent phases, with the Left deciding to stop these desertions at any cost.
Kerala, interestingly, has the highest number of RSS shakhas in India: 5,500. But this didn’t translate into votes so far.
Out of 74 youths arrested nationwide by NIA for ISIS links, the highest, 24, is from Kerala.
They have been arrested from the Left’s party villages, Stalinist townships where every resident is a cadre, and even the police fear to venture inside to arrest criminals.
Ironically, this has created tremendous unrest among the Left’s traditional votebank and the saffron camp is gaining. While the BJP-RSS is showing a fair bit of deftness in making inroads, the battles for Bengal and Kerala are going to be long, violent ones.
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