Banned: How PFI morphed into a stridently militant outfit over 3 decades | Political Pulse News,The Indian Express
Born in a landscape stained by political killings and revenge attacks, over the years, the Popular Front of India took on many forms, until its eventual ban last week. Shaju Philip traces the three-decade journey of the PFI -- from its start in a Kozhikode town until it morphed into a stridently militant outfit that has been at the centre of some of the most violent attacks
However, at Puthanathani, where the PFI has grown into a force over the years, and the now deserted Malabar House, a convention centre-cum-residential training facility that’s backed by the outfit, there is a quiet defiance.
“It is only the name that can be banned, but for us, PFI is an attitude against the Sangh Parivar and its fascism. A ban will not serve to silence us. There have been so many organisations that have come up over the years (to take on the RSS). Whenever they have been banned or restricted in some way, they have regrouped and come up with another outfit,’’ says a 50-year-old long-time PFI activist at Puthanathani.
Before the PFI and eight of its affiliates were banned, the outfit has treaded a long path, making steady inroads into Kerala society and politics. But during their three-decade journey, often stained by violence and terror, the outfit has constantly shifted shapes and forms, alternating between a benevolent social organisation and the face of radical, right-wing identity politics.
With a bunch of its national and state-level leaders behind bars following the NIA raids, and 2,000-odd workers and sympathisers in Kerala in judicial custody in connection with the violence during last week’s hartal that followed the ban, the right-wing Muslim outfit and the social base they catered to are at a critical juncture.
The 1980s were volatile times in Nadapuram, a town in eastern Kozhikode that has a long history of violence between cadres of the CPI(M) and the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), a constituent of the Congress-led United Democratic Front. Over time, the political clashes took on a communal turn as the socially backward Hindu Thiyya community was seen to be on the CPM’s side, while the IUML had the backing of the Muslim community, flush with remittances from the Gulf.
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