Kannur (Kerala): In the second week of December 2023, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), a small political party in Kerala, held its 10th state conference in Kottakkal town in the northern Kerala Muslim-majority  district of Malappuram. 

The three-day event also marked the thirtieth anniversary of the group, but what is more significant for party workers and many observers of the state’s politics is that it was the first major event of the party since the return to Kerala of its founder and chairman Abdul Nazir Maudany, an Islamic scholar and charismatic orator. 

In July this year, Maudany, 57, was allowed to return home after 13 years in Bengaluru as an under-trial detainee in a 2008 bombing.

On 25 July 2008, a series of low-intensity blasts hit seven locations in Bangalore, killing one woman. No group claimed responsibility for the attack. 

Seven months later, in February 2009, Karnataka Police arrested nine Muslim men from Kerala. Then police commissioner of Bangalore, Shankar Bidari, announced that with those arrests, the case had been solved. Police at the time did not mention any connection of these men with any organisation.

However, about 10 months later, a man named T Nazeer from Kerala, then absconding as he was a suspect wanted by Kerala Police for other crimes, was named as the prime accused in the case. In December 2009, Nazeer, who police said had received funding and guidance from the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Toiba, was arrested from the Indo-Bangladesh border area in Meghalaya. 

Nazeer alias Ummer Haji had started growing ginger in Kodagu, a Karnataka hill district known for its coffee plantations, in 2005, before the bombings. 

Police claimed that the attacks were planned at his Kodagu farm, and that he mentioned Maudany during his interrogation. 

A Raft Of Criminal Cases

Maudany was arrested in August 2010 from his home in Kollam district in southern Kerala, by the Karnataka police, and charged under sections 120B (punishment for criminal conspiracy), 121A (conspiracy to wage, or attempt to wage or abet to wage, war against the Government of India), 153A (promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, etc.), 302 (murder), and 307  (attempt to murder) of the Indian Penal Code 1860 and sections 3, 4, 5 and 6 of the Explosive Substances Act 1908 for his alleged role in two of the bombs on the vicinity of a stadium.

Nearly 13 years after that day, Maudany was finally allowed in July 2023 by the Supreme Court of India to return home. He had secured bail in the case in 2014 but tough bail conditions that stipulated he could not leave Bengaluru kept him from travelling to Kerala. The Supreme Court, while permitting his return, ordered him to report to the nearest police station once every 15 days.

Between 2007 and 2010, PDP attained “excellent progress under the direct leadership of Maudany”, according to Sabu Kottarakkara, state general secretary of the PDP, citing a “successful” social justice conference in Kochi and a ‘Kerala Yatra’ for national security. “Maudany shared a stage with Pinarayi Vijayan [then the state secretary of the ruling CPI (M)] in Ponnani.” 

Maudany's arrest in 2010 was his second in a terrorism case. He had returned to Kerala politics in 2007 after spending nine years in jail as an accused undertrial for his alleged involvement in a series of bomb blasts in Coimbatore on 14 February 1998 that killed 58 people. 

He was eventually acquitted, and went home to a hero’s welcome, with both the Left and Congress—the state’s two major political forces—welcoming the acquittal. 

Bleak Political Future

At the time of Maudany’s arrest in 1998, the PDP, which he had founded in 1993 when he was 27, had begun winning local elections in Kerala, including in the state capital of Thiruvananthapuram, where in 1995, the PDP’s Poonthura Siraj was elected to Thiruvananthapuram corporation.  

In the Kerala local body elections held in 1995, just two years after formation of the PDP, the party won 106 seats in panchayats, municipalities and municipal corporations across the state, said Kottarakkara. 

Yet, it could not sustain that momentum and has since never been more than a bit player politically.

In 1996, the PDP contested 50 of 140 assembly seats, polling an average of 2.04 percent of votes with a maximum vote share of 8.8%. 

Currently, the party has just six members elected to local governance institutions in the state, including two members each in Thiruvananthapuram and Alappuzha districts and one each in Kollam and Malappuram districts.

Ashraf Kadakkal, head of the department of Islamic and West Asian studies at university of Kerala, described the PDP’s political future as “gloomy”. 

The party had “attractive slogans”, emerged as a “phenomenon”, but has never been a “political movement”, said Kadakkal, who added that it would be “nearly impossible” for Maudany to revive his party.

Kadakkal argued that the emergence of other political parties since the PDP’s founding, centred on minority issues, made it even harder for the party to improve its electoral performance. 

The Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) is the oldest and most prominent Muslim political party in the state, with three MPs—including two in the Lok Sabha—and 15 MLAs now. However, since 1993, when the PDP was formed, the state also witnessed the emergence of at least three more Muslim-centric political parties—the Indian National League, the Social Democratic Party of India and the Welfare Party of India.  Out of these three, only the INL, which now has one MLA and is part of the ruling Left alliance, could make it to the state assembly.   

In the 2019 general elections, PDP candidates made no impact.

Clueless Witnesses & Other Clues 

Maudany’s 2010 arrest was controversial from the beginning. 

When then Karnataka home minister V S Acharya publicly alleged Maudani’s alleged involvement for the first time in August that year, police chief Bidari said, “I would not like to comment on the home minister’s statement. However, Madani’s role in the stadium explosions has not been proven so far”.

The organisations whose names had been doing the rounds until then for possible involvement in the blasts were the LeT, with which Nazeer was linked, Indian Mujahideen, and the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). 

On 5 February 2010, India’s home ministry extended its 2001 ban on SIMI under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), 1967. The gazette notification said in the Bangalore bombings, “The Karnataka police have registered 9 cases and arrested 10 accused of which 3 were active members of SIMI”.

Later that year, Karnataka police accused Maudany of being the mastermind behind two of the explosions. He was charged with conspiracy. Maudany was listed as the 31st accused in an additional charge sheet, following ‘confessions’ by Nazeer, the suspected Lashkar-e-Toiba operative and prime accused in the case. 

On 4 December 2010, investigative journalist K K Shahina reported in Tehelka that one of the people named by the police as a prosecution witness whose testimony linked Maudany to Nazeer was “on a hospital death bed in Ernakulam on the day the police recorded his testimony”. He died four days later. 

“Police records said that the testimony was recorded in Kannur, around 500 km from Ernakulam where he was admitted,” said Shahina in her acceptance speech for the Chameli Devi Jain award in March 2011. “The hospital records prove that on that day he was not in Kannur, but was very much in the hospital in Ernakulam”.

Shahina went on to track down and interview other prosecution witnesses who, according to police, had testified that they had seen Maudany at a ginger estate in Kodagu in Karnataka where he allegedly met Nazir and plotted the blasts. 

“Two of them told me that they had seen Madani (an alternative spelling of Maudany’s name) only on television,” wrote Shahina. “One among them, K K Yogananda, an RSS activist, was not even aware that he had been listed by the police as a witness.” 

After her report was published in Tehelka, Karnataka Police registered a case against Shahina for allegedly intimidating the witnesses she had interviewed.

A Lifetime of Trials

Since his arrest in 2010, Maudany has been allowed to travel to Kerala on just three occasions—twice to visit his ailing mother in 2015 and 2016, and once for his son’s wedding in 2017. 

His latest plea before the Supreme Court mentioned that he had spent only 25 days in the last 13 years in his hometown. The relaxation of his bail conditions is a significant relief for him, after having spent 22 of the last 25 years in jail or virtual house arrest fighting terrorism cases. 

For many in Kerala, his prolonged incarceration despite not being convicted of any crime exemplifies the injustice visited on the accused denied a fair and speedy trial.

“Maudany had to spend nine years as an under-trial prisoner [in connection with the Coimbatore case],” said Kadakkal. “This happened during the years of his youth.” 

“After this, he was found innocent,” said Kadakkal. “But our system did not compensate him. Instead, he was pulled into the same kind of situation again.” 

R Rajagopal, editor-at-large and former editor of Kolkata’s The Telegraph newspaper, said Maudany’s case raised a “big question”. “Maudany faced huge human rights violations,” Rajagopal said, referring to Maudany's prolonged detentions as an under-trial. “He had to spend almost all of his adult life, productive years, in detention”. 

While Maudany’s mother passed away in 2018, he could not visit his ailing father for several years.  

“Should such a grave injustice ever be done to a human being?” asked K T Jaleel, an MLA from the ruling CPI (M) and former minister, in a statement after visiting Maudany in January 2023.

A Body Worn Down

The prolonged detention has left Maudany struggling with various diseases. After his return to Kerala, Article14 contacted Maudany’s family twice, seeking an interview. Both times, the family informed us that Maudany was in hospital. 

According to Maudany’s doctor, Issac Mathai of Bengaluru’s SOUKYA International Holistic Health Centre, whose testimonies were attached with his SC petition, Maudany has many health problems, several serious.

His kidneys, according to his doctors, are in “critical condition” and one kidney is already “severely damaged”. Some months ago, Maudany suffered a stroke which weakened the right side of his body and led to partial memory loss. 

He has lost vision in his right eye and has diminished vision to an extent of 30% in his left eye. All his conditions have been worsened because he was “denied proper and timely treatment” during the trial period, according to his Supreme Court bail petition. 

Maudany had already lost a leg in a bomb blast in 1992, for which eight men with Hindu right-wing connections were held as accused but acquitted.

A Son Tries To Step In

For more than two decades, Maudany and his family struggled to live a normal life while contesting the cases against him in the courts. One of Maudany’s children, Salahuddin Ayyubi, eventually became a lawyer, enrolling as an advocate in Kerala in March 2023.

“My son today has worn the black gown to differentiate what is just and what is not, amid numerous episodes of constant denial of justice,” Maudany wrote in Malayalam on Facebook after Ayyubbi’s enrolment. He added that the law degree could help his son to fight for “helpless people” who were “denied their rights”.

For Ayyubbi, the “injustice” his father and family faced throughout his life was a “major driving force” behind his decision to study law. He said Maudany himself inspired him to pursue law. “I missed my parents’ presence in almost all the important stages of my life,” he said in an interview after his enrolment.

His father’s prolonged incarceration also affected the progress of his political ideas, said Ayubbi. “What our family lost in the last 25 years is not just our loss,” he said. “There is a politics my father advocated. It is a politics that sought power for Dalit, Adivasi and other marginalised communities. That idea suffered a setback.”

Maudany was 23 when he established, in 1989, the Islamic Seva Sangh (ISS), which he founded as a response to the Hindu-nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The ISS functioned for only three years, until December 1992, when the union government banned it—along with four other Hindu and Muslim organisations, including the RSS—as communal riots broke out in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid by Hindu fundamentalists. 

Maudany challenged the ban, which was upheld in January 1993 by the Kerala High Court. 

In April 1993, Maudany founded the PDP, which advocated political representation for, and unity among, marginalised communities. “The PDP started its political campaign with the motto, ‘Power to underdogs, liberation of oppressed’,” said Kottarakkara. 

In his interview to MediaOne TV after arriving in Kerala in July 2023, Maudany said he and the PDP, which currently backs the state’s ruling Left alliance, always tried to be the voice of the “oppressed” groups.

Ayyubbi said marginalised communities needed to have better representation in the country’s judicial system. 

“It’s the need of the hour for the marginalised communities including Dalits, Muslims, and Adivasis to study law, represent them in court, and fight for justice,” said Ayyubbi. “They must be part of the judiciary and law-making institutions.”

(Muhammed Sabith is a Kerala-based journalist and researcher.)