At Sivagiri, Kerala CM says those who create communal schisms betray Sree Narayana Guru’s teachings

Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has said that those who stoke communal schisms, including by othering minorities and furthering identity politics, betray the humanist teachings of social reformer Sree Narayana Guru.

Speaking during the 93rd Sivagiri pilgrimage event at Varkala, Thiruvananthapuram, on Wednesday (December 31, 2025), Mr. Vijayan said communally divisive messaging invariably played into the hands of revanchist forces seeking to recreate the oppressive and hierarchical caste-based feudal society that Guru’s teachings helped dismantle.

Mr. Vijayan’s speech appeared to carry political significance against the backdrop of recent criticism within the Left Democratic Front (LDF) that the political executive had trod softly around SNDP Yogam general secretary Vellapally Natesan, who had drawn intense criticism from Muslim social organisations for allegedly alienating and demonising minorities.

Notably, the Communist Party of India (CPI) had attributed the LDF’s poor showing in north Kerala in the recent local body elections in part to the ruling front’s failure to unequivocally condemn and distance itself from Hindu social organisation leaders “spewing communal hate” against minorities.

Mr. Vijayan’s Sivagiri speech also appeared to be an oblique critique of the SNDP Yogam’s political arm, the BDJS, which is an NDA ally in Kerala, against the backdrop of the CPI(M)’s post-2024 Lok Sabha poll finding that a surge in caste identity politics in Hindu backward classes had eroded the LDF’s strongholds, including in Alappuzha, in central Kerala. The CPI(M) had urged the SNDP Yogam leadership to correct course “from within” and return to its founding ideals.

(Mr. Natesan, who was on the stage with Mr. Vijayan, had earlier stated that his remarks were against the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) and not the Muslim community as a whole.)

Mr. Vijayan said caste identity politics was anathema to the Guru’s teachings. “When permitting the pilgrimage in 1928, Guru had explicitly told his disciples not to render the spiritual journey to Sivagiri an Ezhava caste-centric event and stressed its humanist and progressive philosophical core,” he said.

Mr. Vijayan noted that Guru eschewed superstition in favour of a scientific temper and gave primacy to education, social welfare, entrepreneurship, organisation, and humanism over individualistic spiritual pursuits. He said Guru’s teachings laid the foundation stone for the Left agrarian movement that ended feudalism and serfdom in Kerala.

“Society should be mindful that the successors of the revanchist forces, which opposed the Guru’s teachings, were seeking to retard the social, economic, and educational progress achieved through social struggles by marginalised sections by incrementally supplanting reason with superstition, science with pseudoscience, and history with myths in the public mind to haul Kerala back to the dark ages”, he said.

Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramiah, Sree Narayana Dharma Sangham Trust (SNDST) president Sachithanandan Swamy, AICC general secretary K.C. Venugopal, and BJP leader Sobha Surendran were among those present.