In recent years, Kerala, a southern Indian state long governed by the Left, has reportedly seen cases of gold smuggling and transactions of illegal, unregulated money. Commenting on the issue in a recent interview, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), chief minister of the state described the Muslim-majority district of Malappuram as a hot spot for these crimes. He claimed that these offenses are most prevalent in this district — and that illegal money is brought into Kerala for “anti-national” activities.

The label “anti-national,” which is often applied, if not limited to, Indian Muslims, is not the chief minister’s own coinage but rather a term borrowed from the lexicon of Hindu nationalist forces. Strategically deployed by Hindutva organizations to ostracize and demonize Muslims in India, the term takes on a more powerful meaning by labeling them as “traitors” to the motherland.

Facing backlash, the chief minister disowned the statement. Yet, party leaders’ borrowing of anti-Muslim rhetoric from the Hindu nationalist echo chamber is not something new. In 2010, another CPI(M) stalwart, V. S. Achuthanandan, accused a Muslim political group of using marriage as a tool to “Islamize” Kerala. This claim resembled the “love jihad” narrative, one of many Islamophobic campaigns propagated by Hindutva forces to demonize Indian Muslims. This conspiracy theory tells us that Muslim men lure Hindu women into marriage to convert them and change the religious demographic.