Sangh Parivar outfits are anywhere in the picture in this case. A few units of the Nair Service Society (NSS) — a socio-cultural organisation of the upper-caste Nair community — is spearheading the campaign outside Kerala.

Curiously, a few state units of the NSS have distanced themselves from the campaign. Some have even expressed solidarity with Mathrubhumi.

The Delhi unit of the NSS is at the forefront of the campaign against the Mathrubhumi group of publications. They entered the scene after the magazine discontinued the serialised novel after right-wing outfits threatened the author and his family and protested against Meesha.

In such cases, protestors usually vent out their ire by burning the publication or attacking the publisher’s offices. Mathruhubmi had faced such protests in September 2015, after it had published aseries of columns by well-known writer MM Basheer on the Ramayana, as well as in March 2016, when it had reproduced an “offensive” comment on Prophet Muhammad in the AppsTalk section of the newspaper.

While the protests against Basheer’s column died down after the daily stopped the series, it had to tender an open apology to quell the controversy triggered by radical Muslim outfits, such as the Popular Front of India and the Social Democratic Party of India, against the comment on the Prophet.

NSS Delhi kicked off the campaign by calling for a boycott of all of Mathrubhumi’s publications. Its president MKG Pillai claimed that the decision to boycott the publication was made unanimously at a meeting in Delhi of various Hindu organisations.

“The novel has brought disrepute to all