KASARGOD: There is no stain of sin on Padna to wash away, wrote Muhammed Ali, 32, a distributor of surgical equipment and a resident of Padna, on his Facebook wall. He was speaking for all Padna residents in his post, which delved on the concerted and coordinated relief work the residents of the area carried out in all the flood-hit districts of Kerala in the past two weeks.
Though there is no stain of sin, Padna residents have been battling an undeserving blot on their ‘cosmopolitan’ village, of being a recruitment ground for the Islamic State, after 17 persons left the village to join the terror group in Afghanistan in May, 2016. Since then, Padna - one of the most harmonious communities in a communal violence-prone district - was not allowed to shake off the notoriety imposed on it.
So, when heavy rain and dam water started flooding Kerala in mid-August, the youths of Padna saw an opportunity to show the world their world. To be sure, Padna is a place which recently demolished a temple wall to accommodate an event of a mosque. “But the media hyphenated us with IS, and it stuck,” said Zuhair Ismail, 32, a media executive with a radio station in Qatar.
On hearing about the floods, he flew down to Goa on August 17, and took a train to Kozhikode, and drove down with his friends to Changanassery, where he set up a base camp. “I was motivated by what my friends back home were doing and the talk of relief work in the WhatsApp groups,” he said.After 15 days, Ismail is still neck-deep in relief work. On Saturday, he was in Palakkad buying and packing gas stoves, plates, tumblers, food items and water to be trucked to Chengannur on Sunday. “We are planning to distribute the kits in Kuttanad and Chengannur,” he said. Another team from Padna was in Inchimudi panchayat in Thrissur distributing 200 beds to the flood-affected.
Till date, people of Padna have sent 30 trucks of relief materials to Alappuzha, Ernakulam, Thrissur, Palakkad and Wayanad, said Ali coordinating the relief work and routing trucks from Edappally in Kochi. Even family WhatsApp groups sent two trucks of relief materials. “Then school and college alumni groups kicked in,” he said.The backbone of the steady flow of relief material was the seven sports and arts club of Padna, and also the political parties and cultural organisations, said Shabeer Ali, who runs a mobile accessories shop in Dubai.The volunteers of Padna say they were now engaged in cleaning and rehabilitation.