When 21-year-old Dheeraj Rajendran and two other leaders of Students Federation of India were stabbed on 10 January, they were on the campus of their Government Engineering College at Painavu in Kerala's Idukki district. The crime was allegedly committed by Youth Congress leader Nikhil Paily and hired hands, in broad daylight.
Rajendran succumbed to injuries, in the first major incident of political violence that the state has witnessed this year. The brutality of three college students getting repeatedly stabbed over minor provocation has evoked widespread resentment in the state.
Despite its progressive moorings and achievements in the universal education sector, Kerala has been witnessing brutal political murders at regular intervals for over four decades, and in the recent years the frequency has increased manifold.
The History of Brutal Killings
Though Kannur had started witnessing sporadic incidents of political murders since the beginning of the 1980s, these were not pre-planned. There were no professional hit-squads which operated with clinical precision.
Though people were killed in sudden eruptions of political violence, involving mainly belligerent activists of CPI(M) and BJP-RSS, there were no instances in which family members were made to watch killings.
An incident that took place in 1994 changed it all.
On 26 January 1994, when a murderous gang of BJP-RSS workers barged into the house of CPI(M) student wing leader K V Sudheesh at Thokkilangadi near Koothuparamba in Kannur district, his aged parents were forced to bear witness to a crime. Sudheesh was stabbed 36 times and killed. The incident marked a fresh chapter in the history of political violence in Kerala because of the brutality involved.
On 1 December 1999, lumpen elements among CPI(M) cadres brutally murdered K T Jayakrishnan, state vice-president of BJP Yuva Morcha, in broad daylight, that too in front of school children whom he was teaching at the time in Mokeri East UP School in Koothuparamba.
Before leaving, the hit squad threatened the students of dire consequences, if they were to testify as witnesses before the court.
Political killings like these, which were once confined to Kannur and Kasaragod districts, have ever since been spreading to other parts of Kerala. The idea of extermination is now gaining ground across the state.
Political leaders have found that murders are the easiest way to exterminate both their opponents and dissidents. Fear psychosis and the widespread silence which such murders generate have made them a resort for most political parties.
Brutality Spikes Exponentially
In the second week of December 2021, Alappuzha witnessed two political murders, committed within a span of six hours.
SDPI leader K S Shan was hacked to death allegedly by a BJP-RSS gang. The assailants knocked him down from his motorbike as he was riding through a busy junction. In what is believed to be a retaliatory attack, BJP OBC Morcha State Secretary Ranjith Sreenivas was brutally killed, allegedly by an SDPI gang. He was killed in his home, as his mother, wife and two children haplessly watched.
Brutal? There are more.
In November 2021, RSS member S Sanjith was hacked to death allegedly by a group of SDPI members at Kinassery in Palakkad while he was travelling with his wife. A week before that, CPI(M) member P B Sandeep Kumar was hacked to death near Thiruvalla in Pathanamthitta allegedly by a group of BJP-RSS members, even as he was travelling with his wife and two children.
While political parties of all hues have been condemning such murders, martyrdom is often given to victims and the incidents are used to reap political dividends.
Moreover, each major political party nurtures its own killer gangs, other than relying on hired assassins. Several youths with criminal backgrounds have joined the hit-squads of political parties in the recent years. These squads often attempt to outdo one another in brutality. Successive governments have been keeping the police force at bay in order to keep their killer gangs safe.
A day after Dheeraj Rajendran was murdered, a police party in the northern hill district, Wayanad, arrested Manoj Kumar alias Kirmani Manoj for taking part in a drug party, at a tourism resort, along with a dozen other criminals.
Kumar, a life convict at Thrissur central jail for his involvement in the murder of Revolutionary Marxist Party leader T P Chandrasekharan, was on parole when he was arrested.
Going by media reports, all the eight persons who killed T P Chandrasekharan, for leaving CPI(M) and forming his own political outfit, have been on parole for 250 days, even as some of them have been nabbed on different occasions for plotting murders and smuggling gold and narcotic substances.
It is believed that they enjoy support from CPI(M) and Kerala Chief Minister, Pinarayi Vijayan.
More, a total of 487 people convicted for political violence and housed in different jails in Kerala are now enjoying extended paroles illegally because of political patronages, according to information available with the prisons department.
Maimed Victims and Communal Killings
In Kerala, murder politics is not just about killers and their victims. Hundreds survived such attacks but were maimed. A senior CPI(M) leader P Jayarajan was brutally attacked in front of his wife, but survived with lifelong injuries to tell the tale. BJP leader C Sadanandan, who contested in the 2016 Assembly election, lost both his legs allegedly to a CPI(M) hit-squad.
The survival struggles of families that lost their breadwinners to political violence pose troubling questions.
Meanwhile, it is not just the main political parties including CPI(M), Congress and BJP which are now being accused of political murders. Socialist Democratic Party of India (SDPI), which is the political wing of militant Islamist organisation, Popular Front of India (PFI), is now allegedly involved in such murders.
The ruling LDF, which was often accused of using muscle power against political opponents, is now finding it difficult to deal with the emerging situation where even smaller parties like SDPI are allegedly plotting and executing murders. This year, the state has witnessed five murders in clashes involving cadres of SDPI and the Sangh Parivar outfits.
And the state police has been remaining helpless, even as hate-filled social media campaigns of rival political groups have become common.
Murder Rampant Even Under CM Vijayan
This has also exposed the failures of Kerala's Home Department, handled directly by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan.
In the last six years, during which Vijayan has been occupying the home portfolio, Kerala has witnessed 25 political murders. While FIRs are registered in all the cases, in the Alappuzha twin murder case the accused are absconding. In most cases, trial is ongoing.
If the police and state intelligence wing were strong enough, many of these murders could have been avoided. It's a shame for Kerala that political vengeance and murders remain part of the state's political narrative.
As far as Kerala is concerned, police reforms are the most effective solution to the emerging threat. The prevailing practice of ruling dispensations using the police force to their benefit, must end.
(KA Shaji is a journalist based in south India. He writes on human rights, environment, livelihood, caste, and marginalised communities. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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