Two murders near Payyannur in a short span of two hours late one July night capture the essential features of the retaliatory violence that has gripped the politically volatile parts of Kannur district of Kerala over the past several decades.
On July 11, Communist Party of India (Marxist) worker C.V. Dhanaraj was hacked to death in the courtyard of his house at Karanthat in the Ramanthali panchayat near Payyannur. Around 10 p.m., the assailants who came on motorcycles swooped on him as he entered the courtyard. His wife and two children were inside the house.
Within hours, a mob surrounded the house of autorickshaw driver and BJP worker C.K. Ramachandran at nearby Annoor in the Payyannur municipality.
Armed killers barged into his house and stabbed him to death even as his wife and children watched. A couple of days later, a reporter of a TV channel here received a phone call from a local BJP worker at Payyannur. “He told me that I saved his life because if I had not rung him up after the first murder to get a sense of the outbreak of tension in the area, he would not have known about the murder,” says the reporter who did not want to be identified. It was this chance phone call that alerted the activist and prompted him to immediately leave his house to a safer place.
Urge for vengeance This is the usual story in the killing fields of Kannur, an urge for vengeance driving rival groups. Crude bombs and swords are the weapons mostly used by them; bombs to overpower the target and scare away people before an attack.
There have been incidents of accidental explosions while making country-made bombs, killing and maiming young workers. In recent raids, the police recovered over 15 bombs and a dozen swords from tension-prone areas.
“The violence continues here as there exists a gap between how each side sees its strikes as justified and those of the other as unprovoked,” T.P.R. Nath, a peace activist explains. A deep sense of pain and distress experienced by relatives and friends of those slain or injured often triggers the urge for reprisal, he said.
Mr. Nath, who is the general secretary of the Kannur Peace Forum, recalls how peace activists, led by the late V.R. Krishna Iyer, had faced an angry outburst from a close relative of slain Bharatiya Jana Yuva Morcha leader and school teacher K.T. Jayakrishnan when they visited the bereaved family after his murder in front of his students in a local school near Panur on December 31, 1999. The deceased leader’s grieving brother initially did not allow the former Supreme Court judge and other peace activists to enter the house, Mr. Nath said.
The fact that both the CPI(M) and the BJP are ruling parties in the State and at the Centre respectively has emboldened their cadres to be equally combative in political activities. This district, with its legacy of Communist-inspired agrarian struggles, is viewed as the bedrock of the CPI(M) in the State.
Peasant uprising In many rural areas of Kannur, Communists had been in the forefront of the uprising of peasants against local feudal chieftains and colonial rulers. The history of political violence here over the past five decades, therefore, has as its backdrop the dominance of the CPI(M) as a political force in the district and the Sangh Parivar’s bid to make inroads into the CPI(M)’s territories.
“The legacy of local ‘chekavas’ [warriors], extolled in the ‘Vadakkan Pattukal’ [northern Ballads], who fought and died for local chieftains appears very much alive in this region, the chieftains today being the rival parties,” says T. Sasidharan, Associate Professor and head of the Department of Political Science at the Sree Narayana College here.
The author of Idathupakshavum Kannur Rashtreeyavum (The Left and Kannur politics), Dr. Sasidharan says that the efforts of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to expand its activities, including ‘shakhas’, in the 1960s and later during the Emergency led to violent confrontation between the rival parties. The psychology of violent confrontation has already turned many parts of the district into a tinderbox.
Most victims were Ezhavas In his book, Dr. Sasidharan says 166 people had been murdered in the clashes between workers of rival parties during 1968 and 2006. The District Crime Records Bureau figures show that at least 45 people had been murdered in the political turf wars in the district since 2007.
The book shows that 80 per cent of those killed in political violence belonged to the backward castes, especially the Thiyyas (Ezhavas), who form the substratum of the CPI(M)’s support base in the district.
Hence, the party’s struggle against the Sangh Parivar’s incursion of late draws on religious and cultural motifs to counter it. The CPI(M)’s organisation of pageantry to celebrate the renaissance leaders such as Sree Narayana Guru and Ayyankali on the same day as ‘shobha yatras’ organised by the Sangh Parivar organisations to mark the Sree Krishna Jayanthi has been perceived as the party’s new strategy to counter the Sangh Parivar.
Sree Narayana Guru (1856-1928), born into an Ezhava family, was the prominent social reformer who fought against casteism and upheld values of humanism. Ayyankali (1863-1941) hailed from a caste that was treated as untouchable in those days. He rebelled against untouchability and fought for civil rights of the downtrodden. The CPI(M) wants to portray itself as natural claimant to the legacy of these social reformers and renaissance leaders. The party is also promoting yoga, now in vogue, but with a secular tag. The BJP’s efforts to gain a foothold in the CPI(M)’s pocket boroughs here are reflected in the increase in the BJP’s vote share in the last civic and Assembly elections.
BJP makes inroads The BJP’s tally in the civic bodies has increased from 14 wards in the entire district to 31 wards. The BJP’s share of seats in the local body elections here is not a big deal as the district has a total of 1166 grama panchayat wards and 289 municipal wards. What irks the CPI(M), however, is that the BJP has pockets inside its traditional strongholds. The Sangh Parivar has also improved its vote share in all the Assembly constituencies in the district, including in those constituencies where the CPI(M) has won with spectacular margins.
Both the police and the district administration are concerned about the escalation of tension. District Collector Mir Mohammed Ali has mooted the idea of holding regular peace meetings at the grassroots to bring to an end the culture of political violence here. Peace, however, remains elusive.
