Communist Party of India’s Kerala State secretary Kanam Rajendran has said that ‘from the experiences of the past,’ he suspects that last week’s ‘encounter’ in the Nilambur jungles in which two Maoists were shot dead by the police was ‘fake.’
“From the numerous encounter killings across the country in the past, including last month’s killing of 40 Maoists in Malkangiri on the Andhra Pradesh-Orissa border, it seems the Nilambur incident too was a case of fake encounter,” Mr. Rajendran, whose party is the second largest in the ruling Left Democratic Front (LDF) coalition in Kerala, told The Hindu on Monday.
Mr. Rajendran was the first mainstream political leader to criticise the ‘encounter’ saying such an incident should not have taken place in the LDF-ruled Kerala.
‘A trap’
He said the Nilambur encounter was a joint operation of the Central and Kerala forces and that the State government must have been aware of it. The Centre was pumping in large sums in the name of hunting the Maoists in the so-called Red Corridor. Each State was trying to grab a portion of the money. Kerala should not fall in this trap.
Asked about Electricity Minister M.M. Mani’s remark that Maoists were not Communists, Mr. Rajendran said he did not want to comment on this, but said the CPI(M)’s official line was different from Mr. Mani’s.
Joint statement
He recalled that the CPI, CPI(M), and four Marxist-Leninist parities had issued a joint statement in the past asking the governments to follow the Supreme Court guidelines (in PUCL v. State of Maharashtra) in the event of a so-called encounter killing. This was binding on the LDF government too. The government had already ordered a magisterial probe into the Nilambur killing, and this was the right thing to do. The government should also take other steps laid out in the Supreme Court guidelines.
In the name of fighting the Maoists, Mr. Rajendran said, several ‘encounter’ massacres had taken place in Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, and Orissa. In Manipur and Kashmir, unarmed people who protested against the draconian Army Forces Special Powers Act were being shot down in so-called encounters. After the Narendra Modi government came to power at the Centre, there had been a sharp rise in the number of such massacres.
‘Maoist issues relevant’
He said the Maoist issue was not a law-and-order problem, but a socio-political one. “The CPI doesn’t approve of the means they are using, but we cannot ignore the socio-economic and political realities of the downtrodden people such as Adivasis that the Maoists are giving voice to.” It was in the Adivasi regions that the Maoists were most active. “Instead of addressing the Adivasis’ socio-economic conditions, the bourgeois State is trying to eliminate by fake encounters the Maoists who are voicing the Adivasi concerns.”
