Sreejith’s over two-year battle for a CBI inquiry into the circumstances of his brother’s death in police custody in 2014 yielded result on Friday with the premier investigating agency of the country informing the Kerala government that it had taken over the probe.
Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s private secretary M.V. Jayarajan handed over a copy of the CBI notification to Mr. Sreejith, who has been staging a protest on the pavement in front of the Secretariat for the past 770 days.
Mr. Sreejith. however, appeared unimpressed. He said he would call off his agitation only after the CBI began its process. “The government could have responded to my pleas earlier. The injustice still rankles,” he told newspersons.
Mr. Sreejith’s protest was a lonely one for long. Suddenly a social media post that showed him curled up on the pavement in the rain against the backdrop of posters demanding justice for his brother went viral and became a catalyst of his cause.
One-man fight
His one-man fight to bring his brother’s alleged assailants to book resonated strongly with the youth and the vast diaspora of Keralites working abroad.
On the street, Sreejith found himself surprisingly mobbed by students, actors, youth icons, politicians of all hues, singers, poets and artists. His lone agitation appeared to gather pace as a potentially emotive mass movement the government could no longer afford to ignore. Finally, Mr. Vijayan granted Sreejith and his mother an audience and agreed to pursue their demand with the Central government.
SPCA findings
The controversy surrounding Sreejeev’s death is centred on the findings of the State Police Complaint Authority (SPCA) that directly contradicted the law enforcement’s version. Several police inquiries in 2014 concluded that Sreejeev had consumed pesticide crystals he had hidden in his underwear after the police arrested him on the charge of breaking into a mobile phone shop. Investigators also furnished a death note purportedly penned by him before his arrest to suggest that he had a suicide streak.
In 2016, SPCA chairman and former High Court judge K. Narayana Kurup shockingly upended the police findings, bringing the case back into public focus. He suggested in his inquiry report that Sreejeev could be a victim of custodial torture. He also doubted the authenticity of the purported suicide note, questioned the forensic conclusions and raised the distressing possibility that Sreejeev could have been force-fed poison in police custody.
