Human rights organisations have dubbed Thursday’s killing of two Maoists in the Nilambur jungles in so-called ‘encounter deaths,’ as stage-managed murders.
“It’s a cold-blooded slaughter by the police,” P.A. Pouran, State general secretary of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), alleged. Terming it State-sponsored murder, Mr. Pouran, a lawyer, said it was a shame that such `heinous State terror’ had taken place at a time when Communists were in power.
At a time when patriotism was being tom-tommed by right-wing forces, Mr. Pouran said the Maoists, who stood by the downtrodden and fought for the Adivasis’ right to life, were the real patriots. “No mother gives birth to a Maoist,” he told The Hindu. “It is the brutal, exploitative circumstances in the country that give birth to such patriots who are concerned for other human beings.”
He said the government should have, instead of branding the Maoists as enemies of the State, talked to them and found what their demands were and what made them fight for the Adivasis. Mr. Pouran said the Union government was pumping in funds to the police force in Malappuram district in the name of battling Maoists and terrorists. There was no accountability for these funds. “If a part of these funds were used for the welfare of Adivasis and Scheduled Castes,” he claimed, “the Maoists would not have been active there.”
A. Vasu, popularly known as ‘Grow’ Vasu, a functionary of the National Confederation of Human Rights Organisations, alleged that the twin murder was a pre-planned one.
The 86-year-old former Naxalite suspects that the Maoists could have been captured elsewhere and brought to the Nilambur jungle and shot dead. “The police have created a smokescreen that the Nilambur jungles are a haven of Maoists and terrorists,” he said. “This helped them to market the theory of encounter death.” Not a single policeman was injured in the so-called `encounter’ in the jungle, he added. Mr. Vasu rued that in just one-and-a-half months, some 50 people had been massacred by the police. These included 40 people killed on the Orissa-Andhra border and eight SIMI undertrials in Bhopal.
He pointed out that after the Naxalite hunt in 1970s, this was the first shootdown of Maoists in Kerala. In February 1970, `Naxalite’ Verghese was shot dead by the police in the Wayanda jungle. In mid 1970s, engineering student Rajan was tortured to death.
