How Kannur became India’s political murder capital

For several days, Korambil Haridas, a fisherman from Punnol in Kerala’s Kannur district, stopped going out following a brawl at the local temple. On February 21, when the 54-year-old finally left home around 7pm and didn’t return well past midnight, his wife Mini got worried and called his brother Surendran over. At 1.20am, he heard a commotion and ran outside to find Haridas being attacked by a gang using a vadival, a sword-shaped weapon that curves at the end like a hockey stick. The gang included two men whom the brothers identified as locals.Haridas died on the way to the hospital. His body was so badly mutilated that it was impossible to count the number of injuries; in fact, his leg had been separated from his body.In Kannur district, these kind of violent deaths can mean only one thing — political murders. medium89973935The murder of Haridas, a worker of the ruling CPM, has put the spotlight on the cycle of political violence that has blighted Kannur.Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has directed the police to constitute a special task force to probe the killing. “Since this government came to power (in May 2021), six political killings have been reported in the state. Of the 92 accused identified, 73 have been arrested and prosecuted,” he said in the assembly recently.Opposition parties were quick to accuse the government of turning the state into “a goonda corridor”. To which, the CM replied that the state had witnessed 1,516 murders in 2016-21 as opposed to 1,677 murders in 2011-16 when the Congress-led alliance was in power. He also accused the opposition parties of trying to sabotage law and order by joining hands with “communal forces like the SDPI (Social Democratic Party of India) and the BJP”. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(e){if(void 0!==e.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var a in e.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r There will be bloodAfter a long period of relative peace, Kannur has been on the edge again. Almost everyone here knows the drill in the wake of a political murder: a retaliatory killing follows inevitably.Haridas’ murder is believed to be the result of a political clash between RSS and CPM workers regarding the organising of a festival at a local temple. Following this, RSS-BJP workers had threatened the CPM cadre with violence in a widely circulated video, leading to the hacking.Even though state BJP president K Surendran and the RSS denied any role in the murder, four RSS men, including BJP Thalassery councillor K Lijesh, were arrested on February 22. medium89973831In November 2021, after SDPI activists had murdered a BJP worker, Surendran had complained that the state police’s hands were tied, and called for an NIA investigation.“These political murders have a long history that is closely intertwined with the struggles of the RSS to gain a foothold in the CPM bastion,” says veteran journalist PA Antony. “When RSS shakhas were started and attracted children from communist families, a bitter rivalry manifested.”Blood brothersKannur’s modern history comes dipped in red. Pinarayi, a small town in Kannur, where the current CM of Kerala also hails from, is where the first meeting of the Communist Party of Kerala was held in 1939. The towns and villages around it are political hotbeds. There is a saying in these parts that the cadre can tolerate insults aimed at their forefathers, but not at their party.Kannur also has a lot of cultural significance within Kerala because of its unique ritual art forms of theyyam and thira, where the performers take on the role of deities, and the stories of valour and kodipaka, an intergenerational bloody feud, run through its folklore. medium89973852Generations of families here are also trained at kalaris, where they become proficient in weaponry and the martial art of Kalaripayattu, dedicating their mind, body and family in the fight for honour. Even today, weapons like vadival, which are otherwise found in kalaris or used for agricultural purposes like hacking coconuts, are used in political murders.“There is also a caste angle to this,” points out Antony, “as most often it is the Thiyya families that are involved in these killings.” Members of the Thiyya caste of Malabar, though classified as other backward class, and considered similar to Ezhavas in other parts of Kerala, have a comparatively higher ranking in Malabar, and mostly belong to landowning families.“I have observed that sometimes those convicted in these political murders are distantly related to each other,” notes Antony. This is not unusual as those living in the interior villages of Kannur often find relations in common. Moreover, the killers are often known to the victims and are old classmates and neighbours.Untitled Carousel 89771004No mercyUntil the 1990s, it was mostly toddy tappers and farm labourers who were given the task of executing political murders. But in recent years, these are being increasingly taken up by quotation gangs, essentially criminals for hire.The early days of political murders also saw the use of crackers mostly to clear the site once a muder was committed. The 1990s saw the use of actual bombs, which are continued to be made in small villages dotting the district. This is why news of party workers blowing up their limbs and houses is not uncommon in Kannur.Political murders, however, are not just the domain of parties like CPM and BJP. In January, Dheeraj Rajendran, a Kannur resident and member of the SFI, the students’ wing of the CPM, was stabbed to death by members of KSU, the students’ wing of the Congress party at Government Engineering College, Idukki. medium89973842These retaliatory political murders also extend beyond Kannur as was seen in 2021 when SDPI state secretary KS Shan was murdered on December 18 in Mannancherry, Alappuzha district, by RSS activists. The very next day, BJP leader Ranjith Sreenivas was murdered in Alappuzha in retaliation by SDPI members.“This is an example of the ‘quick-action militancy’ that SDPI is capable of,” points out Nidheesh J Villatt, a journalist based in Delhi, who has extensively researched these killings.In fact, Vadikkal Ramakrishnan of the RSS is considered to be the “first political martyr of Kannur”. He was killed in April 1969 in Thalassery, in response to an attack on CPM leader Kodiyeri Balakrishnan.Action, reactionWhen the BJP came to power at the Centre in 2014, these murders began to grab national headlines. In 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi released Aahuti: The Untold Stories of Sacrifice in Kerala, which narrates the stories of RSS-BJP workers killed in political violence.In 2018, journalist Ullekh NP’s book Kannur: Inside India’s Bloodiest Revenge Politics explored the lack of a political will to put an end to these battles and how “cosmetic investigations” by law enforcement agencies enable the culprits to get away.“What has often shocked me is the element of hatred and animosity in these crimes,” says Antony. “They would hack a person and throw sand into the wounds, so that even if the doctors manage to stitch them up, these sand grains would remain lodged within, and the victim was left to a life of pain and suffering.” medium89973910Dileep Raj, a writer and professor at Kannur University, believes that these fights continue to be over capturing socially significant public spaces, like a local temple or public library. He also refutes the theories that the local culture and passions trigger these murders, which are “clearly blessed by the party authorities”.“This violence is clearly a modern phenomenon,” Raj claims. “This system works because it is a profitable business for the political parties involved. The day it stops being profitable, these killings will stop.”He also points out that there was a lull in the CPM’s planned murders following the much condemned killing of TP Chandrasekharan on May 2, 2012. The hacking of the powerful local leader, who had fallen out with the CPM and established the Revolutionary Marxist Party, remains one of the most chilling political killings of Kerala in which several communist activists were convicted.“It shows that these parties do this because it suits them,” says Raj. “The more brutal the revenge, the deeper the wound is, the more loved the fallen man is, the bigger the martyrdom and its benefits for the party.”Speaking to a news channel on February 23, TP’s widow and MLA KK Rema said that in Kerala, both the murdered and the murderers are equally glorified as heroes, and that combined with the protection awarded by parties to these criminals, ensure that these political crimes do not end. Most of the people found guilty in her husband’s murder, she claimed, are today out on parole and being protected by the party.Untitled Carousel 89523381