Kannur

Title: Kannur – Inside India’s Bloodiest Revenge Politics

Author: Ullekh N P

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2018 (First)

ISBN: 9780670090693

Pages: 223

Kerala leads most other Indian states on the indices of human development and social progress. Its life expectancy is comparable even to the most developed nations. Kerala’s economy is also peculiar in its makeup. Industrial manufacturing and production of food grains are given no priority at all and the state’s scanty agricultural produce is limited to cash crops like tea, rubber and cashew. The public sector is the major investor as far as industries is concerned. What drives it’s otherwise faltering economy is the remittances made by Keralites working overseas, which comes to about 35 per cent of its income. This makes the human resources of the state a valuable source of income. The topmost position of Kerala in education, healthcare and welfare schemes is thus correlated to its imperative of properly tending to a rich capital of manpower at its disposal. Naturally, this translates to suppression of violence and civic unrest. While most of the state is so peaceful as to make the slogan God’s Own Country no exaggeration but a plain statement of fact, the northern district of Kannur is wrought with political violence of the worst kind. Rival parties employ killer squads to eliminate or maim their opponents working in other political parties. This goes on unchecked even now, and the ruling CPM is arraigned by serious allegations of colluding with the criminals. This book examines the political situation in Kannur, how this sorry state of affairs came into being and the supposed causes and remedies. Ullekh N P is a native of Kannur and is a journalist and political commentator based in New Delhi. He has working experience in India’s leading newspapers and writes on domestic and international politics, economy, governance, public health and corporate affairs.

Continuously targeted by the Marxists, the RSS initiated a nationwide campaign titled ‘Redtrocity’ that highlighted the state-sponsored violence in Kannur. The movement has been immensely successful and Kerala’s Chief Minister, who is also a Marxist and alleged to have links to political violence himself in Kannur, had had to change his travel routes in Bhopal and Delhi to evade the protestors. This book is in fact a Marxist reply to the Redtrocity campaign. The author is the son of Pattiam Gopalan, a former member of parliament of the CPM and boasts of close relationships with the chief minister and CPM’s top brass in the state. The author’s acute political bias is evident from his tweets with the Twitter handle @Ullekh. What is amusing is his shuffling of facts to present himself as an impartial author. On closer inspection, it can be seen that the entire book is an attempt to project the CPM line that all parties in Kannur indulge in violence and their own fury is to be construed as acts of self-defense. Ullekh mentions the death toll at least half a dozen times, like a basketball score, to drive home the CPM’s contention that all parties resort to atrocities to score political points.

The book makes a social analysis of the situation prevailing in Kannur. Whereas the caste groups defined social identity in other parts of Kerala, political affiliation alone matters in Kannur. Even matrimonial alliances are chosen along party lines. Ullekh identifies the Thiyya community as the major pool which supplies both the perpetrators and victims of violence. As times advanced, the strategy also changed. Now, men are picked up randomly from various parts of the district, given fake names and put together as a killer squad. Tipper lorry drivers are the group used most frequently as killers. Another notable feature is that it is the areas that were once mentioned in the Northern Ballads that have seen disproportionately high levels of bloodbath. The ballads sing the saga of Chekavars, who fought and died to settle the personal vendettas of their upper caste overlords. The author assumes that the martial spirit of the Chekavars lingers on today. Widespread practice of the martial arts form called Kalaripayattu also plays a part in driving its practitioners to the battlefield. We should also note that guns and other projectile weapons are not used at all to kill people, while knifes, daggers and machetes are freely employed.

Ullek lays before us the history of the Communist movement in Kannur and how the poison seed of wanton belligerence was sowed by unrelenting physical attacks from Congress and their hired goons. M V Raghavan, who later left CPM to align with the Congress, was the lynchpin of the party’s resistance. As the CPM’s might consolidated, the Congress faded away from the scene and the RSS took its place. The book describes the brutal murder of K T Jayakrishnan Master of the RSS who was hacked to death while teaching his primary school students in the classroom. Forty-two eleven-year olds watched in horror and shock as a few assailants chopped their teacher to pieces. What stuns the civilized reader is the callous indifference with which CPM handled its aftermath. Seven were arrested for the murder, of which one committed suicide during trial. One was acquitted and the remaining five were sentenced to death by a sessions court. The verdict was upheld by the High Court, but on appeal the Supreme Court acquitted four and commuted the death penalty of a CPM activist named Pradeepan to imprisonment. After he spent twelve years in a very liberal prison he was released by the CPM government in 2011. And – the worst was yet to come – he was elected the president of the Parent-Teacher Association of the very school where Jayakrishnan Master was slain. CPM’s retaliation can sometimes turn beastly too. One of their attacks against M V Raghavan turned to smashing of the institutions he had helped found. Consequently, a snake park was attacked by the Marxists and the snakes and tortoises caged in the stalls were roasted alive. However, the author cleverly fails to mention this gruesome incident.

This book’s raison d’etre is the whitewashing of CPM and its chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan, who himself was one of the accused in the horrific murder of Vadikkal Ramakrishnan, an RSS worker in 1969. This is clear from the author’s painstaking research of crime records and party lore on the atrocities committed by the RSS. As K T Jayakrishnan Master was killed in front of his young pupils, so Ullekh cites two other cases in which CPM-men were also killed likewise. Not to be satisfied with this macabre tallying game, he quotes a general principle that recognizes violence as a rightful tool of political movements. He claims that ‘history teaches us that the world over, violence has served certain functions to ensure justice in an unjust society (p.103). We can only wonder why Penguin Books chose to promote such a blatant piece of political propaganda. The book also contains some fanciful theories of Alexander Jacob, a former police chief who served in Kannur during the unrest, which attributes racial factors to the violence. Such ahistorical conjecture which links the people of Kannur with ancient dynasties in Central India and even far away Assyria in Iraq are just flights of fancy.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star