Twenty-five years after the incident, the story is now being retold and it is still a scandal with a capacity to shock. Predictably and promptly, after the disclosure of a few damning facts about the macabre incident, including a confession by a retired policeman, the issue has been politicised.

The Congress, the party to be hit by the previous scandal of the same kind in the state, sees an opportunity to settle political scores with the Left. It is trying to see a Rajan, the student symbol of the Emergency excesses that extinguished lives like his, in the `Che' of a far from Latin American landscape.

The CPI(M) is trying to sound suitably indignant, but without resounding success. Very few would vouch for the party's concern for civil liberties and democratic rights, especially when it comes to dealing with the Naxalites. InKerala, it may not have waged the war on them it did in West Bengal, but Varghese was not the kind of a victim of state brutality that it ever felt called upon to protect.

It is a pity that this has to be spelt out, but the issue is not one of party politics. It is the unconscionably narrow approach by the parties that has ensured a frustrating outcome for the campaign that has continued off and on for decades now against what have been described as "fake encounters".

These include authenticated instances of official crimes, of utterly lawless law-keeping, and have been reported from every region and state where extremism raised its head. The police personnel involved and, more importantly, their patrons and prompters in power have got away in most cases, because no significant political player has shown recognition of the stake. Which is nothing less than the defence of the system itself.

The foolishness of the police ferocity in the case of Kerala is obvious. The end here did not justify the means,even in an amoral sense. The `revolution' in the jungles of Vayanad hardly warranted the response.

Naxalism may have been denied the minimum of natural sustenance here but for the halo conferred upon it by police hamhandedness. But, it is not because of the martyrdom it meant that the murder of Varghese was indefensible.

It was indefensible as a method of dealing with disaffection in a democracy. Extremism cannot be fought by resort to extra-legal and extra-constitutional means. Much has been said about terrorism as a threat to human rights. The point needed, and still needs, to be made.

But, to advance this proposition as the logic of exercises like "fake encounters" is not to deny legitimacy to terrorism. The pleas once heard against complaints about the police in Punjab, when it was combating the Khalistanis, pleas on patriotic grounds, were only proof of the confusion that terrorism could cause in the public mind on this count. The Vargheses are a greater danger to the credibility of the system whendead, and in his manner, than alive.