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The don and the goon are sublimating God, in His own country.
This week’s daylight bombing and hacking to death of an RSS-backed goon by rivals in Thiruvananthapuram, next to the state DGP’s official residence, was nothing new.
Neither was last fortnight’s case of a wife contracting a ‘quotation gang’ to do away with her husband or the series of goonda maimings, assaults and killings in the preceding weeks saturating Kerala newspapers.
Police say the gangs could run into “a few thousands”, with capital Thiruvananthapuram alone home to some 700 gangs. In the three years to 2004, when the menace began to peak, there were more than 39,000 cases of goonda attacks. Police are still processing figures for the last two years.
The Kerala goonda, meanwhile, has been going places, evolving, diversifying, innovating, even finding a tacit mainstream acceptance.
“The goonda is the legitimate quick-fix in Kerala now, for almost anything that the system complicates, and that list is growing. They are almost an accepted essential service in many areas,’’ observes Dr James Vadakkumchery, a criminologist with the state police for over three decades.
No longer is the goonda a semiliterate blunt instrument working for the neighbourhood assault or extortion outfit. Kerala has equally virulent political goons, corralled in legitimate jobs and put to use when required. Migrant labourers, farm hands, even college students, including those in professional courses, are known to moonlight for work that needs only threats. Then there are the so-called tie-wearing goondas, who work for, banks, loan sharks, mobile service providers.
... contd.
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