No chargesheet was filed for a year and a half— until after Marad erupted again, much more violently, at sunset on May 2, 2003. Armed men chopped and hacked eight Hindu fishermen to death on the beach. One assailant was reportedly hacked by mistake in the melee. The killers then escaped into the local Juma Masjid.

The commission’s report notes the submission of then Kozhikode Police Commissioner T K Vinod Kumar that hundreds of local Muslim women converged on the mosque to prevent the police from entering it to catch the killers.

While the police tried to reason with them, a nearly 300-strong armed Hindu mob gathered as well threatening to attack the cops if they didn’t catch the killers.

Driven to the wall, the cops opened fire after lathicharges and teargassing failed, injuring one man. Vinod Kumar’s deposition asserts that ‘‘the conspiracy was hatched in the Marad Juma Masjid and other places.’’

The cops later confiscated a huge cache of arms from this mosque, including explosives.

By then, the communal rift in Marad was total. The Sangh Parivar had driven away all Muslim families from the village, not allowing them to return and rapidly converting Marad into a saffron bastion.

So much so that even then chief minister A K Antony had to plead with the Sangh leadership to be allowed into Marad after the incident.

Local Muslim families, all 191 of them, had to live in exile in relief camps or with relatives elsewhere, for over a year. The Antony Government did not dare to help them get back to their homes.

... contd.