Last week’s killings of RSS and CPM men in Kannur is the latest incident in a three-decade-old battle being fought on imagined ideological lines. Our correspondent travels through the district where violence has maimed as many as it has killed.

Her five-year-old daughter Ashna was holding her hand and the bomb hit the child. It tore off Ashna’s right leg. Shanti says she didn’t even feel the sharpnel slice her own abdomen and mangle the left foot of her two-year-old son she was holding.
That was eight years ago on September 27, 2000. A series of surgeries later, 13-year-old Ashna, in Class VIII now, hops about her small unplastered home on one leg. She dreams of becoming a doctor, a “village doctor”. For many years, her father used to carry her home from school, the stump of her leg bleeding inside the prostheis.
Ashna’s father, Koota Nanu, who used to run the village teashop in Kannur’s Poovathur, says he had known the man who threw that bomb for years, a mason in the neighbouring village and an RSS worker. Nanu swears they had never had a quarrel. But that day the man was among an armed RSS mob pursuing Congress workers fleeing from a fight at the village school across the road, where voting was going on in the local polls.
Nanu claims to have no ill will for the bomb thrower. “We have run into each other many times since, even at times when I carried Ashna to the village market. We just try not to look at each other. I hear he wept for his mistake soon after.” The case, with 14 RSS men in the accused list, is still going on in the local court.
The Kannur blood game has mostly been a Red vs Saffron show but the Congress too has been pitching in with equal fervour. So far, since the killings began in the 1970s, close to 300 people have been injured. The targets are mostly low-level party workers or sympathisers, usually picked at random to quickly even the scores after each killing.
Nanu and his brother were Congress supporters. The RSS mob had rushed to look in their homes for the escaped quarry. Unknown to Shanti and her kids standing near their front door, they came in the way. In Kannur’s political killing fields, people have been maimed or killed for less.
Those like 24-year-old Prasoon, an RSS worker of Peruthattil village. Five years ago, on 14 July 2003, he was playing cricket with his friends at their village ground. Prasoon was about to run up to bowl when three local CPM men he knew clapped and gestured at him from the ground’s edge. He walked up to them, but saw more men come quietly out of the shadows towards him.
“I tried to run but three of them caught and pinned me down on the ground. The others waved swords to keep my friends off. They hacked off my left wrist, then removed my left leg above the knee with an axe.” The doctors sewed back the severed wrist but the leg couldn’t be put back and Prasoon, who once cleaned cement trucks on the side to support his lorry driver father, gets around on a prosthesis, probably for all his life.
All of 19 then, Prasoon had never got into a fight with anyone. But he bore the brunt of an earlier attack by the RSS on a young man of the CPM in another part of the district. And it’s always been Our Dead and Maimed versus Their Dead and Maimed here. Statistics are deadly important to keep the ranks from eroding, and scores must be evened quickly, convincingly, openly. Prasoon, young and a regular at the local RSS shakha, was too tempting a target to miss.

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