IT’S some 30 years now since this surreal war of statistics pitched on imagined ideological planes, began here with bombs, swords, knives, and axes. “As of last week, the RSS-BJP, the Congress and the police have killed 149 of our comrades here. We don’t have the list of our men who lost arms, legs, eyes—there are too many,” says P. Sasi, senior CPM leader and its new district secretary at Kannur.
At the newly built RSS office in Kannur’s Thalassery, mounted photos of 56 Sangh men—and a woman—bombed or cut to pieces by the CPM look down from an entire wood-paneled wall (those too poor to have left behind even a photo have a flower instead, with the name scrawled below). It’s just a partial list, the wall just cannot hold more photos.
The Congress is not keeping a strict count anymore. “I personally know well over 50 of our men here who have lost their limbs,” says K. Sudhakaran, former minister and the Congress’s powerful ex-district secretary, who escaped many attempts on his life and is accused of organising many attacks on his political foes.
The ranks die and become martyrs in brick memorials on Red or Saffron village junctions, but not too many Kannur leaders want to be caught without a gun handy. Kannur is where leaders like the CPM’s central committee member E.P. Jayarajan walks around with a bullet still lodged inside his head after a political attempt on him a few years ago. It is also where local Marxist satrap, politburo member and state CPM secretary Pinarayi Vijayan must carry his .38 revolver at all times—remember the stir at Chennai airport last year when he inadvertently carried bullets into the security check.

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