THIS is also a region where unemployment is galloping and where few investors are stepping in. Parties vie to draw in the swelling army of jobless young men. The local handloom industry, once India’s most active, is collapsing in this “city of looms and lores”. The ruling CPM, which was actually born in Kannur in 1930 and had bagged over 60 per cent of the votes polled even in the last local elections, has no solution. Famously commanding many thousands of crores worth of assets, even the party’s biggest showpiece cooperative hailed internationally, the Dinesh Bidi Cooperative, has crumbled despite many Government- funded resuscitation bids. But the CPM still commands most of Kannur’s surviving little cooperatives, most offering ready liquid cash for party-sponsored initiatives.
Bomb making, however, is looking up. “Enough bombs are made and stocked here to last a long time. It’s a political activity, very little is for non-political use. We can’t go beyond certain limits to catch them,” a senior police official admitted. Even last week, after seven RSS and CPM men were chopped to death here in a space of four days and RSS and the CPM mobs spent time throwing scores of bombs at each other at half a dozen a village junctions, the police had seized no more than 41 bombs as of March 13.
Bombs come in many forms here. “Steel tiffin carriers from Salem, ball bearings from Coimbatore,” are among the preferred stuff for making the more potent steel bombs, says a political worker in Thalassery. The bombs are made in remote village homes, stockpiled in abandoned compounds, even party offices and buildings that few cops would risk raiding in normal course, often even disused village wells and rubbish bins. Party-inclined village blacksmiths, paid handsomely, churn out regular supplies of swords, axes and special equipment like the popular ‘S’ shaped stabbing knives from hard steel, including from old suspension leaves of trucks. Samples from bomb batches are duly tested and passed before handing them to the political sponsors, in deserted quarries and compounds. Usually, banana trees are used to test newly made hatchets and to train greenhorn assault teams.
Sometimes the stocked political bombs forget whom to kill or maim. A few years ago, a little Tamil orphan boy picking rags in Kannur (someone with a black humour had given him the name Amavasi, meaning lunar eclipse) rummaged in a rubbish bin to find a steel container. Amavasi had never seen a bomb before. It blew off both his hands. An NGO later took him in—after renaming him Poornachandran, which means full moon.
Another is Madathumkandi Surendran, a mason of Ponniath village. His pickaxe hit metal while digging a house’s foundation in November 1994—a hidden steel bomb, again. It blew up in his face, injuring both his eyes. No party went to his aid since he belonged to none.
Much of the mostly nocturnal bomb making takes place in or around the many “party villages”. Entire villages have been taken over by the parties who control them and ferociously defend them from incursion by other parties. The CPM, naturally has the largest number of these here, followed by the BJP-RSS. The non-cadre based Congress has only a few. Party villages are where the parties concerned decide who buys or sells property there, who moves in or out, who gets invited to marriages and funerals—sometimes even what newspapers are read, who marries whom. These are easily identified, all the electric posts leading to them wear the respective party colours and stenciled or scrawled symbols, some even have welcome boards such as “welcome to the communist village”, or massive hammers and sickles in concrete. Most Red villages have red-festooned buildings, local clubs, reading rooms and streets bearing portraits, slogans and names of men from the local and international communist pantheons, besides the dead from the battles with the Congress and the RSS. The saffron ones sport huge lotuses, trishuls, flags and typical street names like Shivji Nagar and Durga Nagar, apart from names of Sangh men the CPM had killed.
In these transgressing political opponents are seldom dealt with kindly. One who did is C.H. Suresh Babu, mandal president of the Congress in the 9th ward of Mokeri, a village the RSS was trying to make its own. He filed his nomination in the local bodies poll three years ago, despite threats. Four nights later, a bunch of RSS men caught him in a dark village street with steel clubs. He spent over a month in hospital and is immobile from waist down now.
The hit teams don’t like their quarries escaping a planned strike. Last week, a masked RSS hit squad broke down the door of the CPM’s branch secretary Rajesh in Kavumbhagom. They found only his 65-year-old mother Sarada there. Both her legs were broken with iron rods. Sarada, recovering at the CPM-sponsored Thalassery Cooperative Hospital, is still in shock. In Kathirur, CPM men who came for BJP worker Kunnummel Chandrika, beheaded her cow last Tuesday. In Pulluvam, the hitmen cut off the head of BJP man Balan’s dog.

... contd.