THE many narrow escape lanes in the area and plenty of cheap 100 cc motorcycles to be bought and junked mean the hit men can strike at any hour. K.P. Kumaran also known as Valsan, a local grocer and branch secretary of the CPM in Chalakara, was attacked in broad daylight by eight motorcycle-borne men last November in his shop. “They kicked me down and cut off my right wrist with a sword. Then a man took out a short axe, kept swinging it till my right leg was cut off at the knee,” recalls Valsan, who underwent a Rs 5 lakh, 16-hour long microvascular surgery at Kochi to get his wrist and leg joined back. But he has no sensation in or control over either, and is confined to a wheel chair, lifted and moved by relatives when the pain is more bearable.
But for Valsan, it has been a double tragedy. His ailing 38-year-old wife, Mahila, went into depression soon after the attack and never got out of it. She died last month and their relatives now take care of the couple’s two children.
CPM district secretary P. Sasi points out the case of Harindran, a taxi driver and party secretary in Panur. The RSS attacked him on a crowded road while he was ferrying school kids home. “They threw out the screaming kids, cut off Harindran’s head, hacked his wrist off. They carried away the severed hand in a plastic shopping bag, we later came to know that was since the hit team had a student on his first strike, and he was to present the hand before his gurus.” RSS sources, however, deny this story about the cut hand taken away as gurudakshina.
Police sources say the two sides have lately been hiring ‘quotation’ killers from places like Mangalore. Both the RSS and CPM leaders refute that. “We are a mass-based party and it is the lay people who retaliate when our comrades are murdered,” says P. Sasi, the Kannur CPM chief.
More insight comes from a man in Kannur, one of CPM’s chief hit men till sometime ago until he fell out. “Nothing is done by the ranks without proper authorisation in both the RSS and the CPM,” he says.
Significantly, almost all the dead since the bloody political killings began here in the 1970s have been the poor. The exceptions have been the likes of P. Jayarajan, one of the state’s senior CPM leaders, who was left for dead at his Kannur home, only to recover. On the other side are the likes of Kannur’s former RSS Saha Karyavah C Sadanandan —CPM men cut off both his legs—the police took him to hospital carrying the legs in a plastic sack.
Both parties here take care of their injured. Each series of bombings means injuries and high hospital bills. CPM sources say the party has already spent close to Rs 1 crore on medical and support bills in recent years. The RSS-BJP helps out its victims too, but is obviously not as cash rich as the CPM.
Violence is something Kannur can no longer afford.