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A postcard from the bloody battle ground
WSN Network 

THALASSERY (KANNUR, KERALA): The Thalassery Government Hospital has often witnessed such patients as Suresh who received 120 stab wounds for believing in RSS ideology. A schoolteacher was dragged out of his classroom and brutally murdered before his students, a student leader was hacked to death in front of his parents. Thalassery, the epicentre of the red-saffron clashes, witnesses such savagery regularly. The two cadre-based parties, the CPM and RSS, are in a race to breed martyrs and build memorials on their graves. Over 250 people have fallen prey to revenge killings over the last three decades.  

The warring parties have no qualm in displaying these memorials and nurture ‘killing squads’ to equal their ‘goals’ - a term used in local parlance to settle political scores. A missing flag, defacing of party wall or damage to a bus shelter in the name of a martyr are enough to ignite a fresh round. For the Communists, Kannur attained a Leningrad-status by the fifties. It was here the ideology took its first roots and produced its best leaders, including A.K. Gopalan, K.P Gopalan and E.K. Nayanar. In the sixties the RSS, with the blessings of the Mangalore business lobby, started sneaking into this Communist bastion.  

The uneasy co-existence between the two took a bloody turn in 1968 when the Marxists killed an RSS activist. Since then it was a bloody battle for supremacy between the two. They competed themselves to form party villages where their opponents were banned. In the latest round seven people were killed while several others are still battling for their lives in hospitals.  

None of the victims, however, were hardcore party activists but poor labourers. “About ten years ago Sathyan was an RSS worker. He had severed all links to politics but he was targeted to equal the tally,” his uncle said.

12 March 2008
 

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