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STATES: ASSEMBLY ELECTIONS
2001
Marx, Mothers And Lots Of Blood
Kannur has become a gory battlefield for ideology
and religion. Violent death is the most likely end to political lives
here.
By S. Prasannarajan in Kannur
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THE 30-YEAR WAR: Over 100 RSS and CPI(M) workers have been killed
here in three decades
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The first horror
is vertical. For, the most heroic leaders of Kannur live on walls, as
faded, framed memories of martyrdom. On the walls where the prime slots
are reserved for the holy ghosts of communism, the martyrs live as garlanded
exaggerations of the last desperate revolution, played out by a dead ideology's
bare-bodied red guards. On the walls where the presiding deities are the
bearded, moustachioed pioneers of Hindu nationalism, the martyrs are immortalised
in a lotus painted in saffron. In Kannur, only mothers and the maimed
live in horizontal reality, which continues to be renewed in blood.
Kannur: the new Kurukshetra for the liberation
theologies of communism and Hindutva; a district in north Kerala where
the war cry of a sub-rural struggle for supremacy can only be matched
by the wail of the living. And Kannur, like any other land haunted by
the orphaned spectre of communism, is the countryside. So, step out of
the party offices and seek out the dusty bylanes of the village to see
the remains of a bloodsport which cannot be explained by statistics, however
staggering they may be: more than a hundred murdered in the past 30 years,
and, according to the RSS district karyavah, 52 of the killed were swayamsevaks
or BJP activists. In terms of numbers, martyrdom is almost equally distributed
between the BJP and the CPI(M). Perhaps, the sorrow of the mothers too.
"Where are you, tell me... Why are you so
late to return?" The mother in Cheruvassery, a leafy, remote village
in Kannur, is still in the tear-soaked delirium of loss, more than 24
hours after the murder of her 21-year-old son Jayasheelan, a bus conductor
and a CPM activist, who was knifed to death last Saturday, the day of
Vishu, which heralds spring for every Malayalee. At this moment, he is
yet another martyr, buried beneath a shapeless mountain of flowers, papers
and plastic, the most conspicuous image being the neatly drawn hammer
and sickle on the wreath. And the mourners are eager to make the place
camera-friendly by removing the misplaced items from the site of this
brand new memorial to the workers' struggle. See, the revolution lives
on ... But Madhavi, the mother, understands nothing of this "latest
chapter" in the "revolution of the working class". Someone
is talking of sedatives to bring her back from the world where Jayasheelan
is not a comrade who died for a cause but a son who has not yet returned
home.
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PIN-UP VICTIM: Six-year-old Asna
lost a leg to a bomb last year, and has since been made a symbol of
secularism by politicians |
She is not so distant from the mother of K.T.
Jayakrishnan, despite the colour variations in the politics of the sons.
Jayakrishnan, a teacher of mathematics at Mokeri East Upper Primary School,
was the state vice-president of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha when
he was axed to death inside the classroom, in front of his terror-stricken
students, on December 1, 1999. His house in Panur, one of the headquarters
of Kannur violence, today is a space of dead calm. The house looks unlived
as you enter. Then the living appears. "Oh, journalists," Jayakrishnan's
brother Jayakumar seems to be so used to being an exhibition piece. He
is a railways employee, but he has not been working for three months.
"I'm not mentally well... It's depression." The guide, a local
BJP worker, tells you: it has been like this since the incident. Jayakumar
still thinks it should not have happened. Perhaps his brother, who was
the only earner in the family after their father's death, should have
done nothing except teaching. "But we could not stop him, he was
growing in the party." His only request now: "Please don't ask
my mother questions." And when the mother appears on the doorway,
you don't have to: answers are there in her eyes, trapped inside a teardrop.
Maybe victimhood in Kannur is tired of answers,
unless the victim is a six-year old girl called Asna. In Cheruvancheri,
another murder-friendly flashpoint, she has become the most photographed
pin-up child of secularism. She doesn't have any ideology, still she lost
a leg to an RSS bomb in September last year. An accidental victim. Today,
both the Congress and the CPM are competing with each other to market
the poignancy of the Asna story. She is even getting a new house, thanks
to the politicians who have realised the market value of Asna. As she
plays with a leggy toy girl, father Nanu serves fresh mangoes and tea
to the latest visitors to "Asna's house". And little Asna is
no longer camera shy. Father seems to be waiting for the next batch of
travellers to the museum. Also, Cheruvancheri is never short of fresh
mangoes.
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The
most heroic leaders of Kannur live on walls, as faded, framed memories
of martyrdom ... only mothers live in reality.
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Never short of fresh dialectics either. You get
a mouthful of them from P. Jayarajan, the CPI(M) candidate from Koothuparambu.
He is supposed to be the master planner of communist defence (in Kannur
leaders only talk about self-defence; attackers are always in the other
camp). In terms of physical mutilation, he is visually qualified for the
role. A lost finger, a hanging arm, and that night in August two years
ago. It was a night of the masked dance of Theyyam and explosions in the
sacred grooves. Then he saw sword-wielding men in his room. "There
were 17 wounds and I needed a microvascular surgery." A small price
to pay for a micro-marxist strategy. "The bloodshed in Kannur is
authored by the arrogance of the RSS. We resort to arms only to resist
fascism," says Jayarajan. The most favoured tool of fascism in Kannur,
he tells you, is the S-shaped knife, which "goes deeper and kills
faster". So, comrade, you are ready to die and ready to resist? "The
history of Malabar is also the history of the struggle of communism."
Still, how will you explain it all to the mothers of Kannur, comrade?
"The struggle of Kannur cannot be reduced to the sorrow of some mother,
please." And he reminds you: "The future of communism is Kerala,
particularly Malabar."
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