“Our parents may be Maoists but does that mean their children are not entitled to human rights?” asks Ami, 19-year-old daughter of Roopesh and Shyna, alleged Maoists lodged in the Kannur and Coimbatore prisons.
The couple had more than their share of media glare after their arrest, just when Kerala was again seeing a rash of suspected or actual Maoist acts, after a hiatus. Video grabs of the bearded Roopesh in action, a Kalashnikov assault rifle by his side, which was played over and over into Kerala’s living rooms by the many TV channels, had not helped things for his two children.
Police harassment
“Right from when our parents went into hiding, we have been facing police harassment, for no fault of ours,” says Ami. She says the ordeal began many years ago when she was a Class VII student and her younger sister Savera was five. With them has been their 75-year-old grandmother, Nafeesa.
“The police would knock at our door even at midnight. They would force open the door and search our home even without a warrant. Every visitor we have is questioned. They even went to my friends’ houses and threatened them, so their parents started forbidding them from talking to me. They threatened my little sister that they would break our papa’s head. Why are we fated to suffer like this?” she asks.
She recalls that after her mother wrote an open letter to the Home Minister, human rights activists launched a protest against such treatment meted out to Ami and her sister. “The police then scaled down surveillance of my home. But the harassment continues in other ways.”
“On another occasion, we two were grilled for an entire night about our parents. They asked me many weird absurd questions, as if I was someone arrested for immoral trafficking. My grandmother was not allowed to meet us.”
Ami now spends time running from one court to the other, in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka, where her parents have been slapped with more than 30 cases.
“My mother was not an active Maoist, just a sympathiser. But the State and the police forced her to become an active member. She went into hiding in 2008 to escape arrest. Now, the police too call me a Maoist. I am not a Maoist. I am not against Maoist ideology, but I don’t know much about it,” says the teenager.
“Next target”
Ami has seemingly overcome the insecurity of a lonely childhood. But she worries about her parents. “I may be the next target of the police. I expect to be arrested anytime as I am the only link my parents have with the outside world. But I cannot afford to get arrested now because my parents have only me to fight for their release.” However, she says various organisations, such as the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), are supporting her efforts.
Her mother Shyna has a masters degree in law and had also been a research scholar, while employed as a UD clerk at the Kerala High Court. Her father Roopesh too is a law graduate.
“We shifted to Valappad after our mother too went into hiding. Our father had gone underground in 2002 itself. I was in Class VII then. I still recall my father carrying me, a little kid then, to various venues of agitations. As I grew up I did not know much about their ideology, but I was sure that my parents were fighting for some noble cause. The police harassment on us later only reinforced that conviction.”
While this reporter was talking to Ami, Roopesh telephoned her from the Kannur jail. The prisoners are allowed to make a solitary call to their kin a week. Ami heard him out.
“Papa said none of them have confessed anything to the police,” Ami said, after the call went dead.
“My father is lodged at the Kannur Jail with a dreaded criminal like Govindachamy (notorious rapist-killer) and those like Mohammed Nisham (being tried for murdering a security guard). How can they put political prisoners with hardcore criminals?”
Asked about Home Minister Ramesh Chennithala’s open letter to Ami and her sister asking them not to follow their parents’ path, Ami shrugged. “I am planning to write a reply to the Minister,” she said.
Our parents may be Maoists but does that mean their children are not entitled to human rights.
Ami19-year-old daughter of Roopesh and Shyna
Ami now spends time running from one court to the other, in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka, where her parents have been slapped with more than 30 cases.
