Songs of blood and sword in Kannur

He walks using prosthetics as both his legs were chopped off by CPI(M) cadre near his native village of Perinchery on January 25, 1994. Now a schoolteacher at Peramangalam in Thrissur, C. Sadanandan is a living victim of the cyclical political violence that has left scores of people in Kerala’s Kannur district either dead or maimed.

This election, Mr. Sadanandan is contesting on the BJP ticket from Koothuparamba and his candidacy has drawn attention to the legacy of violent hostilities between the Left and the RSS. In fact, four hours after Mr. Sadanandan was brutally attacked, SFI leader K.V. Sudheesh was hacked to death in front of his parents by RSS workers at his house near Koothuparamba.

The BJP candidate, known in party circles and by his students as Sadanandan Master, has had enough of this politics of retribution. “As a victim of political violence, I try to highlight the urgency of ending this culture of political violence,” he says. Talking to The Hindu at the local RSS office at Panur during a break from the campaign, Mr. Sadanandan says he wants to try and put an end to this violence.

Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi brought this issue up during his campaign address at Kasaragod on May 8. He introduced Mr. Sadanandan as a victim of violence perpetrated by the CPI(M). “To those who are blaming us day and night, I want to ask what crime did Sadanandan Master commit that his legs were cut off,” asked the Prime Minister, holding Mr. Sadanandan’s hand. “My morale went high when the Prime Minister personally introduced me as a victim of the CPI(M)’s politics of intolerance,” the schoolteacher says. He was a member of the SFI and hails from a family of CPI(M) supporters, but started attending RSS ‘shakhas’ [branch meetings] during his college days. He says he was targeted because an RSS functionary in its stronghold was unimaginable to the CPI(M).

Recent overtures for peace by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat to the CPI(M) leadership failed to draw positive response, the BJP candidate says. Asked about instances of violent acts carried out by BJP-RSS workers, he says that there have been cases when it happened in self-defence.

The hostilities began in the 1970s when the RSS tried to get a foothold in the politically sensitive areas of Thalassery, Koothuparamba and Panur that the CPI(M) considered to be its citadels. The turf wars soon saw blood being spilled. One of the most brutal ones was the murder of K.T. Jayakrishnan, a schoolteacher and Bharatiya Jana Yuva Morcha functionary, in front of his students inside classroom here in 1999. It was apparently in retaliation for the attack on CPI(M) leader P. Jayarajan, at present the party’s district secretary, who himself stands accused of murdering RSS functionary E. Manoj in September 2014. Manoj’s death broke the relative peace that had prevailed since 2010.

Meanwhile, the nearby district of Kozhikode too has not remained untouched by the violence. In 2012, Revolutionary Marxist Party leader T.P. Chandrasekharan was hacked to death in the village of Onchiyam. Local CPI(M) leaders and workers in Kannur were among those convicted in the case.

Until political leaders here stop endorsing the narrative of revenge that underlies the culture of political violence in the region, the cycle of violence will keep turning.