I t may look like a chapter from a story of some cannibalistic tribe of the past but the Taliban-like Marxist courts of Kannur district that hold trials, carry out convictions, pronounce death sentences and execute “class enemies” are a brutal reality that God’s Own Country is living with if a recent police report and local stories in Kannur are anything to go by. People in Thalassery and Thalipparambu in Kannur district, where Marxists rule in most villages, say that party courts have always been there, lying dormant. That it has become active at this particular juncture shows how the CPI(M) is worried over the adoption of its own violent political culture by rivals like the Muslim League and the Congress, it is said. According to the locals, party courts — though they have no established structure — have been a reality for the past several years in the p a r t y v i l l a g e s o f K a n nu r which are virtual “communist republics” where everything is decided by the party and its “ruthless bosses”. Keralites shuddered last week to learn of a police report which concluded that that Muslim League activist, Abdul Shukoor (21) of Ariyil in Pattuvam in the district, was brutally stabbed to death on February 20 by Marxist executioners at Keezhara, a “communist village”, as per the decree of a party court for the alleged crime of pelting stones at the vehicle of top party leaders. A senior police official in Kannur said that the modus operandi behind Shukoor’s murder was quite different from that employed generally in the political killings in Kannur by the Marxists. “That Shukoor’s body bore only a single stab injury in the chest shows the accuracy and determination with which it was done. This was indeed premeditated,” he said.
Murderous violence has always been a way of Marxist political practice in Kannur and a minimum of 700 persons have fallen prey to it in the past four decades but these murders have been considered as spontaneous acts of reciprocation or as acts of the abominable strategy to sow terror with a particular intention for a particular period in a particular area. An incident closest to this Keralites have heard of is the chopping of the right hand of Prof TJ Joseph on July 4, 2010 by Muslim extremists as per t h e r e p o r t e d d e c r e e o f a Taliban-style Islamic court for b l a s p h e m i n g P r o p h e t Muhammad. But even the Islamic court had not gone to the extent of decreeing death for Joseph as the Marxists h a d n o w a l l e g e d l y d o n e with Shukoor. S h u k o o r, c a u g h t b y Marxist ‘cops’ for stoning a vehi c l e c ar r y ing CPI (M) ’s Kannur district secretary P J a y a r a j a n , w h o m r i v a l s describe as the brain behind several political murders in the district, and party MLA TV Rajesh, was killed brutally in a field in broad daylight (and i n f u l l v i e w o f d o z e n s of people) after a summary “trial” by a party court, according to the police. As per reports, before carrying out the sentence, the court’s judges, sitting somewhere else, had convicted Shukoor after confirming his identity as the class enemy who had committed the crime of stoning the comrades’ car after a verification exercise using his photographs MMS-ed to them by the captors.
“The existence of Marxist party courts in Kannur and their brutality could be news to people outside the district but not for us,” said Ramesan (name changed) of Thalassery, the town that has seen most of the violent incidents that have taken place in the district. “These courts need not have a permanent structure but they are very ‘systematic’ in their functioning,” he said. “Outsiders tend to believe that political murders here are acts of spontaneous reaction but this is not always the case,” said Ramesan, a former activist who parted ways with the party towards the end of the last millennium. “Most of these murders have been planned in advance and the party courts – though not exactly like in the Shukoor incident – play a pivotal role in this,” he said.
People living in and near the “communist republics” of Kannur are apprehensive of an escalation in violence and the intervention of the “people’s courts” as the Marxists may – as they think – try to overcome the setbacks they are presently suffering all over Kerala by sowing terror in their heartland.
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