BJP’s rise in Kerala, West Bengal rattles rivals
Politics of violence returned to Kannur, infamous as Kerala Marxists' killing field, on September 1, with the cold-blooded murder of the district’s RSS Sharirik Shikshan Pramukh, K Manoj. The method of killing itself was proof of how Kannur Marxists were still relying on terror to keep their once-impregnable fortress intact. The Marxist killers had employed their usual method to eliminate K Manoj: Create an atmosphere of terror with blasts, then pounce on the victim with swords and other weapons, and hack him to death. This was the same method adopted by the killers of TP Chandrasekharan, a rebel Marxist leader who dared to question the Red Czars and their corrupt practices, at Onchiyam in Kozhikode district on May 4, 2012; and of the BJP’s Kerala Yuva Morcha vice president KT Jayakrishnan, a school teacher, who was hacked to death in his classroom in front of his Class VI students on December 1, 1999. Kannur has been witnessing this Marxist politics of murder for the past four decades in which hundreds have lost their lives. The majority of them have been RSS-BJP leaders and workers. This politics of terror has over the years come to be known as the ‘Kannur Model’ of Marxist functioning. The State, ruled alternately by coalitions led by the Marxists themselves and the Congress, has proved its weakness in countering this menace. However, there has been a relieving decrease in such incidents since the murder of TP Chandrasekharan in Kozhikode, which had set off a wave of public anger. But that peace has now been shattered with the murder of K Manoj last Monday, and of Suresh Kumar, a Bharathiya Mazdoor Sangh worker, on August 27. What makes the murder of K Manoj all the more curious is that it has taken place less than a week after more than 400 CPI(M) workers and sympathisers joined the BJP in Kannur, dealing a big blow to the Marxists. Just days before the heinous murder, CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat had spoken in Kannur of the need to invoke the ‘Kannur Model’ to counter the growing BJP influence in the State, forcing the Sangh Parivar to rightly suspect the involvement of the national CPI(M) leadership in the murder of K Manoj. The BJP has made it clear that it will not accept anything less than a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation, as State police probes into Kannur killings have often proved to be farcical.
Elections since 2009 have proved that the CPI(M) is steadily losing its foothold in Kannur, which has the strongest district unit of the party in all of India. The party itself thinks that the BJP's vote-share has grown by 4.5 per cent after the this year’s lok Sabha poll because Hindus, the CPI(M)'s traditional supporters, have started to think differently in the changing political scenario. Also, demands for more freedom to practise religion have been coming up of late from Kannur partymen themselves. It is a fact that the so-called ‘party villages’, once-impregnable Red forts, have been weakening after the TP Chandrasekharan murder. In this context, there is every reason to believe that the situation may have forced the CPI(M) to escalate the ‘Kannur Model’ in Kannur itself and extend it to other parts of Kerala. A similar trend of political violence has been seen in West Bengal too where workers of the BJP, which is on the rise in the State, are being routinely targeted. But the politics of violence is destined to boomerang.