BJP president Amit Shah will on Tuesday flag off the Jana Raksha Yatra (Save-People March) of his party’s Kerala unit against Marxist and jehadi terror at Payyannur in Kannur district and rest of the State against BJP workers.
Shah will also take part in the Yatra by walking through the CPI(M)’s ‘party villages’ in Kannur including the Marxist Chief Minister’s native place, Pinarayi, which has of late become the epicentre of CPI(M) terror against RSS-BJP in Kannur.
The Yatra, raising the slogans, “All Need to live” and “Against Red-and-Jehadi Terror”, and being captained by party’s Kerala president Kummanam Rajasekharan will start at Payyannur at 3.05 pm Tuesday. It will conclude in the State capital, Thiruvananthapuram, on October 17 after travelling through 11 of the 14 districts of Kerala.
Shah will flag off the march formally by handing over to Kummanam the saffron-green party flag at a public meeting at 10 am on Tuesday at the specially arranged venue named after Vadikkal Ramakrishnan, who was killed in 1969 by Marxist killers. Ramakrishnan was the first victim of Marxist violence against RSS-BJP in Kannur, known as Kerala’s Marxist heartland.
Shah will inaugurate the public meeting which will be presided over by senior leader O Rajagopal, the lone member of the BJP in the Kerala Assembly. Union Minister of State for Tourism and IT Alphons Kannanthanam, MPs Suresh Gopi and Richard Hay and other senior leaders will participate in the programme.
The march will be held as padayatra (foot march) on three days in which Amit Shah will participate. He will walk with his colleagues from Payyannur to Pilathara on Tuesday. He will also walk with the other Yatris on Thursday from Mambaram to Thalassery via Pinarayi, the native village of Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan.
Pinarayi village earned a significant spot in the map of violence of Kannur district on October 12 last, the day a CPI(M) killer gang brutally hacked to death 27-year-old truck driver C Ramith, a BJP-RSS worker, in front of his house, which is just a few hundred meters away from Chief Minister Vijayan’s house.
Shah is expected to join the march again on the concluding day, October 17, and move with it on foot from Sreekaryam in Thiruvananthapuram where an RSS Karyawah, Rajesh, was brutally murdered by Marxist killers on July 29. The party chief will also address the rally to be held at the conclusion of the Yatra in the capital city that day.
At least, nine Union Ministers, including Nirmala Sitharaman, Smriti Irani, Dharmendra Pradhan and Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, several Chief Ministers of the BJP and senior national-level leaders of the party like Meenakshi lekhi and Manoj Tiwari are expected to join the Jana Raksha Yatra at various stages.
The Yatra is also expected to set in motion the efforts for ensuring the maximum possible contribution from the State to attaining the goals set by the party’s Mission 350-Plus for the next general election. State leaders are still reluctant to make any open claim about their hopes for 2019 polls but some say the party can win a minimum of five lok Sabha seats from Kerala.
“The Yatra is intended at exposing the murderous political violence the CPI(M) has been pursuing in the State for the past five decades and the anti-national activities of the Jehadi forces. It aims to spread awareness among the people about the insecurity these two terrors have created in Kerala,” said BJP’s national executive member PK Krishnadas.
The police have brought Payannur and the entire route of the March in the politically sensitive Kannur district under tight security cover. Hundreds of police personnel have been deployed across the district and dozens of senior officials also have been posted. “We are not leaving anything to chance though we don’t expect major troubles,” said a senior police official.
In New Delhi, Union Minister Prakash Javadekar said the Yatra would create awareness about what he said “Maoist kind of violence” unleashed by the CPI(M)-ruled Government on the workers of the BJP as the support base of the latter “has jumped to 15 per cent.”
As many as 120 BJP workers, 84 in Kannur alone, have been killed in the State since 2001 with 14 of them in the Chief Minister’s home town since he took the reigns last year, he alleged.