The Kerala CPI(M) is known for its alleged habit of “inventing” culprits in serious crimes with party involvement and providing the police with lists of partymen they should arrest but this has now landed its Ernakulam district unit in trouble following the suicide of a member of its trade union, CITU, after leaders allegedly implicated him in an attempt-to-murder case.
Pressure is now mounting on the Kochi Police to register cases against certain CPI(M) leaders after the widow, mother and other relatives of Ashraf (46) who committed suicide in the wee hours of May 30 allegedly after being listed as the first accused by the party in a case relating to an attack on Kochi-based goonda Thammanam Shaji and some of his fellow gangsters.
“My husband had pleaded with the party leaders to exempt his name from the list but they did not listen. They told him that it was a party decision,” said Ashraf’s wife Azura. His brother Aboobacker said that Ashraf’s colleagues in the CITU, with whom he worked for over 18 years, had not visited his relatives after the tragedy. The police, under pressure from the local people to register cases against certain CPI(M) leaders for forcing Ashraf to commit suicide, said that neither the Marxist party leaders nor anybody else had given any list to them with Ashraf’s name. They also said that no case had been registered against Ashraf for the attack on Shaji.
However, Ashraf’s relatives are firm in their allegation. They lodged a complaint with the police on Wednesday in this regard. They also submitted a complaint to Dinesh Mani, CPI(M)’s Ernakulam district secretary, asking him to hold a party-level probe into the role of certain leaders in forcing Ashraf to take the extreme step.
“The party leaders are now saying that Ashraf had committed suicide because of financial troubles. We are his family and we know he had no such financial problem,” says Azura. “He owned two houses in Kochi city itself and had recently won a lottery prize of 201 sovereigns of gold (costing over Rs40 lakh),” Azura said.
According to her, Ashraf had left the house at about 8.30 pm May 29 and came back by about 2 am. “He said I should not tell anyone about his return to the house. He was in a restless state till about 4 am and then I slept,” she said. It was the neighbours who first saw the body of Ashraf hanging on the terrace of the house.
Shaji now says that he had known Ashraf for several years and that he was not there in the gang that attacked him on the night of May 24. He also says that seven out of the eight persons arrested by the police were not there in the gang of assailants. It is said that the attack on Shaji was over his alleged relations with a constituent party in the Congress-led ruling UDF.
The CPI(M) has often been accused of “inventing” the accused (from the party itself) in cases of crimes in which the party was involved. Such incidents have mostly been reported from the northern Kannur district, known as the Marxist heartland of Kerala where hundreds had been killed in the past four decades in incidents of political violence.