The Kerala Police claim that the Maoist they arrested from Kannur the other day could have masterminded the left extremist attack on the corporate office of a gelatin manufacturing company in Kochi in November even as the CPI(Maoist) has said its three-month Phase 1 campaign has concluded successfully.
KV Jose, a native of Kelakam in Kannur, was arrested on Tuesday night on the basis of the police’s assumption that he had participated in the conspiracy behind the Maoist attack on the office of Nitta Gelatin ltd at Panampally Nagar in the heart of Kochi city on November 10 last, according to sources.
Five persons have been arrested for Maoist connections since that date. The Kochi police had arrested two persons, both human rights activists, on January 30 after the project office of the National Highways Authority of India at Kalamassery was vandalized by suspected Maoists the previous day. These arrests had given rise to a lot of protests from rights activists.
Two young men, Arun Balan and Srikanth Prabhakar, were arrested on December 22 immediately after a left extremist attack on the outlets of KFC and McDonald’s in Palakkad town. The police had claimed that both of them had connections with the attack on the Nitta Gelatin office.
According to police sources, Jose was arrested on the basis of secret information about his involvement in the conspiracy behind the attack on the gelatin firm office. They said that the phones of all the Maoist operatives in Kerala had been switched off immediately after the attack on the gelatin company’s office.
Sources aired the suspicion that Jose could have coordinated Maoist teams for some of the actions they had carried out in Kerala in the past three months. Nine attacks by suspected Maoists had taken place in Kerala between November 10 and January 29 of which four were on Government offices and another four on private establishments.
Meanwhile, protests have been on the rise, especially in social networking sites, against the police’s method of taking human rights workers into custody without any evidence of extremist background in the name of hunt for Maoists. Protestors allege that the State Government itself has adopted a policy of harassing rights workers.
However, the Government made it clear on Wednesday that stringent action would be taken against those human rights activists who were helping the Maoists. State Home Minister Ramesh Chennithala said that certain rights organizations were under the police scanner for helping the extremists but added that the police had been instructed not to harass innocents.
Meanwhile, a statement reportedly issued by the Western Ghats Special Zonal Committee of the CPI(Maoist) claimed that its three-month political and military campaign had brought the relevance of armed struggle into the agenda of political discussions in the State once again.
The outlawed outfit said it had been able to bring to the fore issues like illegal mining and quarrying, mafia operations in land deals and tourism and operation of “blade mafias” (private loan sharks).