Recently Mr. Karunakaran made a tall claim that there are no more extremist movements in Kerala because of his governing tactics. I feel that the Kayanna police station attack by the Maoist extremists, and the resultant police action, was what made Mr. Karunakaran make such a claim.
On February 28, 1976, a group of people attacked the police station at Kayanna and took away a gun. The authorities simply assumed that this was a Maoist-Naxalite action. To enquire into this police station attack, the police set up the camp at Kakkayam, in that shed on the hill by the pond. After the police station attack, from February 29, police started hunting youngsters from nearby places like Kayanna, Koorachundu and Kakkayam. They were taken to the camp and brutally tortured. Police brought people in vans to the camp day in and day out over many days.
Mr. Jayaram Padikkal was in charge of the enquiry, and the camp. This Deputy Inspector General of the crime branch police had had training at Scotland Yard in England, but the mode of enquiry used at Kakkayam never involved any modern or scientific methods for detecting crimes. Torture was the only method the police there knew, and they used it freely.
On March 1 the police went to the Chathamangalam Engineering College to arrest the so-called culprits. The ‘D Zone’ youth festival of the Calicut University had been held at Farooke College. Rajan was an active participant at that youth festival, and was in Farooke College all through the night on February 28, when the Kayanna police station attack had occurred. He came back to the Engineering College hostel early the next morning, and was immediately nabbed by the police.
The police could easily have checked Rajan’s whereabouts on February 28 by enquiring at Farooke College. All the students and teachers who came back from Farooke College were witnesses to this. But the police didn’t ask any one of them. They were not truly interested in finding out who was behind the police station attack and how many had participated. Without complying with any legal formalities they simply took Rajan first to Calicut and then to Kakkayam.
I don’t know whether I will be strong enough to describe the torture that my son underwent at the Kakkayam camp. Like the torture at Hitler’s concentration camps, what went on at Kakkayam was an experiment, undemocratic and heartless, to find out whether the intellectual honesty and sense of justice of a generation could be destroyed by the power of an iron fist. How much Mr. Jayaram Padikkal succeeded in this experiment is something for history to evaluate.
My words might get caught in a storm of emotions and sweep on the reader. I remember Rajan as the kid who held my fingers and toddled, innocently calling ‘father, father’. He still is a kid to me. Hence my evaluation of what happened to him might sound partial. Please do not take it as the impropriety of a father who lost his son. I see generations lowering their heads in shame when they hear of Kakkayam camp. I believe that forever there will be a flower born of tears in the highflying flag of democratic Kerala. Though I have spoken of it often, I cannot but go on talking about Kakkayam camp till my last breath. Even when I go senile in old age I will still be talking about it.
