'Honourable' journey from custodial torture to Ayyappa sanghamam

Ajayan

# Ajayan | For the Left of yesteryears, the police was the iron fist of the State;  a dreaded tool of State torture and oppression. In their fiery youth, Pinarayi Vijayan and MV Govindan shouted themselves hoarse against it. Decades later, in power and in charge, the same police has neither mellowed, nor transformed, nor even pretended to. Custodial brutality flows in abundance, most often against the innocents they once claimed to champion. The deafening silence of the Chief Minister himself is proof that revolution loses its voice the moment it finds a chair.

The Varapuzha incident in 2018 is still raw in public memory. A young man, mistakenly picked up, was dragged into custody, and dragged out as a corpse. Leaders of every party rushed to console the grieving family. Everyone, that is, except the Chief Minister, who also wore the Home Minister’s cap. And what was the Government's idea of justice? A couple of token suspensions, followed by quiet reinstatements and even promotions.

The image of baton-wielding policemen and the Chief Minister’s own security guards thrashing protestors during the farcical Nava Kerala Yatra, even with flower pots snatched from the roadside, is not one the people of Kerala have forgotten. That was no accident. It was a preview.

Now, the Kunnamkulam station visuals - obtained only after a relentless legal battle - confirm what many suspected: brutality is not an aberration, it’s policy as exemplified by the tales of such tortures that are rolling out. Political opponents, ordinary citizens, fabricated cases, nothing is spared. None of this is new. Authorities knew, and they chose to look away, whether out of fear of those at the helm or sheer convenience, is anybody’s guess.

And the Opposition? Their protests are little more than tired theatre, stale lines recited without conviction, smilingly sharing an Onam lunch with the Chief Minister. Parallelly, the Chief Minister has perfected the art of silence;  not the dignified kind, but the sort that reeks of complicity.

Yet none of this seems to trouble those at the helm. The new obsession as part of electoral strategy is wooing the majority religion, wrapped in the pious banner of an Ayyappa Sanghamam. If it were truly about shrine infrastructure, there would be no circus. But for a government that once wore the cloak of “gender equality” at Sabarimala, built a crumbling “wall of renaissance”, and now parades itself as protector of the faithful after an electoral drubbing, this spectacle is little more than tragicomedy. This is to be followed by a meeting for minorities!

LoP V D Satheesan on Global Ayyappa Sangamam

The Chief Minister’s enthusiasm to praise a community leader infamous for spewing communal venom, his sudden declaration that the party now “stands for believers”, and the willingness to even hold Sri Krishna Jayanti processions scream not of conviction, but of helplessness. For a party that once swore by secular ideals, this is no reinvention. It is slow, humiliating surrender.

And surrender by whom? By leaders who now demand to be addressed as “Honourable”, thanks to a circular that makes the honorific mandatory in letters addressed to Ministers. If they were truly secure in their worth, would they need to issue reminders? The compulsion itself reeks of doubt. To call them “Honourable” in this context can only echo Mark Antony’s immortal sarcasm in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “Brutus is an honourable man.”