Alappuzha: In a dusty room at Alappuzha’s Municipal Sathram complex, located opposite the district court, Lisha Ranjith was busy juggling work and phone calls. The room was stacked with bundles of case documents, and on the wall hung a framed rectangular photo of her husband, advocate Ranjith Sreenivasan.
Last month, 14 men associated with the banned Popular Front of India (PFI) were sentenced to death for the 2021 killing of the advocate, also a BJP leader, marking the first time so many people were given capital punishment at once in Kerala.
Days after the order, issued by the Mavelikkara additional sessions court, Lisha, 45, told ThePrint that she had drawn great succour from the judgment.
“I feel peaceful now, after so long,” she said, adding that she was not willing to delve further into the matter.
According to the court, Sreenivasan’s murder was part of a series of revenge killings that started with the murder of a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) worker, Nandu R. Krishna (24), on 24 February 2021.
In her order dated 30 January, Judge V.G. Sreedevi said the offence qualified as “rarest of rare”, and “showed an element of perversity which could be attributed to the minds of frustrated men who totally lacked human sensibility”.
Sreenivasan was hacked to death at his house, in front of his mother, wife and younger daughter, aged 11 at the time.
The murderers had barged into their home hours after K.S. Shan, the state secretary of the Social Demicratic Party of India (SDPI), the PFI’s political arm, was fatally attacked around 8 pm on 18 December 2021, in Alappuazha’s Mannanchery.
While 13 RSS workers have been arrested by police in connection with Shan’s killing, they are all out on bail.
A day after the court pronounced the verdict in the Sreenivasan case, a plea was filed in the Alappuzha additional sessions court to quash their bail. The hearing in the matter is scheduled for Tuesday.
The SDPI has pointed to the two cases — the fact that the trial in Sreenivasan’s case was wrapped up in less than a year — to allege bias.
The “double justice”, the SDPI leadership said in a statement after the judgment, shows an alliance between the state’s Left Democratic Front (LDF) government and the Sangh Parivar.
Sreenivasan (45), who practised in the Alappuzha Bar, was the state secretary of the BJP OBC Morcha. He had also contested as a BJP candidate in the 2016 assembly polls from Alappuzha constituency.
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The case
RSS worker Krishna, the Valayar native whose killing is believed to have started this cycle of murders, was allegedly hacked to death by SDPI members following a clash between the two groups in Cherthala.
The clashes erupted amid tensions in the district after the SDPI held a protest march against Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s visit to Kerala’s Kasaragod — to inaugurate the BJP’s ‘Vijaya Yatra,’ a march led by party chief K. Surendran — on 21 February 2021.
The court order said there had been apprehension that a prominent SDPI leader would be attacked in retaliation, and Shan’s killing followed 1o months later.
According to the prosecution in Sreenivasan’s case, early in the morning on 19 December, the accused trespassed into the victim’s house at Vellakinar, armed with hammers, swords, hatchets, and choppers.
The judgment quotes his mother as saying that the men attacked the advocate in the dining hall of the house.
The accused restrained her, and also attacked her with a sword. The daughter, who was sleeping in a nearby room, woke up from the noise, and ended up witnessing the attack, according to the statements.
The accused, who fled the scene after the attack, were arrested between 28 December 2021 and 3 March 2022.
They have been identified as Naisam, Ajmal, Anoop, Muhammed Aslam, Safarudheen, Manshad, Jaseeb Raja, Sameer, Naseer, Sakeer Hussain, Shaji, Shernas Asharaf, Navas and two namesakes, Abdul Kalam, who work as coolies in Alappuzha.
While the mother identified 12 of the 15 accused, the wife and daughter identified eight. The three were among 156 witnesses assessed in the case.
The defence, however, challenged the identification of the accused by the lawyer’s family members, noting that the offence would have taken no more than three minutes, and that the assailants had arrived on a motorcycle and sped away later.
The daughter, they also pointed out, had said the attackers had their faces covered with towels.
“They have been tutored by showing the photographs of the accused persons and there is further case that the photos of the accused persons have been taken from online media,” the defence said, as quoted in the judgment.
Among other things, the court relied on CCTV footage, which helped back up the statements of other witnesses who said they had seen the convicts hatching the conspiracy at different locations in the district.
“The pertinent aspect to be noted is that all the occurrence witnesses… have witnessed this tragic incident of attack on the advocate and all of them have deposed the heartbroken incident before the court,” the judgment notes. “There was no contradiction at all with respect to the incident narrated by these witnesses.”
The court found the convicts guilty on several counts, including murder, unlawful assembly, rioting, criminal conspiracy, criminal intimidation, and causing hurt by dangerous weapons or means.
Sentencing them to death, the judge said while there is no proof to show the accused are hardened criminals, the district collector’s report showed that chances of reformation were slim “as they have the spirit that what they have done is correct and they have justified that act for their organisation”.
“When a murder has been planned beforehand and has been committed with cruelty or for a sordid purpose, and without least trace of any spirit of fair play or sportsmanship without giving a chance to the victim, it should necessarily be punished with an extreme sentence,” the order said.
While 14 were sentenced to death, the 15th, Navas, is hospitalised, and the sentence for him wasn’t announced at the time.
The trial in the case started on 17 April last year and ended on 6 January.
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A never-ending cycle of violence
According to a December 2023 National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report, Kerala reported seven murders due to political reasons in 2022.
The state, the report says, recorded the fourth highest number of political killings after Jharkhand (17) and Bihar and Odisha (eight each).
Between 2016 and 2022, NCRB data shows, Kerala reported 42 political murders, of which 15 happened in 2016, the year of assembly elections. Nationwide, this was the third highest after Jharkhand (92) and Bihar (85).
Last month saw another conviction in a case of political killings in the state as a special court in Kozhikode, on 22 January, found 12 men — including some local CPI(M) leaders — guilty for the 2012 murder of T.P. Chandrasekharan.
Chandrasekharan was killed in Kozhikode’s Onchiyam four years after he formed the Revolutionary Marxist Party (RMP) following his expulsion from the CPI(M).
Another prominent case took place in November 2021, when RSS worker Sanjith was hacked to death in Palakkad’s Mambaram in front of his wife. The trial in the case, which has several PFI members as accused, is underway in a sessions court.
In April 2022, PFI worker A. Subair (44) was murdered in front of his father in the same area. Three RSS members were arrested in connection with the case. The day after the killing, an RSS leader, Sreenivasan, was killed in the district.
Police arrested over 20 people, including SDPI-PFI members, for the killing, but the probe was eventually taken over by the National Investigation Agency and has yet to be concluded.
Among Kerala residents, this seemingly endless cycle of violence waged in the name of two rival ideologies has sparked a sense of weariness.
At Vellakinar, where advocate Ranjith Sreenivasan lived, residents said the murder was a closed chapter for them.
“It’s been two years and it’s over now,” said a local tailor who didn’t want to be named. “I hardly remember anything.”
(Edited by Sunanda Ranjan)
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