This was heartwarming symbolism. On February 22, while laying the foundation stone for the new district committee office at Kasaragod, chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan used damning words to describe the Periya twin murders. He called the murders 'shameless', he called it 'senseless', and said it could not be justified by any means. What's more, Pinarayi even expressed a wish to visit the houses of the slain Youth Congress workers. This was absolutely out of character.

Was the chief minister laying the foundation stone for a new brand of politics in Kannur? Former Naxal and noted social critic K Venu said the chief minister was only trying to soften as much as possible the damage the murders had done to the party on the eve of Lok Sabha polls. K K Rema, wife of slain RMP leader T P Chandrasekharan, too, said it was just a ruse to fool the people.

Writer and former journalist Appukuttan Vallikkunnu, too, was indifferent. He said this was what the chief minister had said when another Youth Congress leader, Shuhaib, was killed exactly a year ago. Nonetheless, Ullekh N P who had written the bestseller 'Kannur: Inside India's Bloodiest Revenge Politics', said he was surprised at this 'departure'. “After E M S Namboodiripad, not a single top CPM leader has spoken like this,” he said. (In 1993, EMS had vehemently distanced the party from the workers who had set fire to the Pappinissery Snake Park managed by political rival M V Raghavan.)

Pinarayi's butterfly stage

Pinarayi's response to the Periya murders did give Ullekh a pleasant jolt. Still, he felt that Pinarayi had shown signs of change the moment he took over as chief minister. “Here was a man who we thought could respond to issues only as a party secretary,” Ullekh said.

Kerala has still not forgotten the chillingly cold manner in which Pinarayi took on questions about the murder of T P Chandrasekharan. “A class traitor will always remain a class traitor,” Pinarayi had then said. TP's widow was more pained by another statement of Pinarayi. When told that the murder had shaken the state's psyche, Pinarayi had said: “It depends on the mental state of a person.”

“Then I knew this was a heartless man with not a drop of sympathy in his heart,” Rema told Onmanorama.

But Ullekh had sensed a transformation in 2016. “When he became chief minister he was even willing to shed protocol to secretly meet top RSS leaders to sort out issues in Kannur,” Ullekh said. His book speaks of how Pinarayi, usually a leader with abrasive tendencies, keeps on a smile all through and tries hard to engage RSS' Gopalankutty Master who had adopted a combative stance at the meeting. “Such a meeting was considered unthinkable and was not disclosed to the media for a while, for there was a mutual understanding to keep these talks low profile; the intention was to gradually communicate the need to bring the rank and file on to the same page,” Ullekh writes in the book.

A girl's mercy plea

Appukuttan Vallikkunnu said that if at all Pinarayi was trying to transform himself, there was no proof yet of it. Ten days after the death of Shuhaib on February 12, 2018, his little sister Sumayya had written an open letter to the chief minister. “She had asked for a promise from the chief minister and he had still not given it,” Vallikkunnu said.

This is what Sumayya told the chief minister in her letter. “Let our 'ikka' be the last name in the ledger of political killings. Let no more lives be taken away in this manner. Can you give an assurance to us and to innumerable families that had suffered like ours that such cruelties will not be repeated.”

The letter did not elicit any response from the chief minister. “Even then, during the party congress held in Thrissur last February, the only thing he said was that the CPM was a party that suffered like no other,” Vallikkunnu said. This time, too, the chief minister has played the martyr card. “The CPM is a party that is fully aware of the pain that comes from being the victim of violence. This is a party that has suffered a lot. This is a party that had stood looking at the death of many of its own with suppressed pain. This is not a party that will attempt to kill anyone,” he told the media after the Periya murders.

Rumblings within

K Venu views this as mere survival technique, nothing more. “It is sheer common sense that the murders will affect the party's electoral chances. So he is trying to soften the impact as much as possible,” Venu said. “There is also a huge groundswell of anger within the party against this politics of violence. The chief minister cannot ignore it either,” he said.

Ullekh, too, feels that the party is gradually realising that it cannot progress with such type of politics. “There is a section within the party that still spreads the canard that the party will be considerably weakened if violence is jettisoned as a political tool. This is quackery,” he said. “When M V Govindan Master was the Kannur district secretary, he had booted out all violent elements from the party. Political violence dropped dramatically and the party gained, too,” Ullekh said. M V Govindan was Kannur district secretary from 2002 to 2006. In the 2006 elections, the CPM had secured the largest number of seats in history.

Stranglehold of Stalin

But according to Venu, a change can happen only if the party comes out of its Stalinist framework. “Their ideology or organisational structure has no space for democracy. There is not even an attempt at democratisation,” Venu said. During the Vishakhapatnam Party Congress in 2015, a young CPM leader P Krishna Prasad, associated with the V S Achuthanandan group, had wanted to insert a clause in the party resolution that would end dictatorial tendencies in the party. He was shown his place.

Ideological rigidity could be self-destructive in the long run. “The dictatorship of the proletariat is the party's stated political agenda. This in practice means all forces inimical to the party has to be mandatorily wiped out. Annihilation is in the DNA of the party,” Venu said. Many Marxist and socialist parties the world over have managed to bring about democratic changes after the failure of the Soviet Union. “India's CPM is the only party that still holds on to the old Stalinist methods,” Venu said.

Even its ally, the CPI, has dumped the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' policy in 2014, and has emphasised democratic means to achieve political ends.

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