In Kerala, a mob and its many faces

Ramnarayan Baghel likely experienced this threat during the short time he was in the area. That was perhaps why he carried a stick and a stone in his hands as he walked through those largely secluded roads on December 17, Wednesday.

The dogs did not attack him. Humans did.

From Karhi village in Sakti district of Chhattisgarh, Ramnarayan, 31, had arrived in Kerala only two days earlier as a migrant worker. That afternoon, as Ramnarayan, wearing a green t-shirt and a pair of grey trousers, walked down the Puthussery panchayat road in Attappallam, the attack unfolded not with suddenness but with gathering intent. The men — and some women — came to the spot in ones and twos, some still in work clothes, almost all holding mobile phones.

Ramnarayan Baghel soon after he was attacked. (Video Grab)

By the time it ended, Ramnarayan lay fatally injured, the victim of a mob whose members cut across party lines, occupations and age groups, and whose suspicions were sharpened by a now familiar and dangerous idea: that he might be a “Bangladeshi”.

In a state where migrants or “guest workers” form the backbone of the economy, where the government has gone out of its way to accommodate them, the attack was unsettling. The ruling CPI(M) has called the murder a result of “Sangh Parivar’s hate politics” since four of the seven men arrested so far are reportedly linked to the BJP or the RSS. The BJP, in turn, has blamed the CPI(M), with its leader V Muraleedharan saying, “The ruling CPI(M) is trying to put the blame for the mob lynching in Palakkad on the BJP and RSS. Around 15-20 people were involved in the lynching, including CPI(M) workers.”

A Special Investigation Team led by Crime Branch Deputy Superintendent of Police M Gopakumar is probing the case. The State Human Rights Commission has also taken suo motu cognisance of the incident, ordered an inquiry, and directed the Palakkad district police chief to submit a detailed report in three weeks.

In the wrong place, wrong time

Ramnarayan and a few other men from Chhattisgarh reached Palakkad on the morning of December 15, Monday. Construction worker supervisor Shashikant Baghel, who hails from Ramnarayan’s village and is a relative, had brought them to Kerala, hoping to find them work at Bharat Petroleum’s facility within the KINFRA Integrated Industrial and Textile Park at Kanjikode in Palakkad. Those who accompanied him say Ramnarayan did not want to work at the facility and insisted on returning home. They say he left their lodging at Kanjikode on December 16, barely 24 hours after arriving in Kerala. That’s the last they saw of him. They know little of how he reached Attappallam a day later, or what he did in the intervening period.

At Attappallam junction, Babu Antony, an auto driver, is among those who saw Ramnarayan before the mob attack. “I was on my way from Attappallam to Coimbatore to deliver an order. It must have been around 2 pm. I saw a man approaching from the opposite direction, holding a stick in his left hand and a stone in the right. He looked mentally unstable. And something in my mind said it was not safe to proceed,” recalls Babu.

Babu swerved the auto into a narrow street to his right, and shouted at the houses, urging people to come out. By the time a few of them emerged, and they returned to the original spot, Ramnarayan was gone.

“I did not waste any more time there and proceeded with my delivery. It was only the next morning that I got to know that the man I saw was beaten to death by a few people,” says Babu.

From the spot where Babu saw him, Ramnarayan is believed to have moved to a coconut grove where women were working under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (now VB-G RAM G).

Sasikala, among those in the group that day, says, “Seeing the stone and stick in his hands, some women thought he would attack us. They yelled ‘thief’ and cried for help.”

That’s when a few men led by A Anu, 38, now identified as the main accused, jumped into the scene. As Ramnarayan started to run, they caught hold of him, started interrogating him and allegedly beat him up.

Though some reports claimed that the women in the village also thrashed Ramnarayan, Sasikala denies this. “In fact, we asked the men to stop. But they continued to hit him, thinking he was a thief.”

The attack continued for at least an hour before Ramnarayan reportedly vomited blood. The police reached the spot and took him to the Palakkad district government hospital, where, around 7.35 pm, he succumbed to internal injuries.

The post-mortem report revealed over 80 injuries, including severe wounds on the head. Dr Hithesh Shankar, who conducted the post-mortem procedure, told the media, “His ribs were shattered and his spine was broken. Most of the wounds were inflicted with sticks. I have conducted more than 10,000 post-mortem examinations, but I have never seen a body subjected to such severe violence.”

Sreedharan, a resident of Attappallam, says Ramnarayan may have lost his way and ended up on the village road. “Usually, migrant workers don’t take these roads. They are mostly based in Kanjikode. That could be one of the reasons why people got suspicious when they saw him.”

But the suspicion attached to someone who didn’t seemingly belong — Ramnarayan appeared dishevelled, disoriented, spoke haltingly — was shaped by other factors.

In recent months, the area had lived with an undercurrent of anxiety. Only two weeks before the attack on Ramnarayan, an alleged robbery attempt at a temple about 6 km away had circulated in the form of images and WhatsApp forwards. In those images, accessed by The Indian Express, people are seen beating up a disoriented man outside the Vinayaka temple after he allegedly tried to enter the sanctum sanctorum. The case went nowhere — it remains unresolved and undocumented, unknown even to the Special Branch, the intelligence wing of the Kerala Police. But the memory lingered.

Sreedharan talks of another incident that was at the back of people’s minds. “The Saturday before the attack (on Ramnarayan), an unidentified person had put his hands through the window of one of the homes in eastern Attappallam and attempted to rob the anklet of a woman who was sleeping,” he says. Here, too, no case was registered.

So when Ramnarayan came to Attappallam that afternoon, without the social codes needed to move unnoticed, he did not know the place was already primed by fear.

The mob that attacked

Speaking to The Indian Express, M B Rajesh, Minister for Local Self Governments and MLA from Thrithala in Palakkad, calls the murder a “result of right-wing propaganda”.

“The BJP’s politics of hate and violence is clear. Their propaganda is that all outsiders are illegal migrants and such people have to be dealt with forcefully. BJP-RSS workers stopped a Christmas carol in the same village this year. This is not just a law-and-order issue. The government will take all measures to address such hate politics,” he says.

The spot where Ramnarayan was attacked. (Express photo by Narayanan S)

However, what linked the attackers that afternoon was not party allegiance, but atmosphere. “There is politics here, yes, but it is not black and white,” says a senior police officer who is aware of the facts of the investigation. “It was not an organised Sangh Parivar mob. But the language and suspicion shaped by right-wing narratives played a part,” he says.

And so, the suspicion swiftly shifted shape — from thief to outsider to “Bangladeshi”, a word that, in the current political climate, is often weaponised as a moral accusation. “Once ‘Bangladeshi’ entered the conversation, maybe everything the mob did after seemed justifiable to them,” says the officer.

By the time the police arrived, the crowd had dispersed. What remained were videos, injuries, and a familiar pattern: faceless, collective violence.

Yet, many of the phones that captured the violence were never seized. By the time the SIT took over, several suspects had fled, reportedly to Tamil Nadu.

There were other flaws in the early investigation. The original FIR did not include mob-lynching provisions and police took their time to invoke the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, citing difficulties in securing a caste certification for the victim. All political parties claimed ignorance or denied reports about the political affiliations of the accused.

Police records list seven accused so far. Most of them, police say, have prior cases involving violence. All held precarious jobs in the local economy — drivers, casual workers, fabricators.

Anu, 38, a driver who has been intermittently jobless, is described in police records as having more than 15 prior cases across stations, ranging from assault to rioting. He is a “BJP sympathiser”, police sources and local residents say, but not a party worker. He has previously been accused in an attack on DYFI members.

Accused Anu, a driver, he has more than 15 cases, ranging from assault to rioting. He is also an accused in an earlier attack on DYFI members. Police sources say he is a “BJP sympathiser”, but not a party worker.

C Prasad, 34, a welder and a “BJP sympathiser”, is alleged to have beaten Ramnarayan with a stick. Murali, 38, an aluminium fabrication worker, too is described by investigators as a BJP sympathiser. Anandan, 55, a head-load worker affiliated with CITU, the CPI(M)-backed trade union, allegedly kicked Ramnarayan in the abdomen. K Bipin, 30, a BJP sympathiser and co-accused with Anu in the case involving DYFI workers, is accused of assaulting Ramnarayan.

Accused K Vipin (left), a “BJP sympathiser”, is accused in an attack on DYFI workers. Accused C Prasad, a welder, is a “BJP sympathiser”, according to police sources.

The SIT later arrested two other daily-wage labourers — Jagadeesh Kumar, 47, and Vinod Kumar, 54. While police have identified Vinod as a Congress sympathiser, there is no mention of Jagadeesh’s political affiliation.

Accused Murali (left) is a fabrication worker. The police say he is a “BJP sympathiser”. Accused Anandan, a head-load worker, is affiliated with CITU.

‘A huge mistake’

Unnikrishnan, the uncle of first accused Anu, says his nephew did not intend to kill Ramnarayan. “They all thought he was a thief. In fact, after the first few blows, Anu asked the others to step back and hand him over to the police. Whatever happened was a huge mistake, but it wasn’t intentional. Anu even took the man to the hospital.”

He says Anu’s BJP’s links are exaggerated. “He is just a BJP supporter. He may be wearing a saffron mundu and sporting a thread on his hand, but that does not make him a member of the party,” says Unnikrishnan, who lives in eastern Attappallam.

He says there was no malicious intent behind the crowd asking Ramnarayan if he was a Bangladeshi. “It is a routine question we ask when we see a stranger in our area.”

Chandran, the father of another accused, Prasad, says the attack and his son’s arrest have worsened the family’s precarity. “My son is a fabric welding worker. His earnings were our main income. I go for some painting work. We don’t have any land. Even our house is mortgaged for my daughter’s wedding,” says Chandran.

Around 5 km away, at the nearby KINFRA park where Ramnarayan would have worked had things gone to plan, Nazir Hussain looks surprised when told about the lynching.

A worker from Assam, he is on his way to his room at Apna Ghar, the Kerala government’s lodging facility for migrant workers, with a packet of tomatoes and eggs for dinner. “Here, we don’t have much connection with the outside world. We go to work and our shift usually lasts 12 hours. After that, we return, cook, eat and sleep,” he says.

But the incident had taken on a life of its own on social media.

Hussain takes out his keypad phone. “I have no Facebook. I use my phone only to call my family.”