Less than a week to his new outfit’s first poll outing in the local bodies election in Kerala, skeletons of the Emergency that he himself exhumed are now chasing K Karunakaran. They have also pushed the CPM, CPI and even the Congress into a sticky mess, in different ways.Trouble began when Karunakaran—he has hitched his Democratic Indira Congress (K) to the CPI(M) against the Congress-led ruling front—claimed last fortnight that he was not aware of police excesses in the state during the Emergency. At that time, he was Kerala’s powerful Home Minister.In the TV interview—to People, the CPI(M)’s second channel after Kairali—he disowned all responsibility for the excesses, especially the custodial killing of engineering student Rajan, which became the defining story of the Emergency in Kerala. In fact, Karunakaran was forced to quit after a month as chief minister in 1978 on this issue, after the Kerala High Court hauled him up for perjury—he deposed that the police never took Rajan into custody.After last month’s poll tie-up, the CPM has been busy trying to de-demonise the man it had hounded for years, and whom its Politburo member V S Achuthanandan has taken to Supreme Court on a corruption charge. In fact, the CPM channel made sure that the transcripts of the Karunakaran interview reached newspaper offices.But the move backfired, inviting widespread condemnation of Karunakaran’s claims, and the CPI(M) for its electoral truck with him. Pinarayi Vijayan, the state CPI(M) secretary who had proactively brokered the poll deal, claimed that Karunakaran was only a spokesman for the Congress during the Emergency. He also tried to dismiss the Rajan case as a non-issue in the poll.But Pinarayi’s clean chit invited more ridicule, since his own comrades had famously borne the brunt of Emergency excesses in Kerala. His hardline bete noire in the party, Achuthanandan, an Emergency victim himself, went on record that Karunakaran can never be absolved. Cornered, Pinarayi did a hasty back-flip. He stated that the Karunakaran was responsible for all Emergency excesses, and the blame will remain with him till his end.‘‘There is no inconsistency in our perception of the Emergency and Karunakaran’s role. The media missed the spirit and stress of what Pinarayi had said first, so he clarified it the second time. That’s all,’’ said M A Baby, CPI(M) central committee member.‘‘How can the Congress say that our enlisting Karunakaran’s support is immoral? Why are they silent about our support of the Congress at the Centre? After all, that party commissioned more Emergency excesses there than here, including forced sterilisations,’’ he adds.Karunakaran, meanwhile, is sticking to his stance that his measures during Emergency helped crush the Naxalite menace in Kerala. ‘‘All that had happened 29 years ago and I don’t remember anything more than what you already know. But I also know that you have dubious intentions, raking this up just before an election. I have nothing to say,’’ Karunakaran told The Indian Express.The Congress, whose lameduck Kerala government is on a tough electoral wicket, has been quick to swipe at the CPI(M) for yoking itself to Karunakaran, while carefully steering clear of denouncing the Emergency. But to its discomfiture, its former CM A K Antony stated yesterday that Karunakaran alone cannot be held responsible for all that happened then.The CPI is in no better state, either. Its senior leader C Achutha Menon had led the state government during the Emergency. The party is now busy claiming that Karunakaran had got all the mischief done, and not told Menon about it.‘‘It is on record that Menon was deeply pained that he was not informed about the excesses. Yet he, and our party, had never shied from owning up moral responsibility for it as he was then the CM. But it was Karunakaran who was looking after the police, as Home Minister. If he is serious that the police had hidden things from him, he should come out with the possible motives,’’ says Pannian Raveendran, the CPI’s Assistant Secretary.This is not for the first time that the Emergency is returning to haunt Karunakaran in recent times. His daughter Padmaja, whom he failed to get elected to the Lok Sabha last year, was sued for defamation by Rajan’s father last year, after she said during her campaign that the slain student was a Naxalite. She got off with an apology.But more trouble may be on the way. Former Naxalite leader K Ajitha has declared that she would sue Karunakaran, unless he disclosed what happened to Rajan’s body after the police killed him. The body was never found.
