The Emergency, 50 years on: A father’s fight to ensure son’s death wasn’t lost in the darkness

Rajan, a final-year student of Regional Engineering College (REC, now NIT), Calicut, is believed to have been picked up by police in the early hours of March 1, 1976, during a manhunt in the wake of a suspected Naxal attack on a police station. Located 40 km from the REC at Kayanna in Kozhikode district, the police station had been attacked in the early hours of February 28, 1976, and the coalition government of the CPI and Congress was desperate to catch the culprits.

Active in cultural activities at the REC, Rajan was attending an arts festival at Farook College at the time. He was reportedly arrested just near the entrance of the REC as he made his way back.

As per reports that emerged later, Rajan was taken to a camp in Kakkayam set up by the police team probing the Kayanna attack. His hands were tied behind his head, and he was laid out on a bench, and interrogated endlessly. Unsatisfied with his replies, police beat him up and rolled a pestle-like object up and down his thighs, even as senior officers looked on.

The Indian Express report on May 24, 1977

The authorities admitted later that Rajan did not survive the beating. His body was quietly disposed of, with all evidence of him being brought to the camp removed.

On hearing that his son had been taken away by police, Warrier, a professor at Arts and Science College in Kozhikode, rushed to the Kakkayam camp. In his autobiography, Oru Achchante Ormakkurippukal (Memories of a Father), Warrier wrote that he tried to meet DIG Jayaram Padikkal at the camp but could not. (Padikkal later figured as one of the accused in the custodial death of Rajan.)

A police personnel told him “Your son is safe”, Warrier wrote. But when he asked to meet Rajan, he was denied permission.

Warrier returned, still hopeful Rajan would come back soon. But with no news still of his son, on March 10, he petitioned then home minister K Karunakaran, beginning his battle to find Rajan. When he got no reply from Karunakaran, he wrote to others higher up in the government, including then Chief Minister C Achutha Menon, whom Warrier knew personally. He also wrote to other politicians, MPs and MLAs, and went to several prisons in Kerala, hoping for clues.

(Express Archive, August 1975)

As the hunt kept hitting a dead end, Rajan’s mother Radha slowly lost her mind, while Warrier’s daughters Ramadevi and Shanthini fought ineffectually to offer solace.

In January 1977, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi announced Lok Sabha elections, taking the country by surprise. In Kerala, the Lok Sabha and Assembly polls were held simultaneously, and unlike the North where the Congress was routed, the party won both the polls in the state. Karunakaran now became the CM. Still, Warrier did not lose hope.

When political prisoners were released after the Emergency was lifted on March 21, 1977, he thought it was a matter of days before Rajan came home.

But with no news of Rajan again, on March 26, 1977, Warrier filed a habeas corpus petition in the Kerala High Court, the first such suit after the Emergency ended. Karunakaran was impleaded as he was the home minister when Rajan went missing.

On May 24, 1977, The Indian Express carried a front page report confirming Rajan’s death in police torture. Quoting from affidavits filed by Karunakaran and Padikkal, among others, before the Kerala High Court, it said that Rajan “died while in unlawful police custody at the Kayakkam police camp on March 2, 1976, as a result of continuous torture with iron and wooden rollers”.

In their affidavits, the respondents also claimed that they had come to know of Rajan’s death only a week earlier, when investigating officers submitted a report. Karunakaran had earlier filed an affidavit saying he had no knowledge Rajan was in police custody at any time.

Warrier moved another petition in court seeking action against Karunakaran and others, including police officers, for perjury. The court observed that “it was expedient in the interest of justice to lay a complaint against Karunakaran before (an) appropriate court”. This led to Karunakaran’s resignation as CM barely a month after he assumed the post.

Police, however, never linked Rajan’s arrest to the police station attack. Instead, they claimed he was involved in extremist activities.

Warrier now had eight cases filed in connection with his son’s disappearance, and moved in and out of courts fighting them. The case registered in connection with the torture and murder of Rajan was tried at a district court in Coimbatore, 200 km from Kozhikode, at the request of the accused officers.

Referring to the long hours of trial, Warrier said in his autobiography that the cross-examinations and questions only strengthened his resolve. Eventually, the police officers were convicted of torture and sentenced for a year, but the murder charge against them was not proved. Finally, even in the torture case, the police officers got relief from the high court.

In the civil case Warrier lodged, seeking compensation for Rajan’s death, he filed a pauper suit (filed by one who cannot pay the court fees). He was awarded Rs 6 lakh as compensation, of which around Rs 1 lakh went as court expenses. Warrier used the rest of the amount to establish a critical care ward at Government General Hospital, Ernakulam, and made endowments at Rajan’s REC.

CPI(M) Central Committee member and former minister T P Ramakrishnan, who was himself kept at the Kakkayam camp and says he was tortured, recalls hearing about a death at the time. Only later he and the others connected it to Rajan.

“On February 28, when the Kayanna Police Station was attacked, I was already under arrest for protests against the Emergency. Police thought the station attack was in retaliation to our arrest. I was at the camp when Rajan and the others were brought. We were all subjected to third-degree torture,’’ says Ramakrishnan, who was already associated with the CPI(M) by then.

Calling Rajan “innocent” and “a victim of the cruelty of an autocratic system”, the CPI(M) leader adds: “Those who killed him never regretted their actions nor disclosed what happened to his mortal remains. His parents died without getting that answer.”

In 1989, acclaimed director Shaji N Karun made the Malayalam-language movie Piravi (The Birth), telling the story of a father’s endless wait for his missing son, inspired by the Rajan case. It picked up several awards, including Cannes’s Caméra d’Or — Mention Spéciale.

In his autobiography, Warrier wrote about spending long hours, while it rained, listening to Rajan’s singing on a cassette recorder. “I am trying to retrieve a lost wave with this tape recorder,” he wrote. “The good earth is getting filled with songs till now unheard by me, this crude man. My son is standing outside, drenched in the rain… I still have no answer to the question of whether or not I feel vengeance. But I leave a question to the world: why are you making my innocent child stand in the rain even after his death? I don’t close the door, let the rain blow inside and drench me. Let at least my invisible son know that his father never shut the door.’’

In 2004, Oru Achchante Ormakkurippukal won the Kerala State Award. Two years later, having ensured Rajan an indelible space in one of Indian history’s darkest chapters, Warrier passed away at the age of 84.

In January this year, Rajan’s story again reverberated when students of his institute NIT-Calicut claimed that the authorities had made them drop a video featuring him from a college festival that, ironically, claims to be “inspired” by him.

There was no official word from the NIT-Calicut authorities on the matter.