KASARAGOD: C Sivadasan, 73, is living an old curse of a sub-inspector of Alappuzha South police station. In November 1975, while the officer was raining punches on the chest of a 29-year-old Sivadasan, he had just one wish. “One day you will get out of this station but you should not live healthily,” the officer had told him. Today, the septuagenarian is bedridden with a weak spine and heart; and his body trembles. “I’m happy our democracy is healthy,” says Sivadasan on phone from Atholi in Kozhikode.
Sivadasan was among the around 8,000 persons picked up during Emergency in Kerala and subjected to unspeakable police brutality during the darkest 19 months of Indian democracy.
“No other political protest anywhere in the world had seen 1.75 lakh political activists put in prison at a given time,” says Vaikkom Gopakumar, 70, who was then RSS chief in Alappuzha. He was arrested on August 1, 1976, for spearheading various protests against Emergency. After his arrest, the police kept him in an old building near the police station at Muppalam in Alappuzha and assaulted him for 16 days. “The police would take me to a corner and bang my head against a wall and it would rebound and hit the next wall,” says Gopakumar.
The officer who headed the interrogation room, Gopinathan Nair, used to drag Gopakumar by holding on to his penis and scrotum. “It was a new technique the officer experimented on me,” he says.
In 2000, on the 25th anniversary of Emergency, Gopakumar had to undergo a surgery to remove his testes. He is now battling cancer too. “Pain has become my constant companion,” he says.
“When I was brought to the magistrate’s house, the officer left me outside and went in to get the documents signed. I was in bad shape after 16 days of torture,” he says. “My eyes were swollen. I could not stand after they rolled wooden stick over my legs and hit my spine,” he says.
Sivadasan recalled how the police used to ‘fly aeroplane’ on protesters. “They tied my arms behind my back and made me run in the room while constantly kicking me and hitting me with the butt of the rifle,” he says.
After nine days of brutality, he was sent to Thiruvananthapuram Central Prison. He remained in jail for 16 months and was out on March 22, 1977, after Emergency was revoked.
K Purushothama Pai, who is in Kochi, is deaf. “The police ensured he never heard the din of democracy he fought to protect,” says V Raveendran, state secretary of the Association of Emergency Victims.
Pai, who had participated in satyagraha, was picked up thrice by police. Only on the last arrest was he sent to Ernakulam Sub-Jail. “Once an officer put two claws of chicken in his ears and gave him the dreaded double ear slap. He has been deaf since then,” says Raveendran, a former president of Kasaragod’s BJP unit.
Raveendran was among the first seven persons to be arrested in Kerala after Emergency was declared. “We were picked up on July 2, 1975, in Kozhikode, a week after Emergency was declared,” he says. The seven persons were blindfolded and assaulted in Kozhikode police station.
Back in Kasaragod, Raveendran said he and other Sangh leaders organised frequent protests in the district under the banner of ‘Total Revolution’ of Jayaprakash Narayan.
“In Kerala, Kasaragod taluk had the highest number of persons arrested during Emergency,” he says. Eight hundred of the nearly 8,000 persons sent to jail were from Kasaragod. “Here, the police did not resort to the brutality we saw in the rest of Kerala,” he says. The police in Kasaragod resorted to burning down crops of leaders, he says.
Protestors in Kasaragod hung the framed photograph of Mahatma Gandhi over their neck and kept raising the slogans ‘Revoke Emergency, Restore Democracy’. “We were lathi-charged till their batons broke, but we did not inch back,” says Raveendran.
Association of Emergency Victims is documenting the experiences of each of the protesters who were arrested or were brutalised by police during Emergency. “We are trying to ensure the Kerala Government gives them pension on a par with freedom fighters. Eleven states in the country are giving pension ranging between Rs 5,000 and Rs 15,000 to Emergency fighters,” says Raveendran.
Will India see another Emergency? “India is so diverse that nothing except democracy will work in the country,” says Sivadasan.