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The Story of Torture Victim Ayinoor Vasu
Fr. [Dr.] J. J. Pallath
[Ed. Note: This story is the first in a series of interviews that the author will conduct with past and present torture victims in India for Human Rights SOLIDARITY. This first interview recounts the painful experiences several decades ago of Ayinoor Vasu, a trade union and social activist in Kozhikode in the Indian state of Kerala who is now 73 years old.]
Ayinoor Vasu began working in the Commonwealth Trust Weaving Mill in Kozhikode in Kerala at the age of 16 in 1946, and he became a worker of the banned Communist Party as a young boy. As early as 1948, while leading a demonstration against the Commonwealth administration, the police beat him up. His leg still bears the mark of this violent incident.
In 1967, Vasu was among the group of people who formed the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), or CPI (ML), a breakaway party from the Communist Party of India (Marxist), known also as CPI (M). The CPI (ML), which believed in the ideology of armed revolution at the time, was known in this part of India as Naxalites, an offshoot of the Naxalbari group that first implemented the ideology of armed revolution.
As a result of their ideology, the Naxalites began attacking landlords and killing some of them in the villages of Kerala. Their agenda was to work underground to eliminate the oppressive landlords, or janmis. Meanwhile, a faction decided to attack police stations to acquire arms for their operations against the landlords. Vasu, however, belonged to the group of Naxalites that was against attacking police stations, but the faction led by Kunnikkal Narayanan, defying the directions of the Naxalbari leadership, went ahead with their plan to attack the Kuttiyadi police station. Knowing their intentions, Vasu, an acceptable person to both factions, was sent to the Kunnikkal group to persuade them to abandon the idea.
It was on the same night that the Kuttiyadi police station was attacked - Nov. 8, 1969 - that Vasu went to the Kunnikkal group・s camp in Perambra near Kuttiyadi to meet the other faction. On the following day, local people caught Vasu and turned him over to the police. The police caught others too who were not the real culprits. In the police station, he denied his role in the attack. However, the police, which were looking for a scapegoat to save their face, named Vasu as the leader of the operation and began torturing him.
The first stage of the torture was from midnight to 5 o・clock in the morning. The torture began with local police officers kicking and hitting him. After some time, the local police were withdrawn, and the Malabar Special Police (MSP), known for their cruelty and torture, were employed. Throughout the torture, the police never once asked him whether he was involved in the attack. Initially, it was torture for torture・s sake.
"While a MSP police officer was questioning me, another one gave me a blow on my neck from behind. I fell down on my face. On the floor, the police kicked and stomped on me on my back till I became unconscious. At dawn when I woke up, there was no police, and I found myself soaked in excretion and urine. After a while, a policeman came and saw me laying with my eyes open. They took me to the local police quarters and washed my clothes and me."
This painful humiliation was only the beginning, however, as the second stage of torture started later during the day.
"I was made to lie down on a bench, and the police beat me on one side of both of my feet with a lathi (baton). After some time, I was made to stand in water for a while. Again, the police beat my feet and made me stand in the water. When it was repeated for the third time, I felt every beating prick my brain, and it gave me excruciating pain. And I, a person who withstood several such hard situations, cried for the first time as an adult out of bodily pain. I could also not stand in the water; it was too tormenting beyond words to describe.
"The same day in the afternoon I was again handed over to the MSP. This time there were two local police officers with them too. I was asked to stand and stretch out my two arms. When my arms went down, the local policemen beat me with a lathi and lifted my hands with a lathi. After some time it, was impossible to hold my arms stretched out even for a moment. It was at this time that, with my hands still stretched with a lathi, a tall, heavy-built MSP police officer specially trained in torture cut my ribs repeatedly with the edge of his palm from behind. He gave me more than a dozen such cuts. At that time, I felt they were going to kill me.
"I told them, ．You are killing an innocent person.・
"Had I got two or three of the same hits, I would have been dead. Luckily, at that time, a police officer, Murali Krishna, Crime Branch DSP [deputy superintendent of police], who knew about the conflict between the Kunnikkal group and ours, walked into the room.
"He asked me, ．What is the problem Vasu Etta?・ (Ettan is a respectful way of addressing elders.)
" ．I don・t know. Ask them,・ I told him.
"He took me to the station, registered something and put me in the lockup."
After being tortured, Vasu had to deal with the pain.
"I was completely bedridden for eight days in the lockup, every 15 minutes changing sides with the help of the comrade prisoners. Even today I cannot sleep for more than half an hour without changing positions. I had neither eaten nor had motion during these eight days. Urinating with the help of others - sometimes in bed and other times in the corner of the lockup room - was the only thing I was doing consciously. After eight days, the stool that passed was as hard as metal pieces that injured my anal passage so badly that I suffer from piles ever since. An assistant subinspector was given special charge of looking after me. All thought I would die. They were scheming what to do in case of my death. The outside world did not know I was in police custody. On the eighth day, I walked myself to the toilet. Even the policemen were surprised at my recovery.
"After three days, the Crime Branch DSP, Murali Krishna, arranged for a massage and herbal medication and then questioned me. Murali Krishna was a very good officer. He never believed in torture. He investigated the case with his head. To my experience, there was only one such officer. I told him that I was innocent and the police purposely tried to kill me. I was not made an accused in the case but was included in some other section and sent to the Vadakara subjail. On getting bail, I went to the traditional massage centre at Karnanthur in Kozhikode."
Just when it appeared that he could begin to resume a normal life, another incident occurred.
"After the massage, on the eighth day of the one-month prescribed resting period (nalliruppu), there was the Thirunelli action against the landlords. Six landlords were attacked, and two of them were shot dead. It sent shock waves through the landlords, so much so that the landlords fled to neighbouring states and cities seeking anonymity.
"My arrest in the Thirunelli action was quite accidental. I was hiding in the forest boundary under the canopy of a big tree. It was the seventh day in the evening when two women came to the place where I was hiding. They did not come to collect firewood nor for natural calls. It was a mysterious trip, as it were, just to find me. Sighting me, they ran to the nearby village shouting and yelling. The people who gathered caught hold of me and gave me to the police, for the police were combing the area to catch me.
"The police threw me in the van and beat me up in the van itself. One of the MSP policemen hit me with the butt of his gun and broke my shoulder bone. When the higher officers came, they stopped torturing me because further torture would have ended my life.
"Naxalite Varghese was the captain of the Thirunelli action. In fact, he was shot dead by the police in the forest before I was caught, but the media published that he was shot dead in an armed encounter with the police. The general public believed that. Recently, after 30 years, the policeman who was forced to shoot Varghese pleaded guilty after his retirement. The truth was that the police caught Varghese, questioned him in custody, took him to the interior of the forest and shot him dead. A murder case against the police based on the constable・s confession is now under way in the High Court of Kerala."
Vasu was put in a single cell in solitary confinement in the prison, like a prisoner detained for trial, for seven and a half years. He was sentenced to only three months・ imprisonment for all these cases. He was acquitted in the second case of the Thirunelli attack.
According to the jail manual, a person can be put in a single cell in solitary confinement (a jail within the jail) for only one week to a maximum of three months. All the people who spent about two years in solitary confinement went insane. Two people who were in solitary confinement at the time of Vasu, for instance, went mad. About this time, three people in the prison at Trivandrum also became mad, but Vasu was kept continuously in solitary confinement for seven and a half years. Vasu, when he was finally released from prison, showed signs of insanity too for quite some time. In spite of his ordeal, Vasu was able to maintain his mental equilibrium though.
"I was taken out of the cell only twice a day - half an hour each - morning for toilet purposes and evening for a bath - and that too with a police escort. I made a small garden outside of my cell, stealing time from the evening half an hour allotted for a bath and sparing water from the quota. Looking after the garden in the limited time in the evening, looking at the flowers during the day, contemplating the meaning of the struggle and relishing the friendship of comrades, I kept my mental stability.
"I felt many times though that compared to the loneliness and isolation of the single cell confinement, where not even the sky can be seen, that the rigorous imprisonment is heavenly in comparison to the pain of isolation from human beings and nature. In rigorous imprisonment, at least one can see the sky, whatever may be its hardships in terms of labour."
Vasu, who has emerged as the beloved leader of social activists in the state of Kerala, is a top-ranking trade unionist too. Because of him, his union is also known for its righteousness and sense of fairness. He involves himself in an issue that merits social action only after studying both sides, so much so that Vasu・s involvement makes a cause just and the general public backs it. He has undertaken countless hunger strikes for people・s causes. The longest is 30 days to support the Mavoor Rayons factory struggle in Kozhikode. Until recently, this was the longest hunger strike in Kerala. Such a transparent and trustworthy person, a very rare species in our postmodern times, lives even today with chronic asthma and other ailments of his internal organs, the aftereffects of torture in police custody so many decades ago.
Posted on 2003-05-26
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