Indian communists admit murdering political opponents

A communist party leader in Kerala admitted that his party has targetted and killed its opponents, acknowledging an open secret and daring the forces of law and order to take action.

According to FirstPost.in, MM Mani, secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in Idukki, inadvertently admitted the party has killed other leaders at a meeting convened to tell the party workers that the CPM was not involved in the recent murder of popular CPM-dissident TP Chandrasekharan three weeks ago.

Unfortunately for him and the CPM, the shocking footage of his speech found its way to the state’s TV channels.

“His speech was surprisingly vivid in details of the murders that he said the party had planned and executed. He said, the party had made a list of 13 people and killed four of them – all Congress functionaries,” the website reported.

“The first one was shot dead, the second was beaten to death and the third was stabbed to death,” FirstPost quoted Mani as saying.

Known to foreigners (and India's tourism ministry) as “God's own country,” Kerala has been dominated by communist governments over most of India's post-independence history, and scores higher on the human development index than most other Indian states.

So will the latest revelations of violence shake the CPM's stranglehold on the state? It just might, the website suggests:

Unlike the other instances of political violence, Chandrasekharan’s murder was a tipping point: it has created a state-wide outrage against the CPM and its alleged practice of “annihilation” of political opponents. Nobody was ready to absolve the party of any involvement although it swore its innocence.

The most worrying aspect of the murder was the recent trend in which the CPM allegedly entrusts operations of political violence with criminal groups called “quotation gangs”. Although about 200 people lost their lives in a decade since the late 1990s in Kannur, these murders resulted from violence by party cadres, not just the CPM, but others as well.