Kozhikode: The acquittal of all the accused in the Shibin murder case by the Special Additional Sessions Court (Marad cases) is unlikely to offer solace to the communally divided Nadapuram region unless political parties took utmost care on their approach to the verdict.
The communal sphere in the region is divided into Hindus and Muslims with the CPM and IUML representing the sides, respectively. Though the region has a long history of confrontation between the feudal Muslim landlords and Thiyya caste -dominated Hindus, the present scenario has reached a level where killing, looting and plundering were occurring with meticulous planning. Since 2000, four people were killed in the region and numerous incidents of rioting, looting, destruction of houses and other properties were reported.
The strange case of framing more than 400 cases within a couple of days in 2001 pushed the government to form a separate police station in Valayam when the area witnessed unprecedented violence trigged by the killing of DYFI worker P. Santhosh. On the next day, IUML sympathizer Thayyullathil Moosa Haji (68) was killed in retaliation. The Muslim community suffered mostly in terms of property destruction as they were better off in the region through the financial remittance from the Gulf. Following the alleged rape of a Muslim woman at Theruvamparambu, the first accused in the case, E. Binu, was killed at Kallachi by National Development Front (NDF) activists on June 2, 2001. The case was later proved to be a concoted one.
It is estimated that as many as 70 Muslim houses were attacked in Thuneri, Vellur and properties worth '50 crore were destroyed in the spate of violence that occurred in the aftermath of Shibin’s murder.
“The complexities of communal proliferation in the region are the result of entanglements of caste, conversion, economic mobility and land relationship,” notes P.K. Yasser Arafath, assistant professor, department of history, Delhi University, who studied the issue in detail.
“The changing politics of both the RSS and the CPM has a direct bearing on the social condition of Hindus, while the communitarian politics of IUML, Islamic doctrinal argumentatives and neo-Salafisation are significant in the making of new Muslim-landscape.”
