K K Rema on dharna outside CPM office in Delhi Wednesday. (Express Photo) K K Rema on dharna outside CPM office in Delhi Wednesday. (Express Photo)

Five years after breakaway CPI(M) leader T P Chandrasekharan was hacked to death in Kerala, his wife K K Rema sat on a protest dharna outside the CPI(M) headquarters in Delhi Wednesday. What she was demanding was not justice for the murder, she said, but her right to life and political freedom. “Violence including murder have become a part of the CPM’s everyday existence,” she told The Indian Express Thursday. “There is no value for human life. The CPM central leadership is aware of all these things. Why is it not reacting or intervening? Why is it not controlling the Kerala CPM? The CPM is at the forefront of the campaign against fascism and intolerance at the national level,” she said.

Referring to recent violence in Kerala, she said: “The party is keeping quiet when political opponents are brutally murdered and their offices and houses attacked almost on a daily basis in Kerala. We wanted to expose these double standards. The CPM has no moral right to speak against fascism and intolerance without taking the initiative to put an end to attacks unleashed by its cadres in Kerala,” she said.

Rema said she sat on dharna before AKG Bhawan not to seek mercy or to submit memorandums but to register her protest. She said the CPM central leadership is not intervening because “Kerala is its last hub. They have lost Bengal. And we will get to know about the fate of Tripura soon”.

She alleged the CPI(M) national leadership is afraid to go beyond the diktat of the Kerala unit and questioned the need for having a national leadership.

“We too want to live. We cannot be hunted for ever for having a different political view,” she added. Rema is a leader of Revolutionary Marxist Party of India. Her husband, Chandrasekharan, was hacked to death, allegedly by CPI(M) workers, in 2012, four years after he left the CPI(M) due to ideological differences with its state leadership.

Rema also approached the National Human Rights Commission Thursday. In a petition, she claimed that workers of her party in Vadakara, Onchiyam and Orkkatteri areas in northern Kerala have been facing attacks daily after the CPM-led LDF government came to power in Kerala in 2016.

“Pre-planned attacks sponsored by CPI(M) and its supporters are taking place every now and then, false cases (and FIR) registered in the name of RMPI workers without their knowledge, arrests and destruction of the personal and party property are few methods used against the people to make them suffer for not being part of the CPI(M) and for exhibiting dissent,” the complaint said.

“Marriage proposals of and for young members of RMPI are blocked, passports of those working abroad are confiscated through false cases while they come home for holidays. It has become tough for people to carry out their daily life here. Education of children especially girls are getting affected. It is especially tough for pregnant woman to stay at their or in-laws house here,” the complaint said, seeking the intervention of the NHRC.

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