New Delhi: The Kerala high court on Tuesday, July 12, acquitted 13 workers of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in a 2008 case relating to the murder of CPI(M) worker V.V. Vishnu near Kaithamukku in Kerala’s capital, Thiruvananthapuram.
A bench of Justices K. Vinod Chandran and C. Jayachandran allowed the appeals of the RSS workers who had earlier been convicted by the additional district and sessions court. All but two of the accused had been sentenced to life in prison.
The bench started its judgment lamenting the prevalence of political murders.
“Political rivalry, is a simmering cauldron of intrigue, spite and deceit, often spewing out the venom of hatred, in the form of mindless bloodshed. The men in red and those saffron clad, are divided on political lines and the instant case is alleged to be the murder of one among the former, by a few in the latter group,” the court said.
Also read: Both BJP and the Left Aren’t Trying to Prevent Political Killings in Kerala
While delivering the judgment, the bench had come down heavily on the prosecution for the manner in which the sequence of events of the case were presented to the court.
“The manner in which events were portrayed before the court smacks of a deliberate attempt to tutor witnesses and collect evidence to define a scripted story,” the New Indian Express quoted the court order as saying.
The prosecution in the case argued that the RSS workers had hacked Vishnu to death outside the Thiruvananthapuram passport office in 2008 and that the crime was part of conspiracy by a dedicated cadre of the RSS.
Following the incident, the accused were charged under Indian Penal Code (IPC) Sections 120B (criminal conspiracy), 143 ( unlawful assembly), 147 (rioting), 148 (being armed with a deadly weapon); and 302 (murder), read with Section 149 (every member of unlawful assembly guilty of offence committed in prosecution of common object), according to a report by Live Law.
During the course of the hearing, the counsel for the accused had argued that the investigation in the case was “tainted” from the very start and had alleged that the case had been “engineered” at the behest of the ruling CPI(M).
The court also noted that the prosecution had “failed miserably” in proving the incriminating circumstances against the accused and questioned the “incredulous” eyewitness testimonies regarding the killing as well as the recovery of weapons from the convicts.
Among other aspects of the prosecution’s case that the court pulled up was the fact that three investigating officers were changed in quick succession, within a period of five months. Further, it noted that a number of the accused were arrested in a casual manner without any evidence of their involvement.
As such, the court noted that it was possible that the attack was committed by masked men; a fact which failed to find mention in the prosecution’s case.
“There is a deliberate attempt visible, from the commencement of the investigation, to project half-truths and cherry-pick witnesses so as to shape the case in a particular manner,” Live Law quoted the court as saying.
The court noted that the above-mentioned inconsistencies, coupled with overly-certain witness statements, cast doubts over the case, which led the court to acquit the convicts.
According to the New Indian Express, the convicts were Sivalal of Kadakampally, Santhosh of Vanchiyoor, Satheesh Kumar of Kadakampally, Satheesh of Vattiyoorkavu, Subhash Kumar of Ulloor, Biju Kumar of Palathara, Renjith Kumar of Manacaud, Bose, Harilal, Manoj and Balu Mahendran – all four from Uliyazhathura – Babin of Kadakampally and Vinod Kumar of Ulloor.