Malli (left) with her daughter Sarasu at their home in Attapadi. (Express Photo by Shaju Philip)Over the last four years, Malli has learnt to look out for shadows and strangers. The 68-year-old from Pazhayoor, a remote tribal hamlet at Attappadi in Kerala’s Palakkad district, who has been fighting a long, weary battle to ensure that the killers of her son are brought to justice, says she has lost count of the threats she has got from people asking her to drop the case against the accused.
She has just returned home after a trip to the special court at Mannarkkad where trial is going on. Last week, she had gone to Kochi in connection with an anticipatory bail plea in the High Court filed by a person who is facing a case related to allegedly threatening Malli not to proceed with her son’s murder case.
In a case that had shaken the conscience of Kerala society, on February 22, 2018, Malli’s mentally ill son Madhu had been lynched to death by a mob that suspected him of stealing rice and curry powder from shops at Mukkali near Attapadi. A few members of the mob had captured the incident on their phones, with one of them even clicking a selfie while Madhu was being beaten up. Though the mob handed him over to the Agali police in Palakkad, he died on the way to hospital.
After the trial in the case began at a special court at Mannarkkad in Palakkad earlier this year — after a delay of four years during which the trial was suspended on many occasions, three prosecution lawyers pulled out of the case, and 22 of the 27 prosecution witnesses turned hostile — on September 20, the High Court upheld a special court order cancelling the bail of 12 of the 16 alleged accused. The court ruled that the accused had violated bail conditions by contacting “the witnesses over phone on several occasions”.
The cancellation of bail, however, is little solace for Malli, who says the accused are influential people — mostly traders and local taxi drivers — in the hamlet where she lives.
Last month, police had registered a case against a person named Abbas on charges of trespassing into Malli’s house and threatening her against proceeding with the case. After a local court dismissed Abbas’s anticipatory bail plea, he moved the High Court.
Months back, says Malli, two masked men broke into her house at night. “I ran out of the house through the backdoor and hid in a nearby forest. On most days, I am alone at home. The mobile network in our hamlet is very poor. If something happens, I may not even be able to call the local police or inform someone,” she says.
Holding her son’s photograph close to her chest, Malli adds, “Nobody in our village is with us. Even our own (tribal) people are against us. They are afraid that if they support me and my family, they will face trouble,” she says, sitting on the threshold of her house.
In Pazhayoor, despite the shockwaves that Madhu’s lynching generated, there’s little sympathy for Malli and her family.
Says Abdul Nazer, a grocery trader at Chindakki, “The family does not enjoy the support of the local tribal community. The general impression is that Malli has enough money. Many tribals want the family to share that money with them,” he said, pointing out Malli’s family was relatively better off than many of the other tribal households in what’s arguably most Kerala’s backward region.
Malli’s youngest daughter Chandrika is a police constable and her son-in-law Murugan is an employee with the government’s statistics department. Malli’s eldest daughter Sarasu works as an anganwadi teacher and her elder-son-in-law, also called Murugan, is a police constable at Attappadi.
“Despite all this, we are still not safe. People think we got lakhs as compensation from various sources after Madhu’s murder. They want us to part with a portion of that money if they wanted to give evidence in our favour. It’s true that the government gave us Rs 18.25 lakh, but people say we got crores…. Anyone is free to check our bank details,” she says.
After the trial began in the special court earlier this year, Malli and her eldest daughter Sarasu have made it a point to travel 25 km to the court every day, to watch the proceedings.
Over the last four years, Malli has been shuttling between various courts in Kerala and knocking on the doors of politicians to ensure that the trial into the murder of her son is on track.
In June this year, she moved the High Court seeking the removal of then special prosecutor C Rajendran, following which the government appointed advocate Rajesh Menon as new prosecutor.
Two weeks ago, Malli met Union Home Minister Amit Shah in Thiruvananthapuram, seeking the Centre’s intervention to ensure justice for the family.
The four-year delay for the trail to begin had impacted the proceedings. When the court finally took up the case last year, the prosecutors did not turn up and, one after the other, the witnesses turned hostile.
Menon, the public prosecutor in the case now, says, “As the trial did not start on time, the accused got enough time to influence the witnesses. Over the last couple of years, with authorities caught up with managing of the pandemic, the accused freely interacted with the witnesses.”
Malli’s daughter Sarasu says that her mother is determined to fight on. “The case has made my mother a fighter. She is someone who had never stepped out of Attappadi. But now, she is ready to travel anywhere and meet any minister and to ensure justice for her son… She’ll do whatever it takes,” she says.