Raghavan gets bail

Thalasserry additional sessions judge A Hariprasad on Friday granted bail to former Kerala minister and Communist Marxist Party leader M V Raghavan and two others in the November 1994 Koothuparamba police firing case. The accused will be released after executing two sureties of Rs 50,000 each.

Raghavan, T T Antony, the then deputy collector and the then Cannanore deputy superintendent of police, were arrested on July 4, on the basis of the findings of the K Padmanabhan Commission report which went into the firing in which five Marxist-led Democratic Youth Federation of India workers were killed. They had been remanded to judicial custody till July 19.

Meanwhile, the former CPI-M leader said his arrest was part of a plot by leaders of that party to liquidate its political enemies.

The former minister, who is reportedly suffering from high blood pressure and, in consequence, spending his spell in judicial custody in a hospital in Thiruvananthapuram, finds support for his theory from the Congress-led United Democratic Front, the Opposition coalition in the state.

In an open letter to the state chief minister, Raghavan alleges that the seeds of his present imprisonment were sown over a year ago, when he was expelled from the CPI-M for advocating an electoral understanding with the Indian Union Muslim League.

Raghavan recalls how E K Nayanar, then the party secretary, had supported him on the issue, and later back-tracked at the behest of the party's paterfamilias, E M S Namboodiripad.

Raghavan, in his letter, goes a shade further and says that Nayanar's change of heart came because Namboodiripad promised him the chief ministership.

"First, the CPI-M sought to finish me politically, now they are trying to finish me off physically," says Raghavan in his letter, pointing out that the government had recently withdrawn his security cover. Raghavan alleges that his recent arrest was part of a CPI-M bid to get him behind bars, where hardcore party activists had been briefed to harm him physically.

Interestingly, the consensus of legal opinion in the state is that a minister, past or present, cannot be held responsible for an instance of police firing ordered by a judicial magistrate. "Raghavan cannot be held responsible for the firing anyway, because he was not in charge of the home department," further argues leading lawyer Kelu Nambiar.

UNI and D Jose in Thiruvananthapuram