The people of Kerala can’t easily forget T.V. Eachara Varier, who died in a hospital in Thrissur on April 13, aged 86. The retired college professor will be remembered for the king-size battle he fought following the arrest, and subsequent death, of his innocent son during the Emergency.
It all followed a sensational attack on a police station that made the foot soldiers of the Emergency regime run amok, hunting for Leftists and other ‘extremists’. Special camps had already been set up in parts of the state, where the police experimented with savage forms of ‘interrogation’ of Naxalite suspects, among other detainees, leaving a gory trail of broken limbs and fractured souls.
A final year engineering student, Varier’s son, Rajan, was whisked away from near his college hostel for his suspected role in the police station attack. Varier made all efforts to trace the boy, even going to the corridors of power, where he ran into politicians with feet of clay. He met Chief Minister C. Achutha Menon, of the CPI, and his powerful Congress Home Minister, K. Karunakaran, both of whom he knew personally. He explained to the police that Rajan was attending a college function at the time of the attack. All in vain.
Varier’s petition in the high court, the first habeas corpus case in post-Emergency India, was an eye-opener for the people of Kerala, who had been lulled into passivity thanks to draconian preventive detention laws and a shackled media. Even as headlines blared the names of those whose limbs got crushed in torture camps, there were attempts to scare off witnesses as also the legal luminaries who came to Varier’s help. Meanwhile, the court’s observation that Karunakaran had lied resulted in a wave of anger and his resignation as CM in 1977, soon after he assumed office.
{{/usCountry}}Varier’s petition in the high court, the first habeas corpus case in post-Emergency India, was an eye-opener for the people of Kerala, who had been lulled into passivity thanks to draconian preventive detention laws and a shackled media. Even as headlines blared the names of those whose limbs got crushed in torture camps, there were attempts to scare off witnesses as also the legal luminaries who came to Varier’s help. Meanwhile, the court’s observation that Karunakaran had lied resulted in a wave of anger and his resignation as CM in 1977, soon after he assumed office.
{{/usCountry}}Although Varier never got his son back, the State had to pay a heavy price for its cruelties — Rs 6 lakh as compensation, the bulk of which went into the construction of a hospital ward in Ernakulam. Incidentally, Rajan’s body has not been traced to this day.
In the course of his probings, Varier discovered some brutal truths about Indian police. These find mention in a slim but unputdownable volume that he penned recently. The angry old father tells you that for all their much-trumpeted training at Scotland Yard, even the most brilliant police officers depend on barbaric third degree rather than on their forensic talents to ferret out the truth — a colonial legacy.