Parents upset over Ajitha’s links with radical groups

The distraught woman became restless when the topic of her daughter was brought up. “Leave me alone,” she said and shut the front door when asked about her deceased daughter, whose killing in an alleged encounter, came in for severe criticism in Kerala. Ajitha (45) was killed in an encounter by police in Nilambur in Malappuram in Kerala on November 24. 

On Saturday, the lawyer-turned-Maoist also known as Kaveri, was cremated in Kozhikode. Although most residents of the middle class neighbourhood in Ambattur had heard of the killing of a Tamil woman Maoist in Kerala, hardly anyone here knew about her family. Despite the news of the killing reaching the family, the family did not react and did not even bother to claim her body. 

“Vilvam lives here with her son and her daughterin-law. She has one more daughter who is married. She interacts with the neighbours regularly,” said the woman who lives next door. But she is oblivious of the other daughter who left home to join the Maoist organisation and rarely kept in touch with the family. A tailor, who has been living in for the locality for the past 10 years, recalled that five years ago, a police team arrived to enquire about Maoist presence in the locality after they found the ‘Ambattur address’ on the ration card of one of them. 

“Since then, the police came some 20 days ago after the encounter. But I don’t know which house they visited,” she says guardedly. Ajitha of Ambattur, according to police records, was aged 45 and married to Vinayagam, a fellow party worker but the couple had separated. Her father Paranthaman, an engineer with the Railways, was a trade union leader. 

Paranthaman, died of cancer in 2002 and was opposed to his daughter joining the movement and had even ostracised her from the family. “The family was opposed to Ajitha joining the party,” says Bhagath Singh, an advocate at the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court. 

“I was her classmate from 1991 to 1996 while she was pursuing her law degree. She was active in the Tamil Nadu Freedom Movement for Women which led her to joining as a full-time Maoist. I had last contacted her in 2007,” he says. “It was I who accepted the body along with one of her uncles,” says Singh. 

Advocate Thusar Nirmal of Kerala says that Ajitha was unarmed at the time of firing which happened at 12 noon. “Within minutes, the police identified her, which was very strange,” he said.