Even as national security agencies bump into a terrorist network in Kerala in the aftermath of the arrest of Thadiyantavide Nazeer, the low-profile kingpin of Lashkar-e-Taiba in south India, discontent is brewing across the state’s 590-km coastline. Fishing colonies, neck-deep in debt, could be an easy target for terrorists looking for potential recruits and hideouts.
Kerala Police are particularly worried about the recurrence of communal skirmishes in coastal villages. In 2002 and 2003, 14 people were killed in two massacres in Marad near Kozhikode. In Cheriyathura near Thiruvananthapuram, six persons were killed by police trying to stop two clashing groups in May.
The police now know that the explosive seized from Cheriyathura was manufactured in a company in Kanpur. The ammonium nitrate-based material — Neogel-90 — was also used in the Hyderabad blasts in 2007.
“Kerala ranks high in the social indices, but its fishermen live miserably. Fish is depleting and the livelihood of fishermen is being threatened. They are looking elsewhere for support. And that support comes from communalists and terrorists,” says Manoj Meppayil, a journalist who documented fishermen’s lives across the Kerala coast in his film Sea Life.
Around 12 lakh fishermen from 222 fishing hamlets of Kerala are caught in a debt trap — a situation no less grave than the agricultural debt tragedy which prompted an alarming number of farmers’ suicides, the documentary says.
The Kerala Fishermen Debt Relief Commission recommended the government last week to waive loans of Rs121.30 crore taken by 56,695 fishermen.
“Economic backwardness leads them to communal skirmishes,” says M Susaipakiam, archbishop of Thiruvananthapuram diocese, whose flock is predominantly fisherfolk.
“While infant mortality rate is 12 out of 1,000 in Kerala, it is 85 out of 1,000 in fishermen’s families. Around 40,000 families live in makeshift tents and 20% houses are destroyed by sea.”
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