Closer to closure: On the Savad arrest and Professor T.J. Joseph case in Kerala  

The long arm of the law finally caught up with Savad, a fugitive in the notorious case of chopping off the palm of a college professor in Kerala’s Thodupuzha, 13 years after the crime. Sleuths of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) arrested him, the first accused, from a village in northern Kerala’s Kannur where he was living under a fake identity, on January 10. The agency will rightly seek his custody in order to unearth the latent network of the banned Popular Front of India (PFI), which is believed to have planned the barbaric assault on the professor in July 2010 and arranged for Savad’s life in hiding thereafter. Religious extremists targeted Professor T.J. Joseph on his way home from church for drafting a question paper with supposedly a ‘blasphemous’ reference to the Prophet; actually, it was an adaptation of a passage from an essay on a screenplay written by noted Malayalam film-maker P.T. Kunju Muhammad. The State was able to ensure that the incident did not spark communal tensions, but it set off a series of irreversible losses for the professor. With the Catholic church, which managed the college where he was teaching, turning its back on him, he was terminated from service, with a recall on the eve of his retirement made possible, ruefully, by the suicide of his disconsolate wife, as he recalls in his memoirs, A Thousand Cuts (2020).

The NIA took over the investigation in 2011. While it was able to get the conviction of 19 of the accused for various offences including those under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act in the two-phase trial, the fact that the key accused remained at large prevented its closure. The agency announced a bounty of ₹10 lakh for information on Savad. His arrest has shifted the focus to the conspirators who masterminded the assault and the underlings who harboured him. Given that it was the outlawed Students Islamic Movement of India that metamorphosed into the National Development Front and subsequently into the PFI, the key to averting its resurgence in another avatar lies in uprooting the entire network of its underground supporters. Prof. Joseph has, as his words suggest, overcome any ill-will or feeling of vengeance towards his assailants, but he rues that action against the foot soldiers of religious terror would not guarantee peace and harmony in society. For that to happen, their handlers should be brought to book. It is vital that the NIA stays the course and prosecutes the key accused. The terror network that plotted the heinous attack must be disabled entirely.