Wednesday, February 9 2005 20:43 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Bangalore: Citizens Initiative for Peace and few other organisations held a condolence-cum-protest meeting in Bangalore today (Feb 9, 2005) in view of the recent killing of two naxalites in Chikmagalur district of Karnataka.

The slain activists are Saket Rajan alias Prem and Shivalingu who reportedly hailed from Raichur. The two were killed in an encounter with the police on Sunday (Feb 6, 2005) in the jungles of the thick Western Ghats near Chikmagalur.

Saket Rajan was the son of an Army Major and had excelled as an editor, writer, scholar, historian and musician. His friends refer to him more as an intellect who was very soft-spoken and a serious thinker. A friend who had known Saket closely swore that Saket could never be violent and rather he worked with his pen, not the gun as the police have projected him.

Saket, according to some, was a rebel from the beginning. Though his parents wanted him to be an engineer he chose to be a litterateur, perhaps the first signs of rebellion.

He became an executive member of All India Revolutionary Students Union (AIRSU) in 1985, and became an editor of a national journal run by the CPI-Maoists. By then, Saket was writing for several newspapers and had authored a two-volume research effort on Karnataka's history and incidentally parts of his book are now being incorporated in the syllabus of Mangalore University.

While Rajeshwari, Saket's mother, is yet to come to terms with this shocking news and the subsequent hurried cremation of his body by the police, the CPI (Maoists) declares that Saket will remain a Model for all their comrades and vow to continue their movement.

According to another comrade Shivsundar, "Saket had never been in action squads, he was more a part of the intellectual circuit. Furthermore, the supposed encounter never took place, the police have actually brutally murdered him."

An environmental activist who is involved in a movement to save the Kudremukh forest region in Karnataka says, "Saket was reasoning with the villagers over the ill-effects of the Government's new plans on Kudremukh and how it could be prevented."

An activist from 'Dudiyora Horata', an NGO that fights repression of the working class, said, "brutal killing of Saket is nothing but an autocratic face of this so-called democracy, the authorities including the Chief Minister must apologise for this inhumane act".

The Government on its part has ordered an enquiry over the "killings", but is it the right way to solve what seemingly is a socio-economic problem or the Governments both at the State and the Central level should think of solving the underlying problems that would lead to this huge social divide, which further leads to naxalism/Maoism.

Because, as long as the root causes are left unsolved, it would lead to a situation, which in a comrade's words sounds like, "Every time one Saket is killed, two more will be born".