The Mavelikara Additional District Sessions Court-I on January 30 (Tuesday) awarded the death penalty to 15 people for killing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Ranjith Sreenivas.
Ranjith, who was the State secretary of the BJP’s OBC Morcha and a lawyer, was hacked to death most brutally at his house at Vellakinar in Alappuzha municipality on the morning of December 19, 2021. He was murdered in front of his mother, wife and daughter.
Observing that the murder falls under the category of the rarest of rare case, Judge Sreedevi V. G. awarded capital punishment to Naisam, Ajmal, Anoop, Mohammed Aslam, Abdul Kalam alias Salam, Abdul Kalam, Saffaruddin, Manshad, Jaseeb Raja, Navas, Sameer, Nazir, Zakir Hussain, Shaji Poovathungal and Shernas Ashraf.
The convicts, hailing from various parts of Alappuzha, belong to the now proscribed Popular Front of India (PFI) and its political arm Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI).
Also read | The Popular Front of India, its origins, presence, and controversies
The family of Ranjith welcomed the verdict. All 15 accused in the case were convicted by the court on January 20, 2024, under Section 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code.
According to investigators, the killing of Ranjith was a retaliatory strike to avenge the murder of SDPI’s State secretary K. S. Shan at Kuppezham Junction at Mannancherry, Alappuzha, allegedly by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) activists the night before. The trigger for the murder of Shan was the killing of RSS worker Nandukrishna by SDPI men at Vayalar in Alappuzha on February 24, 2021. The high-profile ‘communally tinged political killings’ had led to fears of a possible communal flare-up in Kerala.
The Ranjith Sreenivas murder case was investigated by a special team led by Alappuzha Dy. SP N. R. Jayaraj. Special Public Prosecutor Prathap G. Padickkal and advocates Sreedevi Prathap, Shilpa Sivan and Hareesh Kattoor represented the prosecution side.
