Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) worker S Sanjith (27) was stabbed to death in front of his wife in Kerala’s Palakkad district on Monday morning. Sanjith was waylaid when he was travelling with his wife.

Locals suspect Social Democratic Party of India, political wing of the quasi-terror radical Islamic outfit Popular Front of India, is behind the attack.

Police said Sanjith received more than 50 stab wounds. Tension has gripped the locality following the murder and police were keeping a strict vigil. An ‘investigation’ was underway.

Around 300 RSS/BJP workers have been murdered in Kerala over the decades by Communists and Islamists. In February, 22-year-old Rahul (Nandu) Krishna was brutally hacked to death in Alappuzha district of Kerala, again by SDPI workers. A few weeks after the murder, Nandu’s family lamented that main accused Mansoor was still absconding and that the Kerala Police allowed another co-conspirator Rafeeq to get out of jail on bail.

As per local media reports, it appears there were multiple attempts on Sanjith’s live earlier too. So the question arises on why police failed to provide him protection, and why the RSS/BJP senior leadership is failing time and again to protect the lives of its workers in hostile states despite controlling levers of power at the centre?

The culture of political violence introduced in Kerala by Communists, which was later also embraced by Islamists, has claimed hundreds of lives from all sides of the political spectrum. A similar culture of mind-numbing political violence exists in the other Communist-influenced state of West Bengal.

As this poignant piece by Advaita Kala on the political violence in Kerala tells us, the attacks on RSS workers started in 1948 itself when the then Sarsanghchalak MS Golwalkar ji visited the state.

Update

Additional information on the case has been updated.