THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: At 7 pm, Thiruvananthapuram has turned dark but there are yellow lights on the street and Sreejith's face looks red. At another time and place, he would have greeted a visitor differently. But today, all he has is a weak smile and a small space to offer on his mat spread on the stretch outside the Secretariat, where protesters like him - two old women and a man - have set camps with their mostly unnoticed demands. The old woman next to his mat is reading with a candle light, another is huddled inside a tent she built with an old piece of cloth. Sreejith's own shelter is his mat, a bag and a file full of documents he has to show as proof of what's gone on in the past 476 days. That's how many days it's been on Friday evening. Today, it'd be two more.
"Five hundred days of summer," a passerby comments. Less than a month and it'd be that. Even as we sit down, the heat is unbearable, and mosquitoes are plenty. Sreejith doesn't seem to mind though. He lies calmly beneath the huge news poster of his young brother Sreejeev, who died, he believes, in police custody. It is for justice for him that Sreejith has given up everything - freedom, comfort, and taking care of his old mother, who has to run between an exhausted Sreejith and his accident victim older brother Sreeju. Sreejith's voice is little more than a whisper - the hunger strike taking its toll. He takes out a piece of paper from his bag and says that has everything that happened so far.
It is a copy of the State Police Complaint Authority order on Sreejeev's case. Sreejith from Neyyatinkara had made the complaint to the authority - 188/2014 - on discrepancies about Sreejeev's death in police custody at the Parassala station. The respective investigating commission produced the order on May 17, 2016 and the document in Sreejith's hand is dated September 3, 2016. That's six months and more but that is the last update Sreejith has on the case. The order says how it is clear the death happened in police custody after Sreejeev was beaten and forced to take the poison, and how the police version that he had committed suicide by consuming poison is incorrect. It further names five policemen as responsible for the custodial death and fabricating false proof of it.
Nalini Netto, then additional chief secretary, has further stated Sreejeev's mother and brother should be given a compensation of Rs 10 lakh and this money should be taken out of the accused policemen. There should also be a Special Investigation Team to investigate the custodial death, and the accused policemen should not be in service while the investigation proceeds. The money has come but nothing has happened to the people that Sreejith believes has killed his brother. "It was planned. He was in a relationship with a girl in our neighbourhood. Exactly two days before her wedding, they arrest him, accusing him of mobile theft. You can find problems even there - the theft happened in 2013. He was arrested in May 2014. Why would they bring that up after all these months? The girl was a relative of one of the policemen," he says.
Sreejith recalls the day he was called to the Medical College Hospital to see his brother, fighting for life. He didn't suspect anything then but watched helplessly as his brother, hands and legs tied and with an oxygen mask covering his mouth, tried to say something by shaking his eyes. Something that Sreejith now believes, about the truth of his tragedy. The brothers must have created a bond in the days they went to an orphanage together to get an education. The dad had died many years ago when Sreejith was a toddler. There is a younger sister too in the family. All bonded by love and a lot of courage.
