After a few minutes of talking about their lives, Chinnaponnu says she has a headache, and that it happens every time she thinks of the past. She has just spoken of the nearly nine years that she and other women with her had spent in a Mysore jail, while their husbands or other members of the family were killed in police torture. Chinnaponnu is one of the 89 victims identified by the National Human Rights Commission as tortured by the Joint Special Task Force of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, in their attempts to catch the late forest brigand Veerappan. They were imprisoned and tortured for allegedly protecting Veerappan upon charges which could not be proved and acquitted years later.

“I was taken in 1993 and released in 2001. I spent more than eight and a half years there, and so did these women. Several of our husbands were shot dead. We were tortured in different ways,” she says, pointing to a group of people with her. Bhanumathy, Ponnarassi, Nirmathi, Nallamma, and Sarassu stand next to her in a room they are lodging at in Kerala’s Wayanad where they came to support the candidate of the Left for the Lok Sabha election, Annie Raja.

Annie Amma, they say, has helped them a lot in their fight for justice. In 2007, six years after their release, the NHRC announced an interim relief of Rs 2.8 crore to the 89 victims, after a panel headed by Justice AJ Sadashiva conducted an inquiry and submitted their report. Seventeen years later, some of the women have still not received the amount. “With Amma’s intervention, we have been able to approach several offices, including that of the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Stalin, to get the money. Now we have been assured we will get it soon,” Chinnaponnu says.

Polling begins in Tamil Nadu by-election

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