The children started packing their schoolbags on their own, as if nudged by muscle memory, although it was a Sunday. Nizam Panayikulam mentioned this more than once during his long conversation with me at his home in Aluva in Ernakulam district that houses Kerala’s bustling commercial capital, Kochi.

The three children have grown used to this ritual: the police knocking on their door and taking their father, Nizam, away with them. The pre-teens were born as quadruplets but one sibling, a boy, passed away after four months. Now, there are two girls and one boy.

On Sunday, October 29, 2023, improvised bombs had gone off at a convention in Kalamassery, the death toll creeping up incrementally in hospitals to reach eight, making it the biggest terrorist attack in Kerala. The convention was being held by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a restorationist Christian denomination. Most of the state held its collective breath for a few hours. Then Dominic Martin, who claimed to be a renegade member of Jehovah’s Witnesses, surrendered to the police and confessed.

Soon after, the blast and the toll virtually disappeared from the front pages of most newspapers in the state, probably because the name of the confessor did not tally with the prejudices built up over the years. One national newspaper went to the extent of saying in its headline “no terror angle” in spite of Martin posting a video on social media saying that he resented the denomination’s “anti-national” doctrines.

On that Sunday, Nizam, who had stepped out of his rented flat to buy biryani for lunch, learnt of the blast from some shopkeepers. After lunch with his children, he took a siesta. When the doorbell woke him up, he knew that the all-too-familiar chain reaction was about to ease into its second stage. The police were at the door. The mere sight of the posse was enough for the children to reach for the schoolbags. They knew that they would now be dropped at the house of Nizam’s uncle, and they would have to go to school from there until their father returned.

I was travelling from the southern tip of Kerala to its north, hoping to have conversations that I rarely had with some members of the lar­gest minority community in the country. I chose Kerala for two reasons: I know the local language and the state is where Muslims feel the most secure in India. Nizam’s house had to be my first port of call because although the twists and turns in his life are astonishing, they cannot be called ‘isolated’. The granular details may vary but the devastating impact is more or less the same.

Nizam is now in his early forties. As a teen, he would fib to his mother that he was going to ‘Veegaland’, a brand name that became generic for amusement parks in Kerala in the first decade of the millennium. With the modest pocket money thus scrounged, Nizam would take a train to Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu.

His destination: a jail. There, he would meet Abdul Nasar Madani, a cleric and a fiery orator. Madani and some of his inflammatory statements — the tone of which he regre­tted later — came into prominence in southern Kerala as a response to the growth of the RSS in the state in the 1990s. Madani was being kept in jail as an undertrial over the Coimbatore blasts of 1998 in which 58 people were killed and the BJP leader, L.K. Advani, was said to be among those originally targeted. Ni­zam was a visitor who stood out in the jail because of his young age — the reason the cleric used to talk to him. Madani was eventually acquitted in the case after he spent over nine years in jail. (Madani was arrested in another blast case la­t­er but the verdict has not yet been pro­nounced. He has spent 22 years in custody as an undertrial.) Years lat­er, the visits to the jail to meet Mad­ani would return to haunt Nizam.

On Independence Day in 2006, the lives of Nizam and several other youths turned upside down. They were arrested from Panayikulam, where he lives, after organising a talk. Although the event was held on the first floor of a market — the auditorium was ironically named “Happy” — and its topic was “The role of Muslims in India’s Indepen­dence Movement”, the police conc­lu­ded that the event was associated with the banned Students’ Islamic Movement of India and that sediti­ous statements were made at the talk.

Nizam and several youths were initially told that they were being taken to the police station for clearing some doubts but the complexion changed after the local BJP held a march and news television crews landed up. The Left was in power in Kerala then. It is suspected that a section of the police wanted to be seen as proactive in their fight against ‘terror’. The youths were charged under Section 124A (sedition) and various sections of the UAPA that dealt with membership of unlawful organisations and participation in unlawful activities.

Two months after their arrest, in 2006, Nizam and the others were granted bail. In 2008, the Kerala government handed over the case to a special police squad that started ‘gathering’ fresh evidence. Nizam sought to pick up the pieces of his life and went to Saudi Arabia to run a mobile phone accessory business. Then the 26/11 attacks took place in Mumbai in 2008. Such was the impact of the dastardly attacks that the National Investigation Ag­en­cy was formed the next month. Eventually, the Panayikulam sedi­tion case was handed over to the NIA, which filed a chargesheet in 2011.

Nizam said that he was asked by an NIA officer to return to Kera­la from Saudi Arabia or else action would be taken on those who stood surety for him so that he could leave the country. So, Nizam returned. In 2016, the NIA special court sentenced Nizam (Accused no. 4) and four others to sentences ranging from 12 to 14 years in jail. Nizam and the others spent over three years in jail.

Was he tortured in police custody? No, Nizam said, “one officer told me he wanted to punch me but my smile dissuaded him.”

Should we move to another room, I asked Nizam, noticing that one of his children was standing within earshot.

“No,” Nizam said with that disarming smile (which would recur whenever he realised that I am finding some questions difficult to ask). “The children know everything. Their life has been inextricably linked to mine in the jail.”

The family’s life outside was a struggle. Nizam’s uncle helped as much as he could, often handing over his pension so that the family could make ends meet. In jail, he learnt that his mother had been diagnosed with cancer. He was denied bail. Kindness came from unexpected quarters. One day, Nizam got a chance to narrate his plight to a senior jail official who said “he has the power to grant me the right to visit my mother briefly on his personal risk”. The official kept his word.

In 2019, Kerala High Court acquitted all the accused in the Panayikulam sedition case. The court observed that the alleged speeches may be “malicious” but held that there was nothing seditious in their content. Life after jail was not smooth. Nizam has been marked — any suspected terror incident in the vicinity would have the police knocking on the doors. That is how the children grew accustomed to the customary knock and their father’s disappearance until the police issued the all-clear. “My children and I had to change address several times because most landlords are uneasy after a police visit. The stigma is impossible to wash off,” Nizam said.

He smiled again. I was struck by the remarkable absence of bitterness when Nizam spoke to me for more than an hour.

I asked him what makes him smile so often. “I don’t know. It’s pro­bably because nothing worse can happen to me now. I have suffer­ed so much. They cannot do anyth­ing worse to me anymore,” he said.

A few months ago, on Septemb­er 21, the Supreme Court upheld the acquittal of Nizam and others (some are still serving sentences lin­k­ed to other cases). But the police ritual did not stop even a month after the highest court of the land had acquitted him. When the bombs went off at the Jehovah’s Witnesses convention, the police were back at the door. Unlike earlier occasions, Ni­zam was allowed to go home the same day because Martin confes­sed.

At least one TV channel flashed Nizam’s name as an initial suspect. The same day, the Union minister, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, tweeted an irresponsible message. Matters did not go out of hand because Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan handled the situation with exemplary firmness.

Nizam eventually met a top police officer and narrated his ordeal every time something untoward happened. The officer assured him that the police would no longer go to his home without a valid reason.

Nizam could reunite with his children quicker than they had assumed but something did change. A neighbouring family, belonging to another faith, had grown close to the three children. But the family stopped talking to Nizam and his children after he returned from the police station.

“It hurts. It would have been okay if they had not been so nice to my children earlier. Now, they just look through us,” Nizam said.

Then, Nizam smiled and said: “I don’t blame them. I would have done the same thing had I been my neighbour.”

The name of an incumbent district police chief in Kerala resembles that of the special squad investigator who probed Nizam’s case. I emailed him some questions a few days after I met Nizam. I have not received any reply till now. I am not even sure if the officer received the mail.

R. Rajagopal is editor-at-large, The Telegraph