Version imprimableKerala’s TJ Joseph: The Indian teacher whose hand was cut off for an exam paper
By Soutik Biswas
India correspondent
In 2010, the hand of a professor in India was cut off by extremists after he was accused of insulting Islam in an exam paper. Last month, the government banned the controversial Muslim group Popular Front of India (PFI), whose members had carried out the attack. The BBC travelled to Kerala to piece together the grisly incident and its aftermath.
Warning: This article contains details some readers may find distressing.
TJ Joseph remembers the attack from 12 years ago vividly.
It was a rainy July morning. Prof Joseph, then a 52-year-old teacher of Malayalam language at a local college, was driving home with his mother and sister after Sunday Mass in Muvattupuzha, an idyllic town in the southern state of Kerala set on the banks of a river by the same name.
Barely 100m from his house in a leafy, undulating lane, a Suzuki minivan barrelled down, took a sharp turn and blocked his hatchback.
The door of the minivan opened, and six men burst out. One of them ran up to Prof Joseph’s car. He was carrying an axe.
As the man approached the driver’s door and tried to yank it open, another man, brandishing a dagger, brought up the rear. Three others reached the passenger’s side where his sister was sitting.
Cowering at the wheel of his four-year-old Wagon R, his engine switched off and the driver’s side window smashed into pieces by a blow of the axe, Prof Joseph realised he was trapped.
Image caption,
Doctors took 16 hours to revive Prof Joseph and stitch back the severed palm and repair his hand
The axe-wielding man opened the door from inside, pulled him out, dragged him along the rain-slicked road and hacked away at his legs and hands.
"Don’t kill me
