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Kerala crackdown undercuts tribals'
struggle
By C Surendranath
WAYANAD, India - The long history of people's
movements and Marxist governments in India's southern
Kerala state has now been thrown to the wind after
police, supported by settlers, crushed a movement by
tribals trying to assert traditional rights over forest
land.
The arrest of C K Janu, the charismatic
woman who leads the Adivasi Gothra Mahasabha (AGM) or
Indigenous People's Gathering on Saturday was only the
latest in a series of police actions that included the
shooting of at least 14 tribals on February 19.
Janu showed signs of having been badly roughed
up when she was produced before a magistrate on Sunday.
Janu, who was remanded to further custody, told
journalists outside the court that she had been beaten
up by police.
In all, the police have taken away
184 people, including 99 women and 34 children, from
several tribal communities in the northern district of
Wayanad, where nearly 36 percent of Kerala's 320,000
indigenous people live, and others like Kannur and
Malappuram. They are now detained on charges that
include waging war against the state.
Janu was
handed over to police, along with an associate, by local
people of the Nambikkad community, reflecting a pattern
where settlers in the tribal lands have been instigating
arrests by the police.
On Sunday, the Congress
party-led United Democratic Front (UDF) government in
the state led by Chief Minister A K Antony rejected
demands for a judicial inquiry into the police action.
An independent commission of lawyers and social
activists under the banner of Forum for Democracy and
Communal Amity (FDCA), chaired by former Supreme Court
justice Krishna Iyer, said many of the arrested were
innocent tribals rounded up from the streets of small
towns.
The confrontation began when the
government's attempts to forcibly evict a thousand
tribal families from the Wayanad wildlife sanctuary was
resisted by these families, using agricultural
implements and bows and arrows that drew police fire.
"The police opened fire without warning," said Anila
George, a member of the FDCA team that interviewed local
people and journalists who witnessed the combat
operation by the police to free a policeman and a forest
official taken hostage by AGMS.
However, Antony
maintained that only one policeman and one indigenous
person were killed in the operation. On Friday, the
chief judicial magistrate in Sulthan Bathery remanded
132 tribal people, including 99 women, into police
custody for 15 days. The police said 75 others still
remained in the police camp at Muthanga. The whereabouts
of several hundred who took in the struggle was not
known, as they had retreated into deep forests and only
a few have returned to their villages.
Their
forcible eviction from the sanctuary marked a reversal
of gains made 17 months ago by the tribals. The
government had promised to distribute up to two hectares
of land to 53,000 landless families. The betrayal of the
promises - which included cultivable lands, a five-year
rehabilitation scheme and steps to designate
tribal-majority areas in the state - left the indigenous
people desperate and disillusioned. "We have no other
option but to fight and die," was the refrain of several
tribal men and women who had moved from their villages
to the forests.
Over the past century, the
tribals suffered massive dispossession of their
community and proprietary lands thanks to immigration
from the plains and the conversion of forest lands into
plantations. "The adivasis [indigenous people]
whose rights over the primeval forests had been
recognized for ages were the first to be threatened by
the plantations," says K Raviraman, a scholar with
Center for Development Studies, a think tank near the
state capital of Thiruvananthapuram.
The
non-tribal landlords and the immigrants from the plains
had converted the tribals into slaves until laws were
enacted against bonded labor. A recent World Bank study
estimates that over 80,000 hectares of land have been
alienated from Kerala's tribal communities. Successive
state governments have been able to restore only around
400 hectares.
Opposing the tribals' traditional
rights are various nature conservation societies and
voluntary groups that want indigenous people out of the
forests in the interests of conserving the elephants and
the forest ecosystem. "But the tribal people have at
least as good a right as elephants to live in the
forests," has been Janu's answer to the
conservationists.
"We will forcibly resist all
moves to throw us out. These forest lands were our
dwelling places before the state threw us out and turned
them into plantations. These are our alienated
homelands, our gods and our places of worship remain
here," Janu said. M Geethandan, who leads the land
struggle with Janu, views the conflict between the
indigenous communities and the settlers,
environmentalists and the forest department as an
inevitable eruption of a deep-rooted malaise in Kerala
society. Despite its achievements in the redistribution
of land wealth, health care and education services more
equitably among the general population, Kerala has
virtually left its tribal pockets worthy of epithets
such as "Kerala's Africa" and the "Hills of Shame".
Starvation stalks tribal hamlets. The deaths of
more than 23 people in two months was the immediate
provocation for the indigenous people led by Janu to set
up "refugee camps" in the state capital in August 2001.
Against 100 percent literacy among the general
population, half the tribal people remain illiterate.
Among the Kurumbas in Attappady, infant
mortality stands at 280 in every 1,000 births, against
13 in the general population as of 1998. While Kerala
has reduced its maternal mortality rate to a 1.9 for
1,000 deliveries by 1998, nearly six times more mothers
died in the primary health center at tribal-dominated
Agaly the same year.
AGMS argues that
landlessness is the root cause of the tribal people's
misery. Out of the 320,000 adivasis in Kerala, 90
percent are landless. Successive governments in Kerala
distributed title deeds for all available tribal tracts
or forest lands, but the plains people and the big
plantations were the main beneficiaries.
In
1975, the state assembly passed the Kerala scheduled
tribes act that aimed to protect their lands. But under
pressure from plantation companies and big landowners,
it was kept in cold storage for 11 years and later,
watered down in favor of those who had usurped tribal
lands.
(Inter Press Service)
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