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The
struggle for land rights waged by the indigenous communities in
Kerala took a violent, tragic turn on 12 February when the police
and the forest protection staff unleashed a brutal attack and
gunfire on over a thousand tribal men, women and children to evict
them from the wildlife sanctuary in Wayanad they had
‘occupied’; the tribal group resisted the move with bows and
arrows, and country weapons.
Adivasis (tribals) still hiding deep
in the forests told reporters of the Malayalam daily Madhyamam that
14 people, including three children and three women, have been
killed in the firing. The gunfire took place amidst the combat
operations the police carried out to free a policeman and a forest
official taken hostage by Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha (AGMS), the
apex organisation of around 35 indigenous communities in the
state. However, the chief minister maintains that only one
policeman and an adivasi was killed in the operations.
The police operation began after large tracts of the forest at
Muthanga in Wayanad district suddenly ‘started burning’ on 18
February and an irate AGMS tied up 43 men on the payrolls of the
department who were the forest at the time. AGMS alleged that the
forest department had deliberately set fire to the forest in order
to evict the tribal families. Five of them later deposed before
the district officials that they suspected the role of the
department in starting the fire which they were called into quell,
others refuted the charge.
Though the hostages were freed through discussions with district
officials early Wednesday morning, the real war on the tribal
people began soon after as a huge contingent of police armed with
guns and batons pounced on the adivasi huts in the forests.
The police beat up men, women and children and set fire to the
makeshift tents made of bamboo, grass and plastic sheets. They
fired several rounds of rubber bullets. Later, as AGMS took two
new protection staff members as hostages, police opened 22 rounds
of fire on tents suspected to be the hideouts of the struggle
leaders CK Janu and M.Geethanandan.
The incidents marked a totally tragic reversal of the democratic
success the tribal agitation had won 17 months ago by forcing the
chief minister to promise distribution of 0.4 to two hectares of
land to each of the 53,000 landless tribal families. The betrayal
of the promises – which included cultivable lands, a five-year
rehabilitation programme and steps to designate tribal majority
areas in the state as the Constitutional Schedule V lands with
greater tribal autonomy – left the adivasis desperate and
disillusioned. “We have no other option but to fight and
die,” declared Janu, the maverick adiya woman who
led the struggle. That was the beginning of the elemental
confrontation in the Wayanad Wild Life Sanctuary between the adivasis
and the forest department that ruled over the forestlands,
involving many – the elephants and the wilder animals in the
santuary, a number of civil society groups with vested interests
over the forests and a divided ‘green’ movement with its
loyalties pulled apart between elephants and the tribal.
Soon, over a thousand landless tribal families moved in, clearing
the undergrowth, lighting fires, digging wells and virtually
occupying the seasonal migratory paths and water trails of
elephants and other wild animals. They put up hundreds of tents
adjoining the eucalyptus plantations in the sanctuary where Kerala
forest department had planted seedlings of natural forest trees
under a reforestation project. Before any one else, the Wayanad
Prakriti Samrakshana Samithi (Wayanad Nature Conservation
Society), a local environmental group that had hitherto supported adivasi
struggles, came out with an open call to AGMS to move out of the
forests in the interests of conserving the elephants and the
forest ecosystem.
“We would forcibly resist all moves to throw us out,” claimed
Janu. “These forestlands were our dwelling places before the
State threw us out and turned them into plantations for the Birlas.
These are our alienated homelands; our Gods and our places of
worship remain here,” she claimed, arguing that under the
custody of the Kerala forest department, the forests had only
suffered severe degradation. “The forest department can’t grow
a forest in a lifetime, but we adivasis can do it.”
For the AGMS and the adivasis, the struggle amounted to a
desperate return to the locale and the roots of a primordial
conflict with the rulers of the land who had usurped the forests
and turned the forest dwellers into bonded labourers. Heralding
this confrontationist phase of the tribal land struggle, a
‘tribal court’ organised by AGS in last August had branded the
Kerala forest department and the forest conservation system as the
prime enemies of tribal people.
“Various adivasis – the Kanikkar and Muthuvar of
Thiruvithamkur, the Badagars and Thodars of Nilgiris and Naicker,
Paniyar and Kurumbar of Wayanad – whose rights over the primeval
forests had been recognised for ages were the first to be
threatened by the plantations,” says K Raviraman, scholar
associated with Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram.
AGS also held a more recent grouse against the forest department.
The organisation alleged that the department and the forest mafia
played the key role in sabotaging the accord on land assignment
signed between the government and tribal leadership in October
2001. After a 48-day sit-in strike in front of the state
secretariat in Thiruvananthapuram, the adivasi-Dalit agitation
council led by Janu had then won a commitment from the government
to distribute one to five acres of land to all landless tribal
families and implement a Tribal Rehabilitation and Development
Mission (TRDM) over the next five years. But the accord got
grounded before it really took off.
Saga
of betrayal
In
the past, successive governments in Kerala have been only too
willing to distribute title deeds for all available tribal tracts
or forestland. While the settlers and the encroachers made the
most of the turbulent ‘grow more food’ campaign years, the big
plantation companies remained untouched by land reforms. In the
process, the adivasis and the forests on which they depend
for survival ended up as the twin casualty.
Though the state assembly had passed the Kerala Scheduled Tribes
[Restriction on Transfer of Lands and Restoration of Alienated
Lands] Act, 1975 unanimously, the Act was kept in the cold storage
for 11 years as no rules were framed until 1986. The Act rescued
from an ignominious burial only by a public interest litigation
filed by Nalla Thambi Thera, a non-adivasi doctor in
Wayanad.
When stung by a series of adverse High Court orders, the
successive state governments then set about bringing in new
legislation to dilute the original Act. On two occasions, the
state governor turned down ordinances pushed through for the
purpose. Later the president too returned a bill passed by the
assembly in 1996. Eventually, faced with contempt of court
proceedings, the government hurriedly enacted the Kerala
Restriction on Transfer by and Restoration of Lands to Scheduled
Tribes Act, 1999. The 1999 Act bye-passed the Constitutional
requirement of restoring alienated lands by proposing to assign
compensatory, alternative lands. The legal validity of the Act,
already nullified by the High Court, is presently under the
scrutiny of the Supreme Court of India.
There were other legal instruments too such as the Land Reforms
Act, 1964 and the Private Forest Vesting and Assignment Act, 1971,
which envisaged land assignment to the landless poor. Of these,
the Land Reforms Act exempted the plantation sector from land
ceiling and, in some cases, treated the adivasi as a
landowner and handed over his land to the encroacher/settler
tenants.
The provision in the 1971 Act to assign 23,058.63 hectares of
vested forestland to tribal families was never implemented in
earnest. Had this been done prior to the tightening of forest laws
in 1980, the tribal land issue could have been resolved decades
ago without snowballing into the present social conflict and legal
tangle.
Too
pragmatic?
Faced
with this legal impasse, the adivasis led by Janu made a
strategic turn around in 2001 by shelving the demand for
restoration of the original, alienated tribal lands. They now
demanded five acres of land for each landless tribal family (a
total of 225,000 acres) to be assigned from among at least
1,100,000 acres held by the various government corporations and
departments. They argued the 1975 Act could not have brought
succour to even one-tenth of the landless tribal families in the
State. This was because the cumbersome procedures had already
reduced the number of valid claims for restoration to just 4,524
cases worth a mere 7,640 acres of land. The reason was simple:
until recently the adivasis had neither known nor believed
in possessing title deeds for the lands they lived on under
nature’s boundless care.
The new strategy had several advantages. Fist, it sought to avoid
settling historical scores with the encroachers, a majority of
whom were small farmers who possessed less than 0.5 hectares. It
stressed the urgency and inevitability of taking a pragmatic
approach in saving the adivasis from the starvation deaths.
It argued that democratic alternatives existed outside the bounds
of rigid principles and procedures of law. For the first time in
Kerala history, the adivasi land struggle opened up a space
for dialogue and constructive cooperation between the State and
the adivasis. But the biggest catch in the whole accord and
the Tribal Rehabilitation and Development Mission master plan was
that the adivasis were promised forestlands or uncultivable
tracts – the first bound to be rejected by the Central
Government under the Forest Conservation Act (FCA), 1980, and the
second, by the adivasis themselves.
The accord also left untouched vast stretches of land illegally
usurped and kept in possession by big plantations, such as 20,234
hectares of illegal forestland held by Tata Tea in Idukki
district, mentioned by the Legislative Committee on Government
Assurances (1998-2000). In the end, the connivance of the revenue
and forest officials ended up in listing several uninhabitable and
uncultivable hill slopes such as those at Mankulam (8094 hectares)
for handing over to the adivasis. In less than a year, the adivasis
cause was betrayed once again. The bitterness has now penetrated
the rank and file of the adivasis in Kerala. From the
euphoria and the short-lived success of the democratic struggle in
2001, the adivasis have now gone back to the hazy jungle of
a suicidal battle, fought against heavy odds.
Following AGS, other adivasi organisations too had started
occupying forests and government plantation lands in Wayanad,
reflecting the mood in the tribal belts. Nevertheless, without
lifting a finger to find a solution to the vexed tribal land issue
through a democratic means, the State government unleashed a
brutal attack on the adivasis, creating a bogey that the adivasis
had taken to “armed struggle’ under the support of LTTE, PWG
and the likes. The demands for conservation of ecology, a cause
that successive state governments in Kerala had never supported in
the past, came in handy. “These lands are in the core area of
the Wayanad Wild Life Sanctuary, contiguous with the protected
forests in neighbouring Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, and extremely
important in the conservation of the Asiatic elephants, argued
Wayanad Prakriti Samrakshana Samithi.
An acerbic Janu had, however, challenged the environmentalists to
“open their eyes and see the degradation that had come about the
forests under the rule of the forest department”. Forty percent
of the sanctuary has already been turned into eucalyptus and teak
plantation, leaving little food and water for the elephants and
the wildlife, forcing them to raid on crops in the neighbouring
farms.
This conflict with the Greens marked the crucial turn in the adivasi
land struggle in Kerala. The other demand of the adivasis
– for dissolving the forest department and replacing it with
people’s forest management, remains suppressed in the barrage of
charges and counter charges raised I the aftermath of the terror
in Muthanga. The adivasis and their leadership have been silenced,
as they are holed up in the deep forest. Several tribal people who
returned to the village have been arrested and imprisoned. Even
innocent adivasis are being taken into custody as
‘extremists’, often betrayed by their own big brothers, the
settlers. Pushed out of the forests with bullets and batons, taken
into custody from the villages, the indigenous people of Kerala
now have no place on earth.
The
accord and the discord
On
New Year’s day 2002, Kerala chief minister AK Antony danced with
adivasis at Marayoor in Idukki district to celebrate the
launch of the distribution of land to the landless tribal families
and the implementation of the master plan for tribal
rehabilitation. Under the pact signed in October 2001, the
government had for the first time promised to make efforts to get
Central clearance for declaring tribal majority areas in the state
as Schedule V areas and grant decisive powers to the Oorukoottam
(hamlet-level tribal council) on development schemes implemented
in tribal areas. Had the accord been implemented, it would have
set a milestone in the path of Kerala’s much-touted
‘radical’ development.
But in a few days, the land distribution got mired in a
controversy with the revenue and the forest departments claiming
authority over the lands identified to be assigned to the tribal.
A major chunk of the land was from the vested forests where any
non-forestry activity could not be permitted under the Forest
Conservation Act, 1980.
Soon the other components of the accord too fell apart. The state
minister for tribal welfare blocked the funds earmarked for the
Tribal Rehabilitation and Development Mission. The ministry of
environment and forests turned down the state’s request to
assign forestlands to adivasis. The demand to constitute
Schedule V areas in the state was not pursued. The Oorukoottams
were ordered to be superseded by politically elected gram
panchayats.
In the bitter squabbles that ensued, the adivasi
organisation earned the wrath of the media and certain Green
groups on account its demand for assigning forestlands. The
adivasis and their cause got marginalised more than ever before.
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