SHE FAILS to suppress her emotions
while recalling that horrific night. She wept like a child when her
husband spoke of the way she and three other women were abducted and
brutally raped inside the godown of a plantation company they had
agitated against.
Sharada is one among the hundreds of activists of Sadhujana Vimochana
Samyuktha Vedi, an organisation of landless dalits and adivasis
involved in the agitation for cultivable land at Chengara in
Pathanamthitta district of South Kerala. The agitation is now being
adjudged as the biggest-ever dalit uprising in the history of Kerala as
it involves over 5,000 landless families. But the ruling CPM-led Left
Front Government (LDF) in the state is not ready to recognise it as a
struggle for a just cause. Instead, it abets organised violence
orchestrated by the plantation company which, in fact, has no legal
right over the land and the company’s labour force.
Making the situation worse, Sharada and the other three dalit women
allege that their abductor-rapists were plantation employees who are
CPM members. She says they were kidnapped in the early hours of August
7 and taken to the godown of Harrisson Malayalam Plantations, where
they were raped. They were let off after three hours.
According to activist Laha Gopalan, the women went out of the
plantation to fetch food after they were informed that the CPMmen, who
had been laying siege to the area, had dispersed. The CPMcadres and the
police, Laha Gopalan alleges, were trying to starve the activists.
The women were standing in front of a shop that was open at midnight
when a group of men forced them into a jeep and sped away. Out of fear
and unsure of getting justice, the women have not registered a
complaint with the police so far. Civil society organisations have
taken it up as an issue all over the state. “In the beginning, their
husbands too did not know. Only now are we getting the courage to speak
of it openly,’’ Gopalan said.
Gopalan said that the women came out into the open only after two
activists were found battered at the godown a few days later. “This
practice of taking our activists to the godown and beating them up has
become a regular feature. Congress and BJP activists are involved in
the labour force and so they remain silent over the atrocities of CPM
workers,’’ he alleged.
If the words of these dalits, the local people and civil society
organisations are to be believed, the CPM, the owners of Harrison
Malayalam Ltd and goons have unleashed terror in Chengara with the
support of the police. The agitators are not being allowed to move out
of the area. Nobody is allowed from outside. They are not able to buy
rice and other necessary items and medicines. Children are not able to
go to school.
“The CPM wants to break the struggle by any means. The neo-liberals and
revisionists in the party who constitute the majority have common cause
with the estate management. They believe escalating tension is the best
way to crush the struggle. But to their disappointment, dalits are
getting more and more determined by each passing day,’’ says social
activist CR Neelakantan.
The agitators have stopped all attempts to forcibly evict them. Women
and children keep kerosene cans nearby while sleeping. Whenever the
police come, they threaten self-immolation.
“It is Kerala’s own Nandigram. CPM is using the same strategies of rape
and laying siege here too. But we are determined to fight their might
till the end,’’ says Gopalan. According to him, fresh attacks against
the dalits began at the end of July when three activists from outside
reached Chengara to express solidarity with the agitators on the first
anniversary of the struggle. They were stopped by a group of CPM men
who claimed to be plantation workers. They manhandled the three and
also damaged their vehicles. “All this happened in the presence and
under the patronage of the police. At the request of the police, the
organisers had to shift the venue of the public meeting, planned for
the next day, to another location,’’ says Neelakantan, who took the
activists to Chengara.
THE VIOLENCE in Chengara was planned. Even the police do not say there
was any provocation from agitators. “The CPM is worried by the
overwhelming support for the intensifying land struggle in Chengara
where landless dalits and adivasis are raising the demand for
redistribution of agricultural land, exposing the hollowness of land
reforms implemented by the CPI-Congress coalition in the early 1970s.
To protect the interests of the estate owners, the neo-liberal
revisionists in CPM in Kerala have apparently taken a position that
land redistribution is no longer a substantive political agenda,’’ says
land issue expert Dr. T.T. Sreekumar.
According to the dalits, it is a fight to reclaim ownership of land
that has been part of a long-standing promise of the government. To
this end, about 5,000 families from different parts of the region have
moved on to the plantation, building tents with poles and plastic
sheets to establish last year. The impugned land was a part of a
leasehold to Harrison Malayalam Ltd, which expired in 1985 and no rent
has been paid to the state since. So, dalits say, the plantation group
has no ownership of the land. According to Neelakantan, the fight is
against illegal encroachment of land that belongs to the people by a
corporate entity for commercial purposes with the support of state
machinery.
“A complete blockade of food, medicines and other essentials is the
biggest challenge before the agitating dalits. Such a situation is
leading to starvation and the prevalence of diseases in the camps. Now
tactics include sexual harassment of women and physical intimidation of
the protesters and solidarity supporters,’’ says dalit leader Sreeraman
Koyyon.
“What unites them all is landlessness. The government has a duty to
solve this problem. A Left government has greater responsibility since
it was the Left that raised the slogan ‘Land for the Tiller’, ” says
activist BRP Bhaskar.
Dalits and adivasis in Kerala have traditionally stood with the Left. A
party congress, held at Coimbatore, acknowledged that they were moving
away from the CPIM and decided that steps should be taken to bring them
closer to the party. But the state party unit and the government seem
to be blind to the erosion of the CPM base.
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