Give us what you promised, honour your commitment

Thiruvananthapuram, March 11: “Give us what you promised, honour your commitment,” loudspeakers boom slogans of solidarity at the Harrison Malayalam Estate at Chengara, Pathanamthitta. Women and children at the venue clutch cans filled with kerosene, men have climbed rubber tree tops with nooses tied around there neck, ready to jump, should the police intervene.
During the past four months, almost 7,000 landless families supported by the Sadhu Jana Vimochana Samyukta Vedi (SJVSV) workers, pitched 2,500 tents and encroached close to 6,000 acres of land at the Harrison Malayalam’s Kumbazha Estate at Chengara. The SJVSV is demanding five acres of cultivable land and Rs 50,000 for each landless family.
The struggle of these people was initially dismissed by the state government, but gathered momentum, when social activists like Mrs Arundhati Roy and Ms Medha Patkar visited the workers in February and expressed solidarity towards their cause. Mrs Roy termed the struggle to be the one of the most “colorful” that she had witnessed in recent years. Ms Patkar had agreed that dalits and adivasis of Kerala live impoverished lives and that were not the ones who benefited from the land reform of 1970s, as the reforms focused on granting land to the tenants.
The SJVSV president Mr Laha Gopalan, said: “The chief minister had promised via written assurance at a meeting held in 2006 September that land would be allotted to landless families by December 2006. The CM made promises in Thiruvananthapuram, but his party workers are working overtime to suppress our movement here,” he said.
As for camping at the Harrison estate, the president explained that the government should have taken possession of this land. “The HM plantation company had got the land on lease for 99 years from a family. A local landlord had given the estate to the family on a lease for 34 years for banana cultivation. But the family breeched the agreement when it gave the land to Harisson Malayalam Ltd for 99 years,” he said.
The state government has asked revenue officials to review the lease and look into the claim made by the SJVSV, meanwhile, the plantation company appealed to the High Court and asked the landless people to be evicted from their estate, stating that the ongoing struggle affects plantation activities. The High Court notified the state police that the people should be evicted but without “shedding a drop of blood”. According to sources, after today’s volatile situation, the police are likely to inform the High Court that the court’s request, of evicting the people without putting them in any physical danger, cannot be carried out.