When agitations for land intensified in Wayanad under the aegis of tribal fronts of political parties in 2012, thousands of landless tribespeople took part in it.
They claimed their right to land by erecting huts on forestland. Those who took part in similar agitations till 2004 had been assigned land under the Forest Rights Act, 2006 and it inspired them to participate in these agitations.
The tribespeople thus opened 53 protest centres across the South and North Wayanad forest divisions. Though Forest Department officials arrested 826 protesters, including 296 women, they returned to the same place after local courts granted them bail.
A few of them called it quits once the intensity of the agitations subsided. Those who did not possess even a single cent of land chose to stay back, many among them embarking on cultivation of ginger, coffee, and pepper on the land.
Plight of tribes
Balakrishnan, 70, is the head of the Aanapara Kattunayakka settlement (a particularly vulnerable tribal group). As a boy, he was told by parents that his grandfather possessed nearly 60 acres. “We do not own a single cent now, nothing even to cremate our dead,” he laments. A ramshackle one-room hut in a piece of encroached forestland at Irulam, near Pulpally, has been his home for five years now.
Balakrishnan’s grandfather was illiterate. When settler farmers began migrating to Wayanad in the 1960s, a few of them offered alcohol and tobacco to the tribals, who had no proper title deeds, and usurped their land. Two hundred such tribal families have been living on the slopes of Irulam and Cheeyambam in the South Wayanad Forest Division since May, 2012.
Balakrishnan has planted nearly 300 pepper vines and 200 coffee plants over an acre of vested forestland ‘assigned’ to him by leaders of the Adivasi Congress, an outfit of the Congress at its Irulam protest centre near Pulpally.
Apparently, the activists promised him that he would not be evicted from the land at any cost.
Sujatha, 35, a resident of the Kottakkolly Paniya hamlet and an activist of the Adivasi Kshema Samiti, the tribal arm of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), said her party men had told her not to leave the agitation venue at Cheeyambam, near Pulpally, till she secured own land.
But their life is in makeshift huts plagued by a dearth of drinking water, unhygienic surroundings, and vulnerable to attack by wild animals.
Nowhere to go
“If we are evicted from the land, we have no idea where we will go along with my three children,” Sujatha said. Though the Poothadi grama panchayat constructed toilets for a few of them, at least some are in a state of disuse thanks to acute water shortage.
According to the Census of 2011, there were 4,84,839 tribal people, including 2,46,636 tribal women, in the State and about a half of them had made the inner parts of Wayanad their home.
Data available with the Tribal Development Department revealed that as many as 11,474 tribal families, including 8,263 families in Wayanad district, were landless.
Agitators, including tribespeople, who rallied under the All India Krantikari Kisan Sabha and the Adivasi Bharath Mahasabha, feeder organisations of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Red Star, to take possession of forestland early last year had a tough fate.
They encroached on 110 ha at Thovarimala under the Meppadi forest range of the South Wayanad Forest Division on the eve of the Lok Sabha elections in 2019. The land was earlier under Harrisons Malayalam Ltd. and had been used for cultivating softwood trees to meet the demand of firewood in its tea factories. The Achutha Menon Ministry in 1970 resumed nearly 5,000 acres, including estate land, at Vythiri and Sulthan Bathery taluks, as surplus land.
The Forest Department is its custodian. The land was intended to be assigned to the landless but successive governments failed to adopt steps towards this end, said the leaders of the organisation.
Following their eviction from the land, they have been continuing their agitation in front of the Collectorate for the past nine months.
