THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The dream that the celebrated balladeer O N V Kurup once sold peasants, that fields they harvest will one day be their own, has remained just that; a dream.
Consider these: The average area owned by the state’s scheduled caste population, the original paddy reapers, is a mere 0.75 cents while 800-odd plantations together own 2.27 lakh hectares; originally 7.82 lakh hectares was available for redistribution in 1957 but, as it turned out, only 25,000 hectares was distributed among the landless, a mere 3.2 percent; two companies (Kanan Devan Hills Plantation Company and Harrisons Malayalam Plantation Company) alone possess nearly 49,000 hectares of unused land that should have gone to the deprived.
Prof M A Oommen, the state’s foremost social scientist, argued that land reforms had failed to reverse the marginalization of the backward classes. The slogan ‘land to the tiller’ remained meaningless, he said.
In a seminal article in the latest issue of the prestigious Journal of South Asian Development, Prof Oommen even traces the root cause of the perpetuation of deprivation among the traditionally marginalized communities to the faulty implementation of land reforms in the state. He points out four major distortions.
One, the exemption of plantations endorsed the continuation of the colonial pattern of land holding in the high ranges. Hundreds of plantations with thousands of hectares at their disposal were left untouched.
“It was also found that crucial insider information had allowed influential families to convert large tracts of land into rubber and other plantations before the Land Reforms Bill was tabled on the floor of the Assembly in 1969,” said Mr P K Sivanandan, a former bureaucrat and authority on backward issues.
Two, even the surplus for redistribution from non-exempted land was significantly reduced through the legitimization of mala fide transfers.
When the Agrarian Relations Bill (the forerunner of the Land Reforms Act 1969) was introduced in 1957, it was announced that a surplus of about 7.82 lakh hectares would be available for redistribution.
By the end of 1988, after several amendments to the Land Reform Act, the amount of land ordered for surrender was only 67,000 hectares. Eventually, only 25,000 hectares was redistributed.
“Governance is loaded in favour of plantations. Once the lease period is over, plantation owners are granted title deeds,” said Mr K K Surendran, a Wayanad-based teacher, who champions tribal rights.
Even when the law is brought to bear upon them, plantations have demonstrated a fearsome unwillingness to part with land in their illegal possession. Recently, certain plantations in Wayanad went to the Supreme Court against a High Court verdict that asked them to part with 10,000-plus acres of surplus land.
Three, the original tillers, the scheduled castes, lost out. “The only provision in the legislation that benefited them was the conferring of ownership rights on their homesteads,” Prof Oommen writes. But, for future generations, these small dwellings spawned larger economic and psychological issues.
“Now, three to four generations of a family are seen cramped together on 150-200 sq ft of space inside state-sponsored hutments,” Mr Surendran said. The creation of 'Harijan colonies', Prof Oommen says, has worsened the marginalization process.
Four, development allowed non-tribal people to trespass into forest areas and dispossess tribal people of their land. Though Kerala Scheduled Tribes (Restrictions of Transfer of Lands and Restoration of Alienated Lands) Act was passed in 1975, it was not implemented.
The Liberation Struggle that caused the untimely demise of the state’s first government in 1959, according to author and Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad activist Gopan Mukundan, was the turning point.
“After this, circumstances were created that were not conducive for the realization of land reforms as envisaged by the communist movement,” Gopan said. “Interest groups in the name of farmers scuttled, and continue to scuttle, all attempts at reforms,” he said.
“Even if you grant that, what stopped the Left from fighting the odds thrown at them by the so-called Liberation Struggle,” Prof Oommen asks.
