Chengara Conspiracy
Kerala is a place where you cannot get agriculture labourers because everyone is literate and thinks manual labour is unbecoming. The minimum wages that you have to pay to any manual labourer is Rs. 250/- a day - for 6 hours of what they deem to be ‘work’. The carpenter gets Rs. 300/- to Rs. 500/- a day. A live-in maid comes at not less than Rs. 4500/- plus food and clothes, a month. If you use her for other things, you pay extra. All labourers come to work in motorcycles or scooters.
Kerala is ‘Gulf’ to manual labourers from other states. There is practically no unemployment here after 2000, if you are ready to work. The greediest of young men work in ‘quotation gangs’ that recover money for banks like ICICI, HSBC, HDFC etc, or beat up people for politicians or similar others. They quote in 10000s to lakhs.
Malayali workers including head loaders, and employees including college teachers are, within Kerala, a disgrace to world labour. To them, work is worship of selfish indolence, and exercising of the tongue. Chaathans, created by the great VKN is the best possible presentation of our poor farm labourer.
The Communist parties profess the raising of the living standards of the working class and their leaders. They have thus managed to raise the lifestyles of even coolies or head-loaders to Star levels. Clerks and peons of government departments like Revenue, Registration, and Transport etc earn much more than MNC CEOs, thanks to their unions’ protecting bribe-taking. College lecturers earn at UGC levels without possessing the stipulated qualifications, only because of their Left unions. Secure monthly salary earners are deemed the genuine working class because they pay more and regular Union levies.
Kerala has a population of about 4 % of the country. Projected population for 1st March 2008 is 3, 42, 32,000. We have land of 1.18% of India. The quantum of land 38863 sq. kms or 9 603 00000 cents cannot change.
Of this geographical area, 48% is mountainous or hilly. 12% is the coastal lowlands. The remaining 40% of midlands alone is suitable for human dwelling. That is to say, for 4% percent of the country’s population, only about 0. 45% of its land is available for living and surviving.
In land-starved Kerala, the largest landowners are the government, the Christian plantation owners and the Church. Every time that the CPM has been in power, grabbing of government land by the party workers is usual. The party, however, is now no longer of the poor; it is now a party of contractors, brokers and businesspersons. The CPM thus having moved away from the downtrodden, new forces like the Muslim Solidarity, Catholic Infam and foreign-funded environment organizations moved in to rescue the poor. The Sadhu Jana Vimochana Samyukta Vedi (SJVSV) that has started the Chengara land-grab is one such saviour-outfit of dubious origins.
The pressure on land is our greatest weakness. Our earlier planners did not give this matter honest consideration. We should have planned for development without disturbing or destroying the highlands and lowlands. You meddle with mother Earth and you suffer – our planners ignored this old rule.
Institutional support by the Church to encroachments is responsible for the destruction of our hills. Muthanga was the zenith of their achievement under a Catholic ruler. Sex tourism is responsible for the vandalisation of our coasts.
Land belongs to all of us equally. We also have responsibility to it. Calculating on 960300000 cents and 34232000 humans, individual share comes to 28 cents each. Permissible human usage-share is 40% of that total. Thus, each of us has a birthright to only 11 cents of the land area in Kerala. If you allow a further deduction of 30% to man-made infrastructure like roads, public grounds and buildings, other public utilities etc, a Keralite can claim or own to himself only 7 cents or so.
It is against this ground reality that Chengara orphans demand five acres of land suitable for agriculture and Rs.50,000 in cash for each landless family among them [The Hindu 04.06.2008]. The demands are typically Malayali – similar to demanding that you shut your thattu-kada, stop plying your autorikshaw or not take your ill child to the hospital, for ‘their’ Bandh. It is mere bullying. And we would not dare to do it outside Kerala borders.
Meeting the demand would need only about 40000 acres of land.
I heard Laha Gopalan say many times on TV that the Chengara camp has people of all castes, and that it is only an agitation of people who do not have as much land as their birthright [they having only 4 to 10 cents] and the landless. This might mean that it is not an agitation of landless Dalits; or at least, not any longer. Laha Gopalan himself has by his own admission, only one hectare or 247 cents valued at Rs. 24, 70,000/-
In 3 years, 30% of the active population in Kerala would be non-Malayali or immigrant labour. The Chengara model would serve them well. TRESPASS, SQUAT, GRAB! We need not stop with land alone in the Chengara culture.
There are reports that the organisers of the land-grab collect admission fees ranging from Rs.6000/- upwards from the squatters. As per the Vedi’s claims, as many as 24,000 people belonging to 7,282 families are occupying about 14,000 acres of land at the Kumbazha Estate. The number of makeshift huts pitched at the estate will be around 7,800. The money collected might thus come to crores of Rupees, exclusive of financial assistance received from various Agencies.
Medha Patkar, Arundhati Roy and similar mega-stars’ going to Chengara to proclaim support was only like Henry Kissinger’s having come to New Delhi in November 2007 on behalf of the NSG corporates, to sort out the Left’s misgivings about the reciprocal arrangements for their agreeing to the Nuclear Deal. Such initiatives need spending.
Harrisons Plantations is a company of the RP Goenka group. It is not a foreign company, as depicted by the activists and the media. From 2005, they have been selling off pieces of the Estates in Kerala to real estate companies. The land was not theirs; and their lease with the owners, the Kerala government, had run out years ago; in 1996, according to Laha Gopalan. However, neither Left nor Right, or activist raised any voice against the fraud. http://www.moneycontrol.com/mccode/news/article/news_article.php?autono=169951
The Harrison’s Kodumon Estate land grab by Laha Gopalan and his group in 2006 and the Chengara land-grab of 2007 might thus have been some trick by some real estate group to force a cheap sale of the land. The huge funds spent in mobilising media and activist support could have come from that group. Alternately, it might have been a trick by RPG themselves to escape from Kerala without paying the rent to the government [they have reportedly not paid it for 20 years] and the employee benefits to the labour. After the lease ran out, RPG had availed a loan of Rs. 100 crores from the ICICI Bank on the security of the Estate, on which they had no rights at that point of time. The land grab might also have been to avert having to repay the Bank.
AK Balan, Kerala’s Minister for SC/STs, has already called Chengara a ‘state-sponsored agitation’. It is like Kerala’s Private Bus operators’ agitating and frequently stopping services to make the public agree in agony to fare-hikes by an eager ministry. In the name of settlement of Chengara orphans, government land elsewhere would soon be allotted. The Estate might also be divided and allotted to different employees’ co-operatives, to benefit all the political parties. On 17.9.2008, Laha Gopalan categorically said on Doordarshan that they would not accept land at Chengara, even if no other land were given.
The rehabilitation initiative would be used more as a ploy to allot land to LDF cadres. Each party would have quotas, as had been with the Plus 2 allotment. Anyone that would pay the leaders would get choice real estate ‘free’. By 2010, the plots thus allotted would be consolidated to build resorts, amusement parks or professional colleges. Either the Party leaders themselves or Comrades like Farris Aboobacker would be the entrepreneurs on the land. Chengara would thus be revealed as a Total4 U, in a few more months.
http://archive.gulfnews.com/world/India/10242380.html
On 20th September 2008, AK Balan, Kerala’s Minister for SC/STs, announced that beginning October 5th, the government would begin a massive Scheme for allotting land to the landless all over the State. A total of 15000 acres had been identified as excess land by the government. This land could safely be doled out. Houses would also be built for the beneficiaries. Chengara squatters would be the first to benefit under the Scheme, he said. That would be meeting the demands of the intellectual activists fully. Environmental concerns about more houses coming up in what is till then ecological wasteland might not bother them.
But that would bring us to the basic questions that any prudent society should ask itself at the outset.
If acres are doled away to the so called landless poor without considering the per capita availability of seven cents of land, where would the others that are not as aggressive as the squatters, ever get any land at all from?
What is to happen to the landless among the middle classes of Kerala, who are unable to have houses of their own because of the inhuman cost of land in Kerala? Would they also have to squat and threaten suicide to have 7 cents for a house each?
The squatters that get land would only sell it all off eventually and live idling off the large sums of money so generated. Average minimum cost of land in Kerala is Rs.10 lakhs per acre in the rural parts. In places like Kochi, it is around half to one crore a cent. How much of public wealth would be lost when 15000 acres housing real-estate is freely given away to squatters?
I wish some intellectual activist would answer.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Monday, September 22, 2008
WHY AMBEDKAR MARRIED A BRAHMIN
Copied from Samatha.in
Source: Dalit Nation
Many Dalit intellectuals have burnt a lot of midnight oil trying to analyze why our saviour Babasaheb Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar married Mai Savitha Ambedkar, a chitpavan brahmin from Maharashtra. Did Babasaheb fall a prey to the Brahmin conspiracy. Many of my dalit brothers and writers in Maharashtra hint that there is a conspiracy from the brahmins. Some of the upper caste people laugh at this. Some of their twice born intellectuals even claim that Babasaheb wanted a trophy Brahmin wife. How true are all these. Why have we dalits come to such a stage that we are even questioning our leader. Do these people think that they are more intelligent than Babasaheb, the most revolutionary leader since Gautama Buddha.
Babsaheb can never be wrong. There is a message in each and every action of his life. Babasaheb by Marrying the doctor brahmin Mai Ambedkar has shown us that even women in Brahmin community is oppressed and the only way they can be saved is to get them out of their jati. Brahmin women are also Dalits in a way. Brahmin women are the biggest victim of Brahmin conspiracy. Manu treats women like filth, even brahmin woman. Out dalit women are much more free than the brahmins. They dont become untouchable during menstruation. They work in the fields and they cook.
If you want to finish the brahmins then marry the Brahmin women. Dalits should marry Brahmin women and take them out of their varna. Then Brahmins the micro minority 3 percent population of india will have no women left to marry and breed. They will die a natural death and become extinct. Look at the genius of Ambedkar. Without understanding Ambedkar’s genius all these so called Dalit intellectuals are making all kinds of noise and falling prey to manuwadi agendas. Remmber manuwadis beleive what they want to believe and they make you believe what they want you to believe.
Comment
Sachin Salave said,
April 2, 2008 @ 3:48 pm
I need to share an interesting information with all of you participating in this discussion.
During the General Election in Bhandara, Babasaheb had gone to preside over a meeting. One activist confronted Babasaheb and angrily asked him that why did he marry a brahmin woman. Babasaheb calmly asked him to meet him after the meeting. After the meeting Babasaheb said to him,” Go and give this messsage to my followers that they should not do this mistake.(i.e of marrying a Brahmin woman)”
Circumstances that lead to his marriage must be understood before coming to any hasty conclusions.
Firstly, in the mahar caste and in the untouchables in general, there was no education at all in those times. And to find a nurse or a doctor to take care of him throughout the day was impossible. So he had to marry. But it was impossible to find a doctor woman among our people. And Babasaheb had a plethora of ailments like bloodpressure, diabetes, bodypain etc. There was no one to take care of him after Maisaheb’s death. Babasaheb did not marry many years after Maisahebs death. He chose to remain single. But untimely hours of eating and constant pressure of his social activities made him excessively ill. He was almost blind in his later years. So his doctor Mr.Malwankar introduced Miss Savita kabir to him and she used to take care of him. Eventually they married. But Dr.Ambedkar married a Brahmin doctor so that he could be healthy and contribute more of his energy for the social movement.
But his second wife did not take care of him at all. Dr. Krishnamurthy wrote a letter to Dr.Ambedkar saying that he was being tortured by his wife and she did not allow him to see Dr.Ambedkar. He wrote that as Dr.Ambedkar was doing a great service to the downtrodden people of India, he wanted to treat him and cure him and restore his health. But His wife prevented all this from happening.
Even Dr.Bastein, a woman, was not allowed to see Dr.Ambedkar. Dr.Bastein wanted to check his health and prescribe some medicines for him. But she was not at all allowed to see the doctor.
After Babasaheb’s death, his followers demanded a post-mortem. The post-mortem was done by the Nehru Govt. But the report was not made public.Still it has not been made public. This clearly proves that some thing was wrong.
Just hours after the death of Dr.Ambedkar, his wife demanded that she should be made the National President of Scheduled Castes Federation and The Buddhist Society of India and all this should be done before Dr.Ambedkars dead body was cremated.
All this is documented.
R.Sajan Says:
September 22, 2008 at 1:26 am
In Kerala, The Namboodiris are the Aryan Brahmins. EMS Namboodiripad was one such Namboodiri.
The Aryans were crafty. Domination of other races through sex was one of their strategies. In Kerala, the rule that they laid down for themselves was that only the eldest son of the family could marry from his own caste. Only the eldest son of the family could thus marry from the Namboodiri caste. The others could have Sambandhams with Nairs.
In Sambandham, the Namboodiri could come at night, do his business and leave in the morning. He would take a bath before leaving, to cleanse himself of the lower caste mistress. Children borne of the Sambandham were not allowed to touch their father. The Namboodiri’s family would not recognise them either. They could not expect any financial or other help from the father. They were to be brought up by the mother.
It was gratis sex and nothing else. But the mistress and her children would be emotionally bounden to the alien Namboodiri. He would thus dominate them. His opinion would count in the mistress’ family’s financial and social stands.
This is how the Brahma-swam style of social economy began. In Brahmaswam, the mistress’ family would sign over their wealth to the Namboodiri, when the male members of the family would go to fight the local chieftain’s battles for him. Their return from the battles was often uncertain. The properties then came over to the Namboodiri’s family. An admirable strategy to steal the honour and wealth of the lower castes!
The family wealth of the likes of EMS Namboodiripad, of which the CPM makes much of because he signed it all over to the Party when confronted with an attachment by the British government, was all made this way.
Dr. Ambedkar might have only been reversing the strategy!
Sunday, September 21, 2008
DEVIKA DISCUSSION - FINALE
When I answered the points raised by Dr.Aditya Nigam, who does not seem to know even about the bribes that Kerala government officials make in a month, I found that they would not post my messages in their Blog any longer. My messages would appear as 'Waiting for moderation' and would disappear after some time. Dr. Devika did not answer my long brief either. I noted their inability to stand their ground and argue. I was amused by their levels of moral courage and intellectual honesty.
Harrisons Plantations is a company of the RP Goenka group. It is not a foreign company, as depicted by the activists and the media. From 2005, they have been selling off the Estates in Kerala to real estate persons. The land was not theirs; and their lease with the owners, the Kerala government, had run out in 2005. However, neither Left nor Right, or activist raised any voice against the fraud. http://www.moneycontrol.com/mccode/news/article/news_article.php?autono=169951
The Kodumon Estate land grab by Laha Gopalan and his group in 2006 and the Chengara land-grab of 2007 might thus have been some trick by some real estate group to force a cheap sale of the land. The huge funds spent in mobilising media and activist support could have come from that group. Alternately, it might have been a trick by RPG themselves to escape from Kerala without paying the rent to the government [they have reportedly not paid it for 20 years] and the employee benefits to the labour. After the lease ran out, RPG had availed a loan of Rs. 100 crores from the ICICI Bank on the security of the Estate, on which they had no rights at that point of time. The land grab might also have been to avert having to repay the Bank.
Let us not concern ourselves with such matters. Let us only wonder about and feel sorry at the role of the activists on the Issue.
On 20th September 2008, AK Balan, Kerala’s Minister for SC/STs, announced that beginning October 5th, the government would begin a massive Scheme for allotting land to the landless all over the State. A total of 15000 acres would thus be disposed off. Houses would also be built for the beneficiaries. Chengara squatters would be the first to benefit under the Scheme, he said.
What is to happen to the landless among the middle classes who are unable to have houses of their own because of the inhuman cost of land in Kerala? Would they also have to squat and threaten suicide to have 7 cents for a house each? Average minimum cost of land in Kerala is Rs.10 lakhs per acre in the rural parts. In places like Kochi, it is around half to one crore a cent. How much of public wealth would be lost when 15000 acres is freely given away to squatters?
The activists would not answer. Perhaps, their cut is already paid in advance?
Harrisons Plantations is a company of the RP Goenka group. It is not a foreign company, as depicted by the activists and the media. From 2005, they have been selling off the Estates in Kerala to real estate persons. The land was not theirs; and their lease with the owners, the Kerala government, had run out in 2005. However, neither Left nor Right, or activist raised any voice against the fraud. http://www.moneycontrol.com/mccode/news/article/news_article.php?autono=169951
The Kodumon Estate land grab by Laha Gopalan and his group in 2006 and the Chengara land-grab of 2007 might thus have been some trick by some real estate group to force a cheap sale of the land. The huge funds spent in mobilising media and activist support could have come from that group. Alternately, it might have been a trick by RPG themselves to escape from Kerala without paying the rent to the government [they have reportedly not paid it for 20 years] and the employee benefits to the labour. After the lease ran out, RPG had availed a loan of Rs. 100 crores from the ICICI Bank on the security of the Estate, on which they had no rights at that point of time. The land grab might also have been to avert having to repay the Bank.
Let us not concern ourselves with such matters. Let us only wonder about and feel sorry at the role of the activists on the Issue.
On 20th September 2008, AK Balan, Kerala’s Minister for SC/STs, announced that beginning October 5th, the government would begin a massive Scheme for allotting land to the landless all over the State. A total of 15000 acres would thus be disposed off. Houses would also be built for the beneficiaries. Chengara squatters would be the first to benefit under the Scheme, he said.
What is to happen to the landless among the middle classes who are unable to have houses of their own because of the inhuman cost of land in Kerala? Would they also have to squat and threaten suicide to have 7 cents for a house each? Average minimum cost of land in Kerala is Rs.10 lakhs per acre in the rural parts. In places like Kochi, it is around half to one crore a cent. How much of public wealth would be lost when 15000 acres is freely given away to squatters?
The activists would not answer. Perhaps, their cut is already paid in advance?
Saturday, September 20, 2008
CHENGARA DISCUSSION WITH Dr.J. DEVIKA.
Kafila
media | politics | dissent
Maveli won’t be let into Chengara
a:Posted by: jdevika | 10 September 2008
(J Devika works at Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum, Kerala. Her writing has been mostly about gender, social reform, politics, and development in Kerala. devumol@gmail.com)
This is Onam week in Kerala — a festival that recalls the days of Maveli, the wise asura king dethroned and exiled by Vamana, the avtar of Vishnu, at the behest of jealous gods. It is also an intensely-family time for most people, given that upper caste ‘family’ values are pervasive. Amidst high voltage commercialised Onam, the people at Chengara starve. The trade union blockade has been renewed, and the CITU has brought in women and has extended the blockade 24 hours. And CPM cadre have now started ‘occupying’ the houses of the Sadhujana Vimochana Munnani activists — ostensibly to reveal the ‘truth’ — that some of them indeed possess some land and a house! Strange, indeed. By this logic, the women who the trade unions have deployed in the blockade shouldn’t be ‘workers’ at all, in the light of their middle class dress codes, body language, gold ornaments and apparent reluctance to squat on the road (they sit primly on rows of chairs)!
The idea that activists should be activists should necessarily embrace poverty, or that people should become activists only if they are near starvation, stems from new-elite hubris; but is it also not the case that the communist party has no right to preach what it does not practice? As far as I know, this idea was jettisoned as early as the 1940s, and by none less than EMS Nambutiripad, who is of course the reigning deity of the CPM! In response to widespread discontent over the communist party’s decision to reduce the number of full time activists in 1944, EMS remarked :“As far as comrades from the landowning and capitalist classes are concerned, it may be better that they work to create a group within their class who will work for the country’s economic planning and to improve the people’s standards of living, and to devote their wealth and labour in ways that enhance national pride, rather than sell their assets and hand over the sum received to the party.”
(’Acchadakkattode Pravarttikkuka’ (Be Disciplined Workers), in P. Govinda Pillai (ed.), EMS Sampoorna Kritikal [Collected Works of EMS] vol.5, 1944-45, Thiruvananthapuram: Chinta Publishers, pp. 234-54).
But it is really the silence of the government that it most criminal. The ‘package’ seems indefinitely delayed; the CPM is apparently ‘helpless’ to curb the CITU; the Congress which made supportive noises and said pious things about resolving the issue seems powerless to persuade the INTUC.We hear that the issue is provoking some response among many CPM-identified intellectuals but by the time they get over their terrible moral dilemmas, it may be too late.
I suppose this is the ‘onam spirit’, which makes a virtue of hypocrisy and falsehood. At Onam we are all supposed to eat well, dress well, and pretend that everything is just right so that the exiled Maveli, who is allowed to visit his erstwhile subjects once a year, will be fooled. For that purpose, we are told that ’sell your lease,if you need to,to dine well on onam’. So, we pretend that Chengara does not exist and go about our onam dining and dressing. Not just the CPM, all of us, of the Malayalee new-elite,are equally complicit.
Responses
By: rsajan on 15 September 2008 at 1:24 am
Is jdevika real??
Please put your quesrions to Neelakantan Namboodiri who was a CPM member till two years ago.
The Communist parties have only one goal - that of raising the living standards of the working class. They have thus managed to raise the lifestyles of even coolies or head-loaders to Star levels. Clerks and peons of government departments like Revenue, Registration, Transport etc earn much more than MNC CEOs , thanks to their unions. College lecturers earn at UGC levels without possessing the stipulated qualifications, only because of their Left unions.
Our intellectuals should not ignore such achievments of the working classes under the Left or ridicule them out of envy.
Chegara people have joined the struggle after paying admission fees of Rs 6000/- each. They might not starve at Onam!
By: Devika on 15 September 2008
at 1:43 pm
rsajan is a mixed bag indeed! He seems at times to be the typical upper middle-class cynic who shares the typical elite wisdom that since all politicians are crooked let us have no politics at all, and since the poor are poor because they are unfit for anything else, any improvement in their standards of living must be undeserved, irrespective of whether these gains are through politics or otherwise! And of course his cheerful clubbing of headload workers with college lecturers! At times, he seems to be the typical middle class Hindu upper caste person envious of the church. And of course predominantly the morally-frozen consumer-citizen who’d readily volunteer to spread slander about political struggles, who’d agree to user fees in everything else including public services for the poorest! Only the utterly elitist would claim that people at Chengara are so foolish that they would pay a fairly large sum to buy insecurity and violence inflicted by both the left and the unfeeling consumer citizens of Kerala.
I’m glad this person continues to respond — for other readers, here is evidence to the brand of elitism that Sunny Kapikad talks of in his speech posted here — the sort that denies the poor any real political agency, and sees them as helpless pawns of some kind of unscruplous element or the other. And worse, hints that they can be nothing more than that. At least other readers will see what the poor in Kerala are up against!
By: R.Sajan on 15 September 2008
at 6:30 pm
Kerala is a place where you cannot get agriculture labourers. The minimum wages that you have to pay to any manual labourer is Rs. 250/- a day - for 6 hours of what they deem to be ‘work’. The carpenter gets Rs. 300/- to Rs. 500/- a day. A live-in maid comes at not less than Rs. 4500/- plus food and clothes, a month. If you use her for other things, you pay extra.
Kerala is ‘Gulf’ to manual labourers from other states. There is practically no unemployment there after 2000, if you are ready to work. The greediest of young men work in ‘quotation gangs’ that recover money for banks like ICICI, HSBC, HDFC etc, or beat up people for politicians or similar others. They quote in 10000s to lakhs.
If the ‘poor’ of Chengara would go out and work, they would get a minimum of Rs. 200/- a day. Why do they not go, then?
As for the Rs. 6000/-, I suggest that you ask Com. Neelakantan himself. If you actually do not know about the Rs. 6000/-, it is most unfortunate about the awareness levels of the intellectual tribe of Kerala.
Anyway, why do you not calculate the per capita availability of land in Kerala? Government land is yours and mine also.
By the by, do you have gold ornaments? I am gold-less. Would it be okay if I squat on your gold because you have it, and I do not?
The ways of the lazy and hypocritical tribe of Kerala’s professional intellectuals are to be seen to be believed…….
By: Aditya Nigam on 16 September 2008
at 11:43 am
Aditya Nigam works with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, is interested in political and social theory and is in search of a new, multi-coloured left…Red having become monochromatic grey… aditya@sarai.net
Interesting questions. Why is it that the ‘financial set up’ only of movement leaders is under question? Always? Sometime ago we had discussed an Indian Express report that did the same with regard to Singur and the activists involved in it. Suppose you are right, what is it supposed to ‘prove’? That people with money or wealth should only be doing what you want them to? Make more money? That they should not be part of movements? Unable to understand. Yes, ‘the poor’ are the banner for everybody to flaunt rejimon, except the Sajans of this world. You flaunt it as much as others you accuse of ‘misleading’ them. Why others, more capable and wealthy people, cannot mislead them, of course remains a mystery.
By: Devika on 16 September 2008
at 2:53 pm
Great going, sajan! Let people see what you and the rest of the Great Malayalee Elite are like. The tribe has swelled, and how! I distinctly remember as a child during the days of the Emergency, how a prominent cashew industrialist spoke about it in glowing terms on our school day. The same cribbing about Kerala’s workers who weren’t apparently willing to pick up his shit and tend his plants (or crops) for a pittance… Wow, what a bunch.. they want people to slog for them, feel awful about paying a decent wage, and worse, want people to keep shut as they slog…and feel no shame in spewing all this in the fashion of morally outraged innocents! Sajan’s comments make excellent primary sources for anyone researching Kerala’s apolitical consumerist middle class.
By: Aditya Nigam on 16 September 2008
at 4:12 pm
And you might add, Devika, that this is the new, shifting social base of Kerala’s Old Left. While the old TUs gradually move to entrench new interests, some of them at least, will be in a mortal conflict with these new Malayali elites - and both will find their best bet in the CPI-M. It is not a situation that can last very long, as West Bengal also shows. It will have to be this way or that for the ‘Left’.
By: R.Sajan on 17 September 2008
at 4:20 am
Dr.Devika
Branding dissent with labels and then attacking the labels is usual when one cannot argue specific points. Senile Communist theoreticians often do this. Labels like reactionary, revisionist, Bourgeois nationalist, feudalist, anarchist etc are examples. The labels that our intellectuals use are cynical, pessimistic, communal, retrograde, bigoted, elitist etc. I cannot beat a Sociologist in the art of branding, labelling or in quaternio terminorum.
The following labels have so far been used on me here: Old Left, elitist, apolitical, consumerist, middle class, cynic, Hindu upper caste, morally-frozen etc. Thanks for the tags. Nevertheless, I really wish someone would enlighten me on my points:
• Chegara people have joined the struggle after paying admission fees of Rs 6000/- each.
• Kerala is ‘Gulf’ to manual labourers from other states.
• If the ‘poor’ of Chengara would go out and work, they would get a minimum of Rs. 200/- a day. Why do they not go, then?
• Anyway, why do you not calculate the per capita availability of land in Kerala?
• I am gold-less. Would it be okay if I squat on your gold because you have it, and I do not?
AK Balan has already called Chengara a ‘state-sponsored agitation’. It is like Private Bus operators’ agitating and stopping services to make the public agree in agony to fare hikes by the ministry. In the name of settlement of Chengara orphans, government land elsewhere would soon be allotted. The rehabilitation initiative would be used more as a ploy to allot land to LDF cadres. Each party would have quotas, as had been with the Plus 2 allotment. Anyone that would pay the leaders would get choice real estate free. By 2010, the plots thus allotted would be consolidated to build resorts, amusement parks or professional colleges. Either the Party leaders themselves or Comrades like Farris Aboobacker would be the entrepreneurs on the land. Chengara would thus be revealed as a Total4 U, in a few more months.
http://archive.gulfnews.com/world/India/10242380.html
By: Devika on 17 September 2008
at 4:05 pm
Good. ‘Dr.Devika’, finally!
Here is my response to your burning questions.
(1) CR Neelakantan categorically denies having said or written anything you attribute to him — he said he was shocked about your claim about 6000 rupee fee, and challenges you to provide evidence beyond what some slanderous newspaper may have said. I take this as evidence for your slanderous intent. Not even those those associated with Harrisons Malayalam would make such a concerted effort at slander.
(2) and (3) I would like to correct your ignorance on Kerala as ‘Gulf’ — typical of the Malayala Manorama kind of political imagination. Kerala is no longer ‘Gulf’ to workers from Tamil Nadu or other parts of south India given the steep rise in everyday expenses. Yes it is still ‘Gulf’ for the miserably poor from Orissa, W bengal and other places. The inflow is welcomed here by hirers precisely because they have to pay only a fraction and don’t have to bother about welfare benefits. Well, so what? Does that mean that workers in Kerala should start working for miserably low wages and in abysmal conditions? If so, this contradicts your next point, about high wages in Kerala!
And a fine question to ask, indeed — why don’t the poor opt to stay landless labourers? And when the educated middle-class are even reluctant to let their children choose professions that lack ’social status’! Manual labour is universally devalued in Kerala, and to say that the poor, who have been subjected to it for generations in history should stay continue to regard it as their mainstay reeks of elitism. Of course your understanding of the difference between escaping poverty and poverty management are decidedly poor, and so you’d go on flogging the same dead horse.
(4) Ah, the availability of land! Malayala Manorama-style ignorance, again, I am afraid. It in fact is strongly redolent of the screeching right-wing texts of the 1950s which spoke of ‘teeming millions’ of Kerala who were occupying every inch of the land and ate up all the resources, so that nothing was left for ‘development’! Proved later to be totally off the mark, common sense masquerading as science, with the demise of the Coale-Hoover thesis — there were many things wrong with Kerala but high population didn’t have the kind of economic effect that was attributed to it. Then too people were told to act ‘responsibly’ and cooperate with state family planning to help ‘development’. Now of course once again, land is found scarce. There is of course enough land for real-estate builders, for non-resident Malayali capital is pouring into Kerala filling up paddy land and destroying cultivable area. There is also enough land for more than 20 SEZs. As for the massive plantations, they are semi-private land and indeed, how awful the public should protest when the leaseholders try to snap up profit by selling it! Since it is the wealthy and the neo-wealthy who are the inheritors of the earth, how can we let the scum in, right, Sajan? Ata boy!
But we must go further. There are too many people around (I mean the scum) in plum areas in Kerala. We must rightfully wage a war to throw them out. Recently, the government identified 800 acres of prime land in the highly populous Thrissur district for a new university, some of which is notified land — remember, only when the adivasis squat on reserved areas is firing etc permitted! And for Vizhinjam, thickly populated coastal areas with immense tourism potential have been identified for acquisition. Where will all these people go? Oh, that isn’t our concern — that is what the government is for — eliminate or rehabilitate, keep the scum away from our eyeshot! The bottom line is there is no land available; they should be confined to some colonies.
Seriously, the sort of individualism implied in the use of ‘per capita’ land availability as the fundamental condition for implementing social justice is interesting. It will take several stock market crashes to remedy such hubris.
(5) Gold-less! Indeed! Who are you fooling? This is like Bill Gates saying that he doesn’t possess gold and therefore he is a saint. To treat that as a hypothetical query, yes, if I possess wealth (not ‘gold’) and if another does not, I think it is my moral duty to share it. I don’t think you or I who are likely to be social equals have any monopoly over gold; nor do I need to share it with you, since you are clearly my equal. The least we could do however, is to root for conditions under which those who have no wealth may escape such want and become our social equals. And the Manorama-logic, I fear, surfaces again — ‘if the deprivation suffered by x should be remedied, then y, who does not suffer deprivation now, should be reduced to deprivation’. That makes ‘equals’ of widowed and destitute Kunhipeennu of Chengara and Harrisons Malayalam!
(6) The last bit of counterfactual nonsense deserves no response. Again this impoverished soul has no sense of the status of counterfactuals in inductivist logic and no knowledge of the history, even recent history, of land struggles in Kerala.
And no more of this. The story rsajan fabricated and attributed to Neelakantan is bad enough.
By: R.Sajan on 19 September 2008
at 1:15 am
“CR Neelakantan categorically denies having said or written anything you attribute to him”
I did not attribute anything to him. Please go through my posts again and enlighten me about this. I am not an intellectual. I am unaware how CR Neelakantan is important enough for attributions, fabricating stories etc. Media-created professional intellectuals is not a new thing in Kerala.
Dr.Devika said, “We hear that the issue is provoking some response among many CPM-identified intellectuals but by the time they get over their terrible moral dilemmas, it may be too late.” And I suggested her asking Mr.Neelakantan (about it), he being a CPM man. Ditto about the Rs 6000/-. Surely, he might know its truth or otherwise? I trust that no obsessive sense of doubt or guilt caused the jump to an attribution-identification.
Thanks to Dr.Devika’s post, I now know that there have also been newspaper reports about the Earnest money/Caution Deposit at Chengara, though. When a lawyer has no point to argue, he bangs on the table. Dr. Devika harps on imaginary slander.
As per the Vedi’s claims, as many as 24,000 people belonging to 7,282 families are occupying about 14,000 acres of land at the Kumbazha Estate. The number of makeshift huts pitched at the estate will be around 7,800. The money collected might thus come to crores of Rupees exclusive of financial assistance received from the Agencies.
Medha Patkar, Arundhati Roy and similar mega-stars’ going to Chengara is only like Henry Kissinger’s having come to New Delhi in November 2007 on behalf of the NSG corporates to sort out the Left’s misgivings about the reciprocal arrangements for their agreeing to the Nuclear Deal. Such initiatives need spending.
Chengara might be either Harrisons’ playing to continue their enjoyment of the land, or it might be some other group that wants the land for themselves after Harrisons. The Estate might also be divided and allotted to different employees’ co-operatives, to benefit all the political parties. I refer again here to AK Balan’s statement. On 17.9.2008, Laha Gopalan categorically said on Doordarshan that they would not accept land at Chengara, even if no other land were given.
I am sure that Dr. Devika and the others would be open about the Chengara financial resources once “they get over their terrible moral dilemmas”
By: R.Sajan on 19 September 2008
at 1:15 am
“I would like to correct your ignorance on Kerala as ‘Gulf’”
I should admit that I might not perhaps, know as much as Dr..Devika does about the immigrant labour situation. I was born in a Government Hospital in Kerala more than half a century ago and have lived here all my life. However, I cannot claim infallibility of awareness or omniscience of experience. That right rests with professional intellectuals.
However, Malayali workers including head loaders, and employees including college teachers are, within Kerala, a disgrace to world labour. To them, work is worship of selfish indolence, and exercising of the tongue. Chaathans, created by the great VKN is the best possible presentation of our poor farm labourer.
By: R.Sajan on 19 September 2008
at 1:18 am
“And a fine question to ask, indeed — why don’t the poor opt to stay landless labourers?”
I heard Laha Gopalan say many times on TV that the Chengara camp has people of all castes, and that it is only an agitation of people who do not have as much land as their birthright [they having only 4 to 10 cents] and the landless. This might mean that it is not an agitation of landless Dalits; or at least, not any longer. Laha Gopalan himself has only one hectare or 247 cents.
I am not competent to say whether anybody [Kerala labourer, Kerala intellectual, CPM, the Church, Harrisons or Harris] should be landless, though I would like to believe that all material possessions are logically stupid.
By: R.Sajan on 19 September 2008
at 1:19 am
“Ah, the availability of land! Malayala Manorama-style ignorance, again, I am afraid”.
=====================
Kerala has a population of about 4 % of the country. Projected population for 1st March 2008 is 3, 42, 32,000. We have land of 1.18% of India. The quantum of land 38863 sq. kms or 9 603 00000 cents cannot change.
Of this geographical area, 48% is mountainous or hilly. 12% is the coastal lowlands. The remaining 40% of midlands alone is suitable for human dwelling. That is to say, for 4% percent of the country’s population, only about 0. 45% of its land is available for living and surviving.
The pressure on land is our greatest weakness. Our earlier planners did not give this matter honest consideration. We should have planned for development without disturbing or destroying the highlands and lowlands. You meddle with mother Earth and you suffer – our planners ignored this old rule.
Institutional support by the Church to encroachments is responsible for the destruction of our hills. Muthanga was the zenith of their achievement under a Catholic ruler. Sex tourism is responsible for the vandalisation of our coasts.
Land belongs to all of us equally; Laha Gopalan, Devika and me have equal [only equal] rights on it. We also have responsibility to it. Calculating on 960300000 cents and 34232000 humans, individual share comes to 28 cents each. Permissible human usage-share is 40% of that total. Thus, each of us has a birthright to only 11 cents. If you allow a further deduction of 30% to man-made infrastructure like roads, public grounds and buildings, other public utilities etc, a Keralite can claim or own to himself only 7 cents or so.
It is against this ground reality that Chengara orphans demand five acres of land suitable for agriculture and Rs.50,000 in cash for each landless family among them [The Hindu 04.06.2008]. The demands are typically Malayali – similar to demanding that you shut your thattu-kada, stop plying your autorikshaw or not take your ill child to the hospital, for ‘their’ Bandh. It is mere bullying. And we would not dare to do it outside Kerala borders.
I have no objection to Dr.Devika’s giving 5 acres to any Chengara orphan. Meeting the demand would need only about 40000 acres of land. Please give me my 7 cents also simultaneously.
Remarks beginning “Recently, the government identified 800 acres of prime land in the……..”etc do not concern me. All administrations do such things for bribes. From Sir CP, who brought his Mylapore friends here to start FACT and the Aluminum Company, to the Fronts who bring the various Cities, they are all the same. Environmentalists that take money from one bidder and agitate against the other are also equally great. I feel that squatting and allotment are both immoral as long as land is not equally shared.
By: R.Sajan on 19 September 2008
at 1:23 am
“Gold-less! Indeed! Who are you fooling?”
======================
I only asked /meant if anyone’s trespassing and squatting on land that is not his, is okay. Dr.Devika said that we should share. I agree. I shall share once I get more than my 7 cents. In 3 years, 30% of the active population in Kerala would be non-Malayali. The Chengara model would serve them well. I am all for the Chengara culture. TRESPASS,, SQUAT, GRAB! We need not stop with land alone.
Dr.Devika has mistaken me for someone else. I am not her equal in any aspect. We do not have any gold either. She is welcome to squat here a la Chengara, if she wants our gold.
By: R.Sajan on 19 September 2008
at 1:27 am
“And no more of this. The story rsajan fabricated and attributed to Neelakantan is bad enough”
———————————-
I now regret being stupid and not being an intellectual. I re-read my posts. Did I ‘fabricate and attribute’ any story about Neelakanthan?? Why does a person like Dr.Devika feel so? Obviously, she must be right and I am wrong. I must go back to my Govt UP School and learn my English again. I fail to see how Neelakantan could be important enough to merit slander.
Dr.Devika has added one more tag on me – slanderer. Though I am reminded of The Church’s calling Sr. Abhaya reports slanderous, I thank her again for her beautiful tags.
I do not know what Malayala Manorama ignorance is. My family have been traditional “Mathrubhumi” readers for generations. I suppose the area of land, population etc are the same whether we read Manorama or Mathrubhumi. And about immigrant labour that one sees all around and at times hires, one observes and learns.
But one does not argue with professional Kerala intellectuals…….one ‘cannot’.
By: Aditya Nigam on 19 September 2008
at 9:10 am
Amazing! Sajan’s posture of injured innocence. He seems to be suffering from some complex. How else does one understand the fact that he continues to complain about ‘labels’ being attached to him, while being completely oblivious of his own mode of argument. Just for the sake of pleasure and entertainment, let me cite from his own first comment, which he keeps harking back to:
1. “Is jdevika real??”
I am not sure what this means. That Sajan has not heard or read any such thing before? This is Neelakantan Namboodiri masquerading as Devika?
2. “They have thus managed to raise the lifestyles of even coolies or head-loaders to Star levels.”
Presumably ‘they’ refers to communists. ‘EVEN coolies’, S tells us, live lifestyles that are ‘Star level’ (five-star?). Now this is clearly not an aspersion on coolies in Mr S’ view! And the implication of course should not be missed: EVEN COOLIES are living lives that are not meant for them, the scum of the earth! And this is not a label or an accusation. He is simply stating a fact??
3. “Clerks and peons of government departments like Revenue, Registration, Transport etc earn much more than MNC CEOs , thanks to their unions.”
After coolies, it is the turn of ‘clerks and peons’ - How dare they earn more than MNC CEOs (really? do they? Mr Sajan?). And this is a poor government school educated boy who is being unjustly attacked by some apparition called Devika!
4. “College lecturers earn at UGC levels without possessing the stipulated qualifications, only because of their Left unions.”
Now, did we leave out somebody? Ah, yes, the Chengara lot:
5. “who have joined the struggle after paying admission fees of Rs 6000/- each.”
Thus proved: All you people are goons holding innocent Sajans of Kerala to ransom.
And none of this is either invective or labelling. It is labelling only when Mr S is called names.
By: R.Sajan on 20 September 2008
at 2:45 am
A pity that my response to Dr.Nigam’s comments were moderated out.
media | politics | dissent
Maveli won’t be let into Chengara
a:Posted by: jdevika | 10 September 2008
(J Devika works at Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum, Kerala. Her writing has been mostly about gender, social reform, politics, and development in Kerala. devumol@gmail.com)
This is Onam week in Kerala — a festival that recalls the days of Maveli, the wise asura king dethroned and exiled by Vamana, the avtar of Vishnu, at the behest of jealous gods. It is also an intensely-family time for most people, given that upper caste ‘family’ values are pervasive. Amidst high voltage commercialised Onam, the people at Chengara starve. The trade union blockade has been renewed, and the CITU has brought in women and has extended the blockade 24 hours. And CPM cadre have now started ‘occupying’ the houses of the Sadhujana Vimochana Munnani activists — ostensibly to reveal the ‘truth’ — that some of them indeed possess some land and a house! Strange, indeed. By this logic, the women who the trade unions have deployed in the blockade shouldn’t be ‘workers’ at all, in the light of their middle class dress codes, body language, gold ornaments and apparent reluctance to squat on the road (they sit primly on rows of chairs)!
The idea that activists should be activists should necessarily embrace poverty, or that people should become activists only if they are near starvation, stems from new-elite hubris; but is it also not the case that the communist party has no right to preach what it does not practice? As far as I know, this idea was jettisoned as early as the 1940s, and by none less than EMS Nambutiripad, who is of course the reigning deity of the CPM! In response to widespread discontent over the communist party’s decision to reduce the number of full time activists in 1944, EMS remarked :“As far as comrades from the landowning and capitalist classes are concerned, it may be better that they work to create a group within their class who will work for the country’s economic planning and to improve the people’s standards of living, and to devote their wealth and labour in ways that enhance national pride, rather than sell their assets and hand over the sum received to the party.”
(’Acchadakkattode Pravarttikkuka’ (Be Disciplined Workers), in P. Govinda Pillai (ed.), EMS Sampoorna Kritikal [Collected Works of EMS] vol.5, 1944-45, Thiruvananthapuram: Chinta Publishers, pp. 234-54).
But it is really the silence of the government that it most criminal. The ‘package’ seems indefinitely delayed; the CPM is apparently ‘helpless’ to curb the CITU; the Congress which made supportive noises and said pious things about resolving the issue seems powerless to persuade the INTUC.We hear that the issue is provoking some response among many CPM-identified intellectuals but by the time they get over their terrible moral dilemmas, it may be too late.
I suppose this is the ‘onam spirit’, which makes a virtue of hypocrisy and falsehood. At Onam we are all supposed to eat well, dress well, and pretend that everything is just right so that the exiled Maveli, who is allowed to visit his erstwhile subjects once a year, will be fooled. For that purpose, we are told that ’sell your lease,if you need to,to dine well on onam’. So, we pretend that Chengara does not exist and go about our onam dining and dressing. Not just the CPM, all of us, of the Malayalee new-elite,are equally complicit.
Responses
By: rsajan on 15 September 2008 at 1:24 am
Is jdevika real??
Please put your quesrions to Neelakantan Namboodiri who was a CPM member till two years ago.
The Communist parties have only one goal - that of raising the living standards of the working class. They have thus managed to raise the lifestyles of even coolies or head-loaders to Star levels. Clerks and peons of government departments like Revenue, Registration, Transport etc earn much more than MNC CEOs , thanks to their unions. College lecturers earn at UGC levels without possessing the stipulated qualifications, only because of their Left unions.
Our intellectuals should not ignore such achievments of the working classes under the Left or ridicule them out of envy.
Chegara people have joined the struggle after paying admission fees of Rs 6000/- each. They might not starve at Onam!
By: Devika on 15 September 2008
at 1:43 pm
rsajan is a mixed bag indeed! He seems at times to be the typical upper middle-class cynic who shares the typical elite wisdom that since all politicians are crooked let us have no politics at all, and since the poor are poor because they are unfit for anything else, any improvement in their standards of living must be undeserved, irrespective of whether these gains are through politics or otherwise! And of course his cheerful clubbing of headload workers with college lecturers! At times, he seems to be the typical middle class Hindu upper caste person envious of the church. And of course predominantly the morally-frozen consumer-citizen who’d readily volunteer to spread slander about political struggles, who’d agree to user fees in everything else including public services for the poorest! Only the utterly elitist would claim that people at Chengara are so foolish that they would pay a fairly large sum to buy insecurity and violence inflicted by both the left and the unfeeling consumer citizens of Kerala.
I’m glad this person continues to respond — for other readers, here is evidence to the brand of elitism that Sunny Kapikad talks of in his speech posted here — the sort that denies the poor any real political agency, and sees them as helpless pawns of some kind of unscruplous element or the other. And worse, hints that they can be nothing more than that. At least other readers will see what the poor in Kerala are up against!
By: R.Sajan on 15 September 2008
at 6:30 pm
Kerala is a place where you cannot get agriculture labourers. The minimum wages that you have to pay to any manual labourer is Rs. 250/- a day - for 6 hours of what they deem to be ‘work’. The carpenter gets Rs. 300/- to Rs. 500/- a day. A live-in maid comes at not less than Rs. 4500/- plus food and clothes, a month. If you use her for other things, you pay extra.
Kerala is ‘Gulf’ to manual labourers from other states. There is practically no unemployment there after 2000, if you are ready to work. The greediest of young men work in ‘quotation gangs’ that recover money for banks like ICICI, HSBC, HDFC etc, or beat up people for politicians or similar others. They quote in 10000s to lakhs.
If the ‘poor’ of Chengara would go out and work, they would get a minimum of Rs. 200/- a day. Why do they not go, then?
As for the Rs. 6000/-, I suggest that you ask Com. Neelakantan himself. If you actually do not know about the Rs. 6000/-, it is most unfortunate about the awareness levels of the intellectual tribe of Kerala.
Anyway, why do you not calculate the per capita availability of land in Kerala? Government land is yours and mine also.
By the by, do you have gold ornaments? I am gold-less. Would it be okay if I squat on your gold because you have it, and I do not?
The ways of the lazy and hypocritical tribe of Kerala’s professional intellectuals are to be seen to be believed…….
By: Aditya Nigam on 16 September 2008
at 11:43 am
Aditya Nigam works with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, is interested in political and social theory and is in search of a new, multi-coloured left…Red having become monochromatic grey… aditya@sarai.net
Interesting questions. Why is it that the ‘financial set up’ only of movement leaders is under question? Always? Sometime ago we had discussed an Indian Express report that did the same with regard to Singur and the activists involved in it. Suppose you are right, what is it supposed to ‘prove’? That people with money or wealth should only be doing what you want them to? Make more money? That they should not be part of movements? Unable to understand. Yes, ‘the poor’ are the banner for everybody to flaunt rejimon, except the Sajans of this world. You flaunt it as much as others you accuse of ‘misleading’ them. Why others, more capable and wealthy people, cannot mislead them, of course remains a mystery.
By: Devika on 16 September 2008
at 2:53 pm
Great going, sajan! Let people see what you and the rest of the Great Malayalee Elite are like. The tribe has swelled, and how! I distinctly remember as a child during the days of the Emergency, how a prominent cashew industrialist spoke about it in glowing terms on our school day. The same cribbing about Kerala’s workers who weren’t apparently willing to pick up his shit and tend his plants (or crops) for a pittance… Wow, what a bunch.. they want people to slog for them, feel awful about paying a decent wage, and worse, want people to keep shut as they slog…and feel no shame in spewing all this in the fashion of morally outraged innocents! Sajan’s comments make excellent primary sources for anyone researching Kerala’s apolitical consumerist middle class.
By: Aditya Nigam on 16 September 2008
at 4:12 pm
And you might add, Devika, that this is the new, shifting social base of Kerala’s Old Left. While the old TUs gradually move to entrench new interests, some of them at least, will be in a mortal conflict with these new Malayali elites - and both will find their best bet in the CPI-M. It is not a situation that can last very long, as West Bengal also shows. It will have to be this way or that for the ‘Left’.
By: R.Sajan on 17 September 2008
at 4:20 am
Dr.Devika
Branding dissent with labels and then attacking the labels is usual when one cannot argue specific points. Senile Communist theoreticians often do this. Labels like reactionary, revisionist, Bourgeois nationalist, feudalist, anarchist etc are examples. The labels that our intellectuals use are cynical, pessimistic, communal, retrograde, bigoted, elitist etc. I cannot beat a Sociologist in the art of branding, labelling or in quaternio terminorum.
The following labels have so far been used on me here: Old Left, elitist, apolitical, consumerist, middle class, cynic, Hindu upper caste, morally-frozen etc. Thanks for the tags. Nevertheless, I really wish someone would enlighten me on my points:
• Chegara people have joined the struggle after paying admission fees of Rs 6000/- each.
• Kerala is ‘Gulf’ to manual labourers from other states.
• If the ‘poor’ of Chengara would go out and work, they would get a minimum of Rs. 200/- a day. Why do they not go, then?
• Anyway, why do you not calculate the per capita availability of land in Kerala?
• I am gold-less. Would it be okay if I squat on your gold because you have it, and I do not?
AK Balan has already called Chengara a ‘state-sponsored agitation’. It is like Private Bus operators’ agitating and stopping services to make the public agree in agony to fare hikes by the ministry. In the name of settlement of Chengara orphans, government land elsewhere would soon be allotted. The rehabilitation initiative would be used more as a ploy to allot land to LDF cadres. Each party would have quotas, as had been with the Plus 2 allotment. Anyone that would pay the leaders would get choice real estate free. By 2010, the plots thus allotted would be consolidated to build resorts, amusement parks or professional colleges. Either the Party leaders themselves or Comrades like Farris Aboobacker would be the entrepreneurs on the land. Chengara would thus be revealed as a Total4 U, in a few more months.
http://archive.gulfnews.com/world/India/10242380.html
By: Devika on 17 September 2008
at 4:05 pm
Good. ‘Dr.Devika’, finally!
Here is my response to your burning questions.
(1) CR Neelakantan categorically denies having said or written anything you attribute to him — he said he was shocked about your claim about 6000 rupee fee, and challenges you to provide evidence beyond what some slanderous newspaper may have said. I take this as evidence for your slanderous intent. Not even those those associated with Harrisons Malayalam would make such a concerted effort at slander.
(2) and (3) I would like to correct your ignorance on Kerala as ‘Gulf’ — typical of the Malayala Manorama kind of political imagination. Kerala is no longer ‘Gulf’ to workers from Tamil Nadu or other parts of south India given the steep rise in everyday expenses. Yes it is still ‘Gulf’ for the miserably poor from Orissa, W bengal and other places. The inflow is welcomed here by hirers precisely because they have to pay only a fraction and don’t have to bother about welfare benefits. Well, so what? Does that mean that workers in Kerala should start working for miserably low wages and in abysmal conditions? If so, this contradicts your next point, about high wages in Kerala!
And a fine question to ask, indeed — why don’t the poor opt to stay landless labourers? And when the educated middle-class are even reluctant to let their children choose professions that lack ’social status’! Manual labour is universally devalued in Kerala, and to say that the poor, who have been subjected to it for generations in history should stay continue to regard it as their mainstay reeks of elitism. Of course your understanding of the difference between escaping poverty and poverty management are decidedly poor, and so you’d go on flogging the same dead horse.
(4) Ah, the availability of land! Malayala Manorama-style ignorance, again, I am afraid. It in fact is strongly redolent of the screeching right-wing texts of the 1950s which spoke of ‘teeming millions’ of Kerala who were occupying every inch of the land and ate up all the resources, so that nothing was left for ‘development’! Proved later to be totally off the mark, common sense masquerading as science, with the demise of the Coale-Hoover thesis — there were many things wrong with Kerala but high population didn’t have the kind of economic effect that was attributed to it. Then too people were told to act ‘responsibly’ and cooperate with state family planning to help ‘development’. Now of course once again, land is found scarce. There is of course enough land for real-estate builders, for non-resident Malayali capital is pouring into Kerala filling up paddy land and destroying cultivable area. There is also enough land for more than 20 SEZs. As for the massive plantations, they are semi-private land and indeed, how awful the public should protest when the leaseholders try to snap up profit by selling it! Since it is the wealthy and the neo-wealthy who are the inheritors of the earth, how can we let the scum in, right, Sajan? Ata boy!
But we must go further. There are too many people around (I mean the scum) in plum areas in Kerala. We must rightfully wage a war to throw them out. Recently, the government identified 800 acres of prime land in the highly populous Thrissur district for a new university, some of which is notified land — remember, only when the adivasis squat on reserved areas is firing etc permitted! And for Vizhinjam, thickly populated coastal areas with immense tourism potential have been identified for acquisition. Where will all these people go? Oh, that isn’t our concern — that is what the government is for — eliminate or rehabilitate, keep the scum away from our eyeshot! The bottom line is there is no land available; they should be confined to some colonies.
Seriously, the sort of individualism implied in the use of ‘per capita’ land availability as the fundamental condition for implementing social justice is interesting. It will take several stock market crashes to remedy such hubris.
(5) Gold-less! Indeed! Who are you fooling? This is like Bill Gates saying that he doesn’t possess gold and therefore he is a saint. To treat that as a hypothetical query, yes, if I possess wealth (not ‘gold’) and if another does not, I think it is my moral duty to share it. I don’t think you or I who are likely to be social equals have any monopoly over gold; nor do I need to share it with you, since you are clearly my equal. The least we could do however, is to root for conditions under which those who have no wealth may escape such want and become our social equals. And the Manorama-logic, I fear, surfaces again — ‘if the deprivation suffered by x should be remedied, then y, who does not suffer deprivation now, should be reduced to deprivation’. That makes ‘equals’ of widowed and destitute Kunhipeennu of Chengara and Harrisons Malayalam!
(6) The last bit of counterfactual nonsense deserves no response. Again this impoverished soul has no sense of the status of counterfactuals in inductivist logic and no knowledge of the history, even recent history, of land struggles in Kerala.
And no more of this. The story rsajan fabricated and attributed to Neelakantan is bad enough.
By: R.Sajan on 19 September 2008
at 1:15 am
“CR Neelakantan categorically denies having said or written anything you attribute to him”
I did not attribute anything to him. Please go through my posts again and enlighten me about this. I am not an intellectual. I am unaware how CR Neelakantan is important enough for attributions, fabricating stories etc. Media-created professional intellectuals is not a new thing in Kerala.
Dr.Devika said, “We hear that the issue is provoking some response among many CPM-identified intellectuals but by the time they get over their terrible moral dilemmas, it may be too late.” And I suggested her asking Mr.Neelakantan (about it), he being a CPM man. Ditto about the Rs 6000/-. Surely, he might know its truth or otherwise? I trust that no obsessive sense of doubt or guilt caused the jump to an attribution-identification.
Thanks to Dr.Devika’s post, I now know that there have also been newspaper reports about the Earnest money/Caution Deposit at Chengara, though. When a lawyer has no point to argue, he bangs on the table. Dr. Devika harps on imaginary slander.
As per the Vedi’s claims, as many as 24,000 people belonging to 7,282 families are occupying about 14,000 acres of land at the Kumbazha Estate. The number of makeshift huts pitched at the estate will be around 7,800. The money collected might thus come to crores of Rupees exclusive of financial assistance received from the Agencies.
Medha Patkar, Arundhati Roy and similar mega-stars’ going to Chengara is only like Henry Kissinger’s having come to New Delhi in November 2007 on behalf of the NSG corporates to sort out the Left’s misgivings about the reciprocal arrangements for their agreeing to the Nuclear Deal. Such initiatives need spending.
Chengara might be either Harrisons’ playing to continue their enjoyment of the land, or it might be some other group that wants the land for themselves after Harrisons. The Estate might also be divided and allotted to different employees’ co-operatives, to benefit all the political parties. I refer again here to AK Balan’s statement. On 17.9.2008, Laha Gopalan categorically said on Doordarshan that they would not accept land at Chengara, even if no other land were given.
I am sure that Dr. Devika and the others would be open about the Chengara financial resources once “they get over their terrible moral dilemmas”
By: R.Sajan on 19 September 2008
at 1:15 am
“I would like to correct your ignorance on Kerala as ‘Gulf’”
I should admit that I might not perhaps, know as much as Dr..Devika does about the immigrant labour situation. I was born in a Government Hospital in Kerala more than half a century ago and have lived here all my life. However, I cannot claim infallibility of awareness or omniscience of experience. That right rests with professional intellectuals.
However, Malayali workers including head loaders, and employees including college teachers are, within Kerala, a disgrace to world labour. To them, work is worship of selfish indolence, and exercising of the tongue. Chaathans, created by the great VKN is the best possible presentation of our poor farm labourer.
By: R.Sajan on 19 September 2008
at 1:18 am
“And a fine question to ask, indeed — why don’t the poor opt to stay landless labourers?”
I heard Laha Gopalan say many times on TV that the Chengara camp has people of all castes, and that it is only an agitation of people who do not have as much land as their birthright [they having only 4 to 10 cents] and the landless. This might mean that it is not an agitation of landless Dalits; or at least, not any longer. Laha Gopalan himself has only one hectare or 247 cents.
I am not competent to say whether anybody [Kerala labourer, Kerala intellectual, CPM, the Church, Harrisons or Harris] should be landless, though I would like to believe that all material possessions are logically stupid.
By: R.Sajan on 19 September 2008
at 1:19 am
“Ah, the availability of land! Malayala Manorama-style ignorance, again, I am afraid”.
=====================
Kerala has a population of about 4 % of the country. Projected population for 1st March 2008 is 3, 42, 32,000. We have land of 1.18% of India. The quantum of land 38863 sq. kms or 9 603 00000 cents cannot change.
Of this geographical area, 48% is mountainous or hilly. 12% is the coastal lowlands. The remaining 40% of midlands alone is suitable for human dwelling. That is to say, for 4% percent of the country’s population, only about 0. 45% of its land is available for living and surviving.
The pressure on land is our greatest weakness. Our earlier planners did not give this matter honest consideration. We should have planned for development without disturbing or destroying the highlands and lowlands. You meddle with mother Earth and you suffer – our planners ignored this old rule.
Institutional support by the Church to encroachments is responsible for the destruction of our hills. Muthanga was the zenith of their achievement under a Catholic ruler. Sex tourism is responsible for the vandalisation of our coasts.
Land belongs to all of us equally; Laha Gopalan, Devika and me have equal [only equal] rights on it. We also have responsibility to it. Calculating on 960300000 cents and 34232000 humans, individual share comes to 28 cents each. Permissible human usage-share is 40% of that total. Thus, each of us has a birthright to only 11 cents. If you allow a further deduction of 30% to man-made infrastructure like roads, public grounds and buildings, other public utilities etc, a Keralite can claim or own to himself only 7 cents or so.
It is against this ground reality that Chengara orphans demand five acres of land suitable for agriculture and Rs.50,000 in cash for each landless family among them [The Hindu 04.06.2008]. The demands are typically Malayali – similar to demanding that you shut your thattu-kada, stop plying your autorikshaw or not take your ill child to the hospital, for ‘their’ Bandh. It is mere bullying. And we would not dare to do it outside Kerala borders.
I have no objection to Dr.Devika’s giving 5 acres to any Chengara orphan. Meeting the demand would need only about 40000 acres of land. Please give me my 7 cents also simultaneously.
Remarks beginning “Recently, the government identified 800 acres of prime land in the……..”etc do not concern me. All administrations do such things for bribes. From Sir CP, who brought his Mylapore friends here to start FACT and the Aluminum Company, to the Fronts who bring the various Cities, they are all the same. Environmentalists that take money from one bidder and agitate against the other are also equally great. I feel that squatting and allotment are both immoral as long as land is not equally shared.
By: R.Sajan on 19 September 2008
at 1:23 am
“Gold-less! Indeed! Who are you fooling?”
======================
I only asked /meant if anyone’s trespassing and squatting on land that is not his, is okay. Dr.Devika said that we should share. I agree. I shall share once I get more than my 7 cents. In 3 years, 30% of the active population in Kerala would be non-Malayali. The Chengara model would serve them well. I am all for the Chengara culture. TRESPASS,, SQUAT, GRAB! We need not stop with land alone.
Dr.Devika has mistaken me for someone else. I am not her equal in any aspect. We do not have any gold either. She is welcome to squat here a la Chengara, if she wants our gold.
By: R.Sajan on 19 September 2008
at 1:27 am
“And no more of this. The story rsajan fabricated and attributed to Neelakantan is bad enough”
———————————-
I now regret being stupid and not being an intellectual. I re-read my posts. Did I ‘fabricate and attribute’ any story about Neelakanthan?? Why does a person like Dr.Devika feel so? Obviously, she must be right and I am wrong. I must go back to my Govt UP School and learn my English again. I fail to see how Neelakantan could be important enough to merit slander.
Dr.Devika has added one more tag on me – slanderer. Though I am reminded of The Church’s calling Sr. Abhaya reports slanderous, I thank her again for her beautiful tags.
I do not know what Malayala Manorama ignorance is. My family have been traditional “Mathrubhumi” readers for generations. I suppose the area of land, population etc are the same whether we read Manorama or Mathrubhumi. And about immigrant labour that one sees all around and at times hires, one observes and learns.
But one does not argue with professional Kerala intellectuals…….one ‘cannot’.
By: Aditya Nigam on 19 September 2008
at 9:10 am
Amazing! Sajan’s posture of injured innocence. He seems to be suffering from some complex. How else does one understand the fact that he continues to complain about ‘labels’ being attached to him, while being completely oblivious of his own mode of argument. Just for the sake of pleasure and entertainment, let me cite from his own first comment, which he keeps harking back to:
1. “Is jdevika real??”
I am not sure what this means. That Sajan has not heard or read any such thing before? This is Neelakantan Namboodiri masquerading as Devika?
2. “They have thus managed to raise the lifestyles of even coolies or head-loaders to Star levels.”
Presumably ‘they’ refers to communists. ‘EVEN coolies’, S tells us, live lifestyles that are ‘Star level’ (five-star?). Now this is clearly not an aspersion on coolies in Mr S’ view! And the implication of course should not be missed: EVEN COOLIES are living lives that are not meant for them, the scum of the earth! And this is not a label or an accusation. He is simply stating a fact??
3. “Clerks and peons of government departments like Revenue, Registration, Transport etc earn much more than MNC CEOs , thanks to their unions.”
After coolies, it is the turn of ‘clerks and peons’ - How dare they earn more than MNC CEOs (really? do they? Mr Sajan?). And this is a poor government school educated boy who is being unjustly attacked by some apparition called Devika!
4. “College lecturers earn at UGC levels without possessing the stipulated qualifications, only because of their Left unions.”
Now, did we leave out somebody? Ah, yes, the Chengara lot:
5. “who have joined the struggle after paying admission fees of Rs 6000/- each.”
Thus proved: All you people are goons holding innocent Sajans of Kerala to ransom.
And none of this is either invective or labelling. It is labelling only when Mr S is called names.
By: R.Sajan on 20 September 2008
at 2:45 am
A pity that my response to Dr.Nigam’s comments were moderated out.
Kerala Intellectuals and Jamiya Nagar shoot-out
Within minutes of the commencement of the Action at Jamiya Nagar on 19th Sep 2008, secularists in faraway Kerala began the refrain that it is a fake encounter. Even when a Sub Inspector figured in the casualties' list, the false whine continued. In the TV discussions in the evening, the anchors were afraid to ask the pro-militant panellists about the 'fake-ness' of the Inspector's death; and kept on giving more time to them.
This is all very sad. I am disgusted by the Mallu hypocrisy and credulousness in such a serious matter. Is this not a case fit for our sedition laws?
This is all very sad. I am disgusted by the Mallu hypocrisy and credulousness in such a serious matter. Is this not a case fit for our sedition laws?
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
CHENGARA CULTURE
In land-starved Kerala, the largest landowners are the government, the Christian plantation owners and the Church. Every time that the CPM has been in power, grabbing of government land by the party workers used to be seen. The party is now no longer of the poor; it is now a party of contractors, brokers and businesspersons. The CPM thus having moved away from the downtrodden, new forces like the Muslim Solidarity, Catholic Infam and foreign-funded environment organizations moved in to rescue the poor. The Sadhujana Munnani that has started the Chengara land-grab is one such saviour-outfit of dubious origins.
Harrison Malayalam Plantations runs the Kumbazha Estate under a lease agreement from the government. The lease has expired. The land has fallen back to the government. The local party leaders wanted to distribute this land among party members to be identified as ‘landless’. Before they could get to this, outfits like the Sadhujana Munnani beat them to it.
The squatters in Chengara are not all landless. Even the leader Laha Gopalan has admitted to owning land elsewhere. Their demands are very humble. They each want one acre of land and Rs. 50000/- to cultivate it.
Kerala has the highest density of population in the country, about 1000 people per 240 acres of land. This works out to one person for every 24 cents of land. This calculation is for the entire land irrespective of its terrain as liveable or not. If the land is to be liveable, it has to have its rivers, backwaters and hills exempted in the calculation of permissible human occupation. It is agreed that only 60 percent of land in the State is thus available to humans to live in. The actual permissible density is only one person per 14 cents of area. As such, all land in the state is housing real estate. The land demands of the Chengara squatters are therefore, ridiculous and their motives dubious.
Some of the princes of the Church support Chengara. To them, a CPM leader asked whether the clergy would be agreeable to the landless’ squatting in Church estates in the Chengara fashion.
I have 5 cents with a 900-m2 house in it. It carries a burden of 14 lakhs debt also, which I propose to settle through a Reverse Mortgage where the Bank would take over the property when I die.
Going by the Chengara philosophy, any landless might in the future demand my land because he is landless. What then, is civilisation all about?
Harrison Malayalam Plantations runs the Kumbazha Estate under a lease agreement from the government. The lease has expired. The land has fallen back to the government. The local party leaders wanted to distribute this land among party members to be identified as ‘landless’. Before they could get to this, outfits like the Sadhujana Munnani beat them to it.
The squatters in Chengara are not all landless. Even the leader Laha Gopalan has admitted to owning land elsewhere. Their demands are very humble. They each want one acre of land and Rs. 50000/- to cultivate it.
Kerala has the highest density of population in the country, about 1000 people per 240 acres of land. This works out to one person for every 24 cents of land. This calculation is for the entire land irrespective of its terrain as liveable or not. If the land is to be liveable, it has to have its rivers, backwaters and hills exempted in the calculation of permissible human occupation. It is agreed that only 60 percent of land in the State is thus available to humans to live in. The actual permissible density is only one person per 14 cents of area. As such, all land in the state is housing real estate. The land demands of the Chengara squatters are therefore, ridiculous and their motives dubious.
Some of the princes of the Church support Chengara. To them, a CPM leader asked whether the clergy would be agreeable to the landless’ squatting in Church estates in the Chengara fashion.
I have 5 cents with a 900-m2 house in it. It carries a burden of 14 lakhs debt also, which I propose to settle through a Reverse Mortgage where the Bank would take over the property when I die.
Going by the Chengara philosophy, any landless might in the future demand my land because he is landless. What then, is civilisation all about?
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