Challenging task

After creating much euphoria, Chief Minister Achuthanandan's demolition drive runs into roadblocks of all kinds.

R. KRISHNAKUMAR in Thiruvananthapuram

Few other events in recent years have created so much excitement, concern and divisions in Kerala society and politics as the eviction drive launched by Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan in May this year against illegal encroachers of government land, especially in Munnar and surrounding areas in Idukki district. The government's intention, the Chief Minister announced, was to distribute a portion of the land thus recovered among landless agricultural labourers, farmers, tribal people and others who are poor, based on norms; to protect ecologically fragile land thus recovered; and to develop Munnar, based on a master plan to be drawn up soon and taking into consideration its ecological fragility and tourism potential.

Initially at least, the decisiveness and pace of the government action saw 91 "illegal" buildings on "encroached" government land, including high-end tourist resorts, being razed to the ground and over 11,350 acres (one acre is 0.4 hectare) of "encroached land" being recovered within a month by a three-member task force handpicked by Achuthanandan. This created overwhelming public support for the Chief Minister, which could only be compared to the euphoria he generated among Kerala's voters in the run-up to the Assembly elections in early 2006.

Coming as it did a whole uneventful year after Achuthanandan's crusades as Leader of the Opposition (against mafias engaged in land, sand and sex rackets) catapulted his party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and the coalition it led, the Left Democratic Front (LDF), to power, the anti-encroachment initiative seemed to raise hopes that the Chief Minister was finally beginning to deliver on his election-eve promises.

But by the time the eviction drive entered its third month in July, the task force was in disarray, evictions had come to a standstill and the Chief Minister himself was on the defensive, despite a personal visit to Munnar to try and revive the operation by putting the spotlight on what he described as large-scale encroachment by the Tata Tea company (which has owned tea estates in large tracts of leased government land right from the early 1960s). The prospects for the poor, landless labourers, farmers and tribal people seemed a long way off as ever. Such a turnaround was inevitable and Achuthanandan would not have been unaware of it.

Illegal encroachments in Kerala are not a new phenomenon. All over the State, every other bit of government land and puramboke land has been encroached upon as a result of a thriving alliance among real estate businessmen, land dealers, corrupt government officials, politicians and political parties.

No government could hope to punish illegal beneficiaries at one end alone ignoring the huge network that had played a profitable role in the deal or without letting a complex set of inconvenient legal issues and historical facts from tumbling down on its head. In Munnar, for example, among the first few constructions demolished by the task force was a walkway and the compound wall of the local office of the Communist Party of India (CPI), the second largest constituent of the LDF, whose representatives handled key Revenue and Agriculture portfolios in the Achuthanandan government.

The rationale of the task force was simply that the constructions stood on encroached government land. The CPI raised hell within the LDF, the Cabinet and outside, and very soon came the argument that the local office of the CPI(M), too, would then have to be demolished as it, too, was located similarly on encroached government land. On June 8, therefore, in a controversial move, even as other buildings of resort owners and traders, including petty traders, were being demolished in Munnar and in the three major cities, Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram and Kozhikode, the government issued a circular excluding offices of political parties and places of worship from the purview of the demolition drive.

The hue and cry that followed was enough for the CPI central leadership to intervene and the party soon announced that its office need not be given any special treatment and the government was free to take action if indeed the construction was illegal. Thus, even before it became fully operational, the demolition drive was enmeshed in a political controversy that once again drew attention away from the large-scale encroachments that had taken place and instead put the focus on the style of operation of major political parties in the ruling coalition, especially over how they raised funds and other assets. By the time the government withdrew the circular on June 18, the demolition drive had lost much of its moral force.

As it was explained later, the offices of the CPI and the CPI(M) in Munnar were located on land for which title deeds were distributed in 1999 as per the recommendations of the Land Assessment Committee appointed by the then LDF government.

The committee had then recommended 530 such title deeds, and those for the two party offices, among many others, were issued by Deputy Tahsildar M.I. Raveendran. According to allegations, the official, who was put in charge at the local village office by the then District Collector, issued title deeds for others too, in addition to those recommended by the committee.

The LDF has now taken the stand that the deeds issued on the recommendation of the committee are "genuine" and those issued by Raveendran from outside that list are "illegal".

According to the task force Special Officer, K. Suresh Kumar, however, all title deeds issued by the Deputy Tahsildar were illegal, as the Collector alone had the authority to issue such title deeds, and that his action against the CPI office was justified.

The Chief Minister finally had to announce in public that the action taken against the CPI office was a mistake even though he praised the genuineness and sincerity of his three-member task force. But very soon, a ministerial committee and a senior government Secretary were appointed to "supervise" the work of the task force. The task force members, too, were soon a divided lot - a big relief perhaps to the encroachers and the Chief Minister's political opponents.

But certainly, there is no doubt today about the devastating scale of encroachments in Munnar and other places in Idukki district and the role of government officials and top political leaders in facilitating and regularising them, as at least three government-appointed inquiry reports have indicated.

A report submitted by Additional Director-General of Police Rajan Madhekar in 2004, for instance, clearly indicates the scale of encroachment of revenue and forest land in Munnar, Devikulam and the Kannan Devan Hills with the connivance of politicians and revenue officials. Eventually, following media reports and visits to Munnar, first by the Leader of the Opposition Oommen Chandy on April 21 and then by CPI Ministers Binoy Viswom and K.P. Rajendran on April 24, Achuthanandan, too, went to Munnar and announced that "both ruling and opposition front politicians had a role in the encroachments" and that the government was appointing Principal Secretary, Revenue, Nivedita P. Haran, for further inquiry and recommendations.

Her report once again indicated that the ecological danger that had put Munnar on its deathbed today was the result of the unhindered activity of the land mafia whose links with officials of the Revenue, Registration and Survey departments were no longer a secret; that the involvement of top political leaders and officials and lawyers often made village officers helpless; that the resurvey ordered by the government had itself turned out to be a joke and was the main reason for the unending corruption in the land deals; that the police failed to inquire into the cases involving false title deeds; and that the land-grabbers who destroyed Munnar had already set their eyes on neighbouring areas like Chinnakkanal, Pallivasal, Bison Valley and Pothenmedu.

The report recommended a vigilance inquiry into every land deal that took place in Munnar in the past five years and the eviction and prosecution of all encroachers within six months. It also recommended that the government declare a moratorium on all land deals in Devikulam, Udumbanchola and Peerumedu taluks in Idukki district and order a stay on all constructions sanctioned at Chinnakkanal, Pallivasal and Wagamon until an inquiry was held into the genuineness of the title deeds.

It also recommended the transfer of all illegal land deal cases to a special cell of the State police and the declaration of Devikulam, Udumbanchola and Peerumedu taluks as environmentally sensitive zones.

The demolition drive at Munnar in which 91 illegal constructions were destroyed and several acres of land recovered in about 30 days was essentially based on the report.

But from the moment it hit the hurdle of the CPI office, the task force could not make much headway amidst complaints that the government was essentially trying to punish the present owners of land for illegal deeds done years earlier by the real culprits who encroached on government land and regularised the encroachment with the help of officials and politicians and then went away with their profits.

Subsequently, after a lull of nearly a month, Achuthanandan again visited Munnar on July 3 to give a boost to the eviction proceedings that had come to a standstill after the CPI office incident. But this time he announced that the target was the big-time offender, Tata Tea Ltd., which he claimed had been keeping under its control acres of government land located near the various tea estates it had owned on lease for several years.

In a symbolic act which received wide media publicity, Achuthanandan then supervised the removal of a board that said "Gundumala Estate, Kannan Devan Hill Plantation Company Ltd" (in which Tata Tea owned 20 per cent shares) and replaced it with another one announcing that it was the property of the State government. But no sooner had the event occurred than Revenue Minister and CPI leader K.P. Rajendran announced in the Assembly that the land that the Chief Minister claimed to have recovered did not belong to the Tata Tea company but was actually under the custody of the Forest department. The CPI said the Chief Minister was again trying to run publicity events that portrayed him alone as a hero and showed his Cabinet colleagues and LDF partners in poor light.

The Chief Minister subsequently explained that what he recovered was indeed government land but which was being kept by the Tata Tea company under its custody for several years. As arguments and counter arguments rose, what became obvious amidst demands by the opposition for the resignation of either the Chief Minister or the Revenue Minister was this: the action in Munnar that began as a symbol of the firm resolve of the Achuthanandan government to act against the land mafia had within two months degraded into a symbol of the disunity and divergence in the LDF.

In the Tata Tea company example, too, what was evident was that the issue of land encroachment in Idukki was quite complex, legally and historically, and was not something that could be solved through impulsive or symbolic actions.

Encroachment in the Kannan Devan Hills, in fact, has a history dating back to 1877, when the Raja of Poonjar, a vassal state of erstwhile Travancore, gave 588 square kilometres in Munnar, then "a practically unexplored region covered by thick fever-haunted forests" full of wild animals, on lease to J.D. Munro, a European official in the Travancore government service. The land was donated for coffee cultivation with provisions against encroachment on rivers, lakes and grasslands or destruction of trees or the environment in any way. The company that Munro founded was later transferred to a British company, Finlay and Moore, in 1895, which formed the Kannan Devan Hills Producing Company in 1897. In 1964, the Tatas became a partner in the company and subsequently, in 1983, the Finlay group transferred its entire shares to the Tata group. In 1971, the government introduced the Kannan Devan Hills (Resumption of Lands) Act with a view to distributing unutilised land that was held by the company to poor farmers, agricultural labourers, tribal people and others.

The Act was meant to take over the entire 1,37,431 acres in Kannan Devan Hills held mostly by the Tata-Finlay group, for redistribution. Subsequently, a survey was done under instructions from the Land Board, which then allowed the company to keep over 57,000 acres and vested the remaining nearly 70,000 acres with the government for redistribution.

However, it is a sign of the unwillingness of the governments that came subsequently, the pervading corruption in the bureaucracy and the constant rivalry between the Forest and Revenue departments that the nearly 50 tracts of forest land vested in the government that lay between Tata's tea estates were never redistributed as planned.

It was literally left a free territory for encroachers, and the Tata Tea company held sway over huge tracts of land originally vested in the government, thus offering it security from other encroachers even while exposing itself to allegations that the company was indulging in large-scale sale and misuse of forest land. Even after three decades, except for the 20,000 acres transferred to the Eravikulam National Park, no government in Kerala claimed for itself the nearly 50,000 acres that rightfully belonged to the people of the State. Achuthanandan's action had only tried to touch the tip of the iceberg, and his critics now argue that the first requirement is for the government itself to demarcate the territory that belonged to it very clearly and then go against the encroachers.

Following the Gulf boom and the construction boom that followed it from the mid-1980s and with Kerala's rise as a major tourism destination since the early 1990s, government land and puramboke land have been encroached upon in a widespread manner in the State. A large proportion of such encroachments has received some level of legal protection through corrupt officials and political interventions.

Therefore, it may remain a mystery to many why Achuthanandan began such a never-before drive against well-entrenched encroachers without first ensuring that the government machinery - and not just his handpicked team alone - was up to the task at all. But significantly, just as he had launched his political campaigns when he was the Leader of the Opposition, the eviction drive, too, was launched at yet another crucial political moment - when the CPI(M) State unit was once again going through a bitter battle within, in the run-up to its organisational elections.

Clearly, Achuthanandan has learnt by now that the key to his political success, in the context of the opposition he faced within his own party and the coalition, is in taking such decisive administrative measures on his own and in creating a committed support base among the people, even outside the confines of his party. But the challenge for him today is whether he can transform the tremendous popular support that he has been able to garner through his back-to-the-wall initiatives into a reformatory force in Kerala politics and society.