The Wayanad Principal Sessions Court has finally spoken on a case that has hung over Kerala’s conscience for more than two decades. M. Geethanandan, one of the state’s most consequential Dalit-Adivasi rights activists, has been acquitted of murder in the death of police constable K.V. Vinod during the police action at Muthanga on 19 February 2003. That the court found the murder charge unsustainable, after twenty-three years, is itself an indictment of how long the state took to arrive at what should have been evident much earlier. But in the same breath, Geethanandan and three others have been convicted in a related case and sentenced to five years’ rigorous imprisonment. It is difficult to read this outcome as anything other than what it is: the criminal justice system closing its books on Muthanga while the deeper wrong that produced Muthanga remains wide open.
For the state, Muthanga was simply a law-and-order episode. But it was the eruption of a crisis that Kerala’s successive governments had spent five decades manufacturing. As far back as 1975, the state legislature passed the Scheduled Tribes (Restriction on Transfer of Lands and Restoration of Alienated Lands) Act, promising to return land that had been alienated from Adivasi communities. It is one of independent India’s oldest unkept legislative promises. Every government that followed, regardless of political colour, found reasons to delay, dilute or abandon its implementation, evidently unwilling to confront the settler interests that had taken root on Adivasi land. Rules were drafted; little was restored. By the turn of the millennium, Kerala’s Adivasi communities — barely a little more than one per cent of the state’s population — were suffering starvation deaths even as the government debated procedure.
Copyright©Madras Courier, All Rights Reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from madrascourier.com and redistribute by email, post to the web, mobile phone or social media.Please send in your feed back and comments to editor@madrascourier.com
