HC asks Kerala Govt to get RPG group land cleared

Putting the LDF Government in a fix, the Kerala High Court on Thursday ordered it to evict within three months the thousands of encroachers...

Putting the LDF Government in a fix, the Kerala High Court on Thursday ordered it to evict within three months the thousands of encroachers — mostly Dalits and Adivasis — who have taken over around 6,000 acres of the RPG group’s Harrison Malayalam Ltd (HML) land at Chengara.

Several thousand men, women and children have been staying in the land since the organised encroachment began nine months ago. They have threatened to commit mass suicide if the Government used force.

The Government on Thursday pleaded for time to try for a peaceful conciliation, but the

two-member High Court bench — hearing an HML petition seeking immediate removal of the encroachers — stressed that the deadline cannot be extended any more.

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The police had not implemented the court’s earlier order to carry out the eviction without bloodshed, after the encroachers, led by a local outfit, the Sadhu Jana Vimochana Samyukta Vedi (SJVSV), threatened to kill themselves. While the women with children in tow had brandished cans of kerosene, the men had climbed up trees with nooses around their neck, threatening to jump or hang themselves if the police went in.

The encroachers are demanding five acres of arable land and Rs 50,000 for every landless family, and claim that Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan had personally promised their leaders last year that this would be given by the end of last year, but never did.

“When we kept refusing to quit the plantation until the land was distributed, V S personally told me that unless we went away, our people would face not the soft Communist police but a police force with fangs and claws,” SJVSV state president Laha Gopalan claimed to The Indian Express.

Gopalan insisted that they were not violating any court orders. “The High Court has ordered eviction of only HML’s land. HML has already told the High Court that it possesses only 1,048 hectares, that it had leased for 99 years from a local landlord, and the lease itself has since long expired. Besides, the company itself has encroached many thousands of acres of government land, and that is what the landless poor have taken over.”

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The state government, in fact, had also argued in court earlier that HML had no right over the land any more, which the HC had turned down.

The issue has been assuming critical mass, with a slew of social and human rights activists, including Medha Patkar, Arundhati Roy and Yogendra Parikh, visiting the area and endorsing support to the encroachers. Many political parties, including the Congress, BJP and PDP of Abdul Nasser Mahdani and tribal organisations like the Adivasi Gothra Mahasabha, have also voiced their support for the encroachers.