(Published in Fountain Ink-June 2011)
Kodagu's fabled hills are famous for their ginger farms, but for the men and women who toil there, it's a place of ill omen from which many labourers return on a bier.
***
“Let’s go then,” the jeep
driver tells Kolu. Kolu is reluctant, “No, no, no, I am not going anywhere,” he
mutters to himself. It’s a feeble reassurance, capable of accomplishing no more
than a mere adjournment of the ceremonies of usual business for a few more
jittery moments. Sooner or later, Kolu knows he will yield. Not that he does
not recognize the implications of accepting the offer. Skulking in the
direction the jeep intents to take him and his life is death, its pretexts
many. Death by poisoning, death by drowning, death by electric shock, death by
suicide, death by murder, death by who-knows-what. Kolu has been down that road
before, his memories not yet stale. But traditionally, in Kolu’s part of the
world, the hellishness of memory, when pitted against the hellishness of
present, stands no chance; so go he must again. A hungry, thirsty family, no
money; a bruised, battered mind, no alcohol; where’s the choice? In the direction
the jeep intents to take Kolu and Kolu’s life, where death skulks under the
guise of various pretexts, there is also money to be made—not much, just enough
to live if spared by death—and more than enough alcohol to be consumed. So
there goes Kolu again, on the twenty first of April, 2005, from his one-room-house
in an Adivasi settlement in Wayanad, the north eastern tip of Keralam, to where
there is money and alcohol, to a ginger farm across the border in Kodagu,
Karnataka. Two days later, after the sun has set, Kolu returns, with the jeep
driver and a couple of the cultivator’s men, as a dead man. Too much alcohol,
and a fatal fall, killed Kolu according to the police.
Kolu’s relatives cry foul: “Not
a case of natural death. How could it be?” Their man was healthy when he had
left for Kodagu, and though a quarter bottle of rum did mean something to him
everyday, an alcoholic he was not; so how could a man such as him die from too
much alcohol? And what were those wounds on his back, on the side of his right
eye? Didn’t they look like the kind inflicted by a sharp knife? And why was the
post mortem conducted before any of the dead man’s relatives were informed? Why
were those who came back with Kolu’s dead body fanatical about getting the
burial done before the night was over? Why did the police and the revenue
officials arrive in haste at the spot? And why were they keen on offering money
to the bereaved?
The reek of murder is a trifle
too acrid to ignore. Consider the circumstances. Kurian Alex, the jeep driver
who approached Kolu is forest guard Baby’s man; and between Kolu and Baby,
there is a history they share. Ganapathy, Kolu’s elder brother explains: “Kolu
had information about many of Baby’s shady deals including his hand in smuggling
forest wood and deer meat. Baby then went on to warn Kolu, asking him to stay
out of his way; but nobody thought he would go this far.”
Ganapathy, in his quest for
justice, later files a complaint with Sulthan Bathery police station, but that’s
the farthest he advances. Soon the realization hits him: within the precincts
of a ginger farm in Kodagu it’s way too easy to murder an Adivasi, not a leaf shall
flutter. Of the more than 150 Adivasi deaths reported from the region in the
last decade (that’s the official count, the Adivasis say more than 400 have
died), around 40 are cases of suspicious deaths. So far no action has been
taken in any of them. For a while, Ganapathy seethes with indignation. Indignation
soon gives way to disillusionment: in the prefab of a system of law unreasonably
contingent on a system of evidence, there is not enough space for everyone;
some have to be always outside. The place of death, Vagamandalam, Kodagu, is
located within the boundaries of a different state, Karnataka, whose police had
noticed nothing fishy about Kolu’s death. Not a murder, they said; too much
alcohol, and a fatal fall; no evidence to suggest anything else. The report of
post mortem confirms their version: too much alcohol, and a fatal fall; no
evidence to suggest anything else. The other Adivasis who were with Kolu in the
farm too are in complete concurrence; none of them witnessed anything untoward.
Duly, Ganapathy’s quest for justice is dispatched to the vaporous realm of
sterling fiction material.
Six years down the line, Suresh,
Kolu’s son, now earns his livelihood and alcohol working at a ginger farm in
Kodagu. “I always told his father, don’t go to Kodagu; it’s a dangerous place,
a slaughterhouse of Adivasis. So many have died there; 400, 500, I don’t know
how many. Who knows, one day he might meet the same fate his father once met.” Ganapathy’s
voice is cold, and it’s hard to spot a wince on his face.
***
There are dimensions to geography
that a map cannot explain. Kodagu, a map says, is the region on the eastern
slopes of the Western Ghats in Karnataka, spread across a geographical area of
1,584 sq.mi. Kodagu, the Adivasi in Wayanad says, is any place across the
border where ginger is cultivated. The early ginger farms had sprung up in the
administrative district of Kodagu during the early nineties when farmers from
Wayanad, in their pursuit of bigger profits, arrived at the region and at once
acknowledged the scale of its potential. Exodus is a leitmotif running through
the history of these farmers. Masters of survival, they possess an acute sixth
sense in recognizing even the faintest of promises held out by a piece of land.
They had come to Wayanad from the hills of Central Keralam in the menacing
aftermaths of Second World War and, in spite of the severity of circumstances—a
perilous terrain, a vicious famine and the outbreak of deadly malaria--, had
wasted little time in striking gold. Pepper, paddy, tea, coffee; the seasons
were rich. But gradually the returns diminished. Overtaxed, the soil
progressively turned less forthcoming in its readiness to yield. That meant
another exodus; so off to Kodagu the farmers went. In farms leased out by
Kodavas, they cultivated ginger. In next to no time, they advanced further,
reaching districts such as Hasan, Mysore and Shimoga; all of them identified as
Kodagu in the parlance of an Adivasi in Wayanad.
Ginger is a gambler’s crop; big
money to lose, bigger money to win. Such games are known to generate
predictable victims. In the farms of Kodagu, they are the Adivasis of Wayanad, large,
inexpensive, credulous and extremely productive. Making up, according to the
census of 2001, 17% of the population of Wayanad (1, 36,062 of 7.80, 619) they
are broadly categorized into agricultural labourers, marginal farmers and
forest dependants. Most agricultural labourers belong to Paniya and Adiya
communities that comprise 55% of the tribal population. Their plight, even by
the general standards of penury the Adivasis are afflicted with, is abject. Too
many years of slavery (the first Paniya man and woman, according to their
folklore, were slaves of a landlord in the foothills of ‘Ippimala’, the revered
hill of the Paniyas), too many years of no land (the upward social mobility
exhibited by Kurichyas and Kurumas, the other major Adivasi tribes of Wayanad, is
credited to the fact that they own land and have their own small farming
enterprises), too many years of no education (they have the least number of
school going kids among all the tribes of Wayanad), too many years of no health
(plagued for generations by the lethal genetic disease-sickle cell anemia, most
Paniyas die before they turn forty five); they are people customised for
exploitation. When the man who comes in the jeep to take them to Kodagu —sometimes
the farm owner’s agent, sometimes the farm owner himself-- offers them Rs 1000
or Rs 2000 as advance money, they readily accept the bait. “Our circumstances
have made us inured to the ramifications of going to work at Kodagu,” says Narayanan,
a Paniya who belongs to Manmadampalayam colony in Noolppuzha panchayath,
Sulthan Bathery and who just about managed to flee from death in Kodagu. He,
and a couple of fellow Adivasis, had dared to raise their voice against their
owner who had tried to molest a woman labourer in the farm. “We said we will
let the news out in the open. He said he will kill us.”
***
Murder, for the Adivasis, is
only one of the ways, to get killed here; daily grind has many more in store.
Narayanan recounts a typical day’s affairs: “It starts in the morning. Eight o
clock, seven o clock, six o clock, on some days even as early as five thirty.
First things first; they give us alcohol; strong and the cheapest variety
available in market. Sometimes they arrange for arrack. We like arrack more
than foreign liquour. All of us drink;
men, women, even some children. Then starts the work. Till dusk. It’s grueling
stuff. Only the strongest survive. But if you give up in between, or object,
they will beat you anyway. So we work, work, work. And we drink, drink, drink.
If you drink more, you will work more. The pesticides we work with are deadly,
like EMISAL. If you don’t have the proper protective gear, you are doomed. We
don’t have any. There are large ginger-pits where we will have to get down and
drench ourselves in pools of those lethal pesticides. Most of us don’t even
know about the kind of hazards and diseases that can result from working with
such toxic pesticides, and that too without protection. In between there is a
lunch of little or rice gruel. If it’s a weekend, the accounts will be settled
after the day’s work. Rs 125, Rs 175, sometimes up to Rs 200 per day. True,
it’s not a bad wage. In fact it is better than the wages we get here in
Wayanad. But there’s a problem; we rarely get the money. From the wage, the
money for alcohol and lunch is deducted. Then the advance money also is deducted.
There have been occasions where they have paid us Rs 1000, and then deducted Rs
2000. We don’t understand the mathematics. What we do understand is that, after
each week, we are more and more in debt, and that, if we have to pay the debt
back, and since there is no other way left to us but to pay the debt back, we
have to keep working, working and working. We live in ramshackle temporary
sheds arranged for us. Thirty to forty of us, men, women, and children, everyone
stay in the same dingy shed. If anyone tries to question the ways of these
owners and their agents, they will make sure that the person is dead.” Like
Ganapathy’s, Narayanan’s voice too bears the stamp of a detached coldness.
So does Leela’s; if anything,
her voice is colder. Another member of the Paniya tribe hailing from Kallur
panchayat of Sulthan Bathery, Leela was 13 when she was taken to a ginger farm.
When she returned after seven months she was five months pregnant.
“I went there for my
vacations. When the vacation was over and it was time for me to go back to
school, the farm owner asked me to stay back. He said he will give me money, he
said he will give me a lot of money. It seemed a wonderful idea to me, earning
a lot of money for myself. So I stayed there. Then he started making advances. First,
I resisted. He said he will marry me. He slept with me many times. Then, one
day, when I told him that I was pregnant, he just packed me off.” Leela’s son died
before she turned 16.
***
Farm owners promptly dismiss
the Adivasis’ allegations as “baseless”. Benoy John, one of them, says: “If the
situation is as bad as it has been made out to be, do you think the Adivasis
would return to work? And why is that only the Adivasis die? Labourers from
other communities also come to work in the farms though none of them have died.
Most of these Adivasis are plagued by poor health. There is also rampant
alcoholism among them. Most deaths result from these reasons.”
The civil society, as ever, is
skeptical. If the deaths are murders, what, and where, are the evidences? The
innuendo of the question, for the Adivasis, is a violent assault on their
reality. They do not possess, nor can they access, tangible evidences to attest
their convictions. Blame it on the smug rich, that’s all Narayanan can say. Blame
it on the smug rich; that’s all Kunjamma too says. Wife of Shankaran, the most
recent victim of a Kodagu ginger farm (on the 13th of April, 2011,
he went; on the 17th of April Kunjamma received the news of his
death), she claims her husband, when he last spoke to her, was a bundle of
fears. He had planted his own little share of ginger in the farm and the owner
was not amused. “Then, he killed my husband.” Just like that.
For the civil society,
perennially beset by a terminal them-and-us-us-and-them-syndrome
in its interactions with the Adivasis, these claims, in the absence of
evidences, are merely misfired fusillades of visceral anguish. Often, they are
even interpreted as paranoid delusions endemic to doomed struggles of survival
and existence. Either way it signifies a scheme of violence, more surreal than
real, to which the quotidian circumstances of the Adivasis are beholden. K
Ammini, a Paniya leader whose moniker is Junior Janu—for her firebrand ways
that are vivid evocations of C K Janu, the legendary leader of the Adivasi land
movement that had rattled the political conscience of Kerala in the first
decade of new millennium before being ruthlessly tamped down by state terror--,
says: “All this clamour for evidences is quite absurd. It accentuates the
intensity of the violence that we suffer. Someone who is an expert swimmer
drowns in a 10-ft pool, and we are supposed to believe that it was an accident.
Someone else who, in the afternoon, promised to return within a week is burned
to death that night, and we are supposed to believe that it was a suicide.”
Ammini’s sentiments are echoed
by Fr Stephen Mathew, in charge of the NGO Neethi
Vedhi (Stage for Justice), that has been providing assistance for the
Adivasi families in fighting the cases. “It’s true that even the most obvious
of cases stand next to no chance in a court of law, especially when the system
is so structured that the centres of power that matter pander to the whims of
these farmers” But he is quick to add: “It’s also true that not all deaths are
cases of murder, though the Adivasi might believe them to be so. That really
makes our job of fighting these cases very difficult. In fact, that’s one
reason why we often fail to carry out proper follow-ups.”
To which Ammini retorts: “If
NGO’s want to be true to the claims they so loudly and proudly make, of wanting
to make a change in the life of Adivasis and suchlike, then they should work
with total conviction and should be wholehearted in their dedication to the
cause. It should not be like you take up a case, give the Adivasi a lot of hope
and then take no efforts in following it up.” Ammini herself was a field worker
with Fr Stephen’s NGO before she left the organization under circumstances that
she describes as far from ideal. “I left when I realized that I won’t be able
to work in an independent manner. To arrive at the real solution to the
problems of Adivasis, more and more Adivasis should be allowed to work
independently. But few NGO’s can claim to do that.” Fr: Stephen counters:
“Ammini had to leave because she was duping us by working for another NGO, and
supplying them with the same data she used to collect from the field works she
did under us.” Murky NGO politics, together with its economics of foreign
funding, is a major sub plot of the Adivasi situation in Wayanad, home to
nearly 450 such organizations, most of which cite the Adivasis as their ‘field
of work’. It’s a world crammed with bleeding hearts.
***
“We are aware of the situation,
and are trying our best to tackle it; but the tooth of statutory law is week,”
says V Ratheeshan, the District Collector of Wayanad. He has been to Kodagu as
part of a people’s tribunal set up to study the issue and has seen things for
himself, so he gamely acknowledges that “all labour rules are flouted in the
ginger farms”, but concedes that “little of note has so far been achieved,
despite earnest efforts, in the process of setting the system right.”
Typical intricacies of a two-states-problem,
he says. “Because this is an inter-state issue, we have our limitations. The
district administration has written in detail about the issue to the state
government and the National Schedule Caste and Schedule Tribe Commission. But the
reality of the situation is such that the onus is on the Karnataka government
and the district administration of Kodagu to take sterner steps; especially
about these cases of suspicious deaths. If a complaint is filed with a local
police station in Wayanad regarding any of these deaths, all that the police
can do, under the present circumstances, is to forward the complaint to the
police station of the area where the death took place.”
The Collector moots a long-term
solution. “Really, the only feasible way forward is to introduce and
successfully enforce sterner provisions in the Inter-State Migrant Workmen
(Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act.” Presently, the three
major tools of law deployed to counter the issue are The Child Labour
Abolishing Act, The Bonded Labour Abolishion Act and The Schedule Caste &
Schedule Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989.
The Collector also directs
part of the blame towards the Adivasis for the system’s apparent failure to
deal with the problem. “Whatever laws are in place, they can be successfully
enforced only if the Adivasis co-operate. Unfortunately, we have been let down
on that front. We cannot, by means of law, ban any Indian citizen from going
and working anywhere in India. The best we can do as an administrative body is
to make arrangements that are local to the situation. Here, for instance, any
Adivasi who goes to Kodagu is supposed to register his/her name in the local
police station. But nobody bothers to do so.”
Mohammed Basheer, Assistant
Tribal Project Officer, Wayanad, says: “Recently, we had conducted a checking
at Bavali, the border. But nothing came out of it, because we did not have the
support of the Adivasis.” He even alludes to an “inbred and deep-seated sense
of slavishness that rules the psyche of the Adivasis, especially the Paniyas,”
from which all their present ailments germinate. “Why is that, despite all
these deaths, they still flock to Kodagu in big numbers?” he asks. “Before the
ginger farms, there were the Bandipur forests where they used to go and poach
sandalwood for Veerappan and his band of dacoits. They were slaves then, they
are slaves now. Nothing has changed. That’s why such missions like Sugandhagiri
Adivasi Rehabilitation Project had to meet with failure. The real task at hand
is to find a way to free their minds from this slavishness. And in this case it’s
not as if they are short of alternatives. Why don’t they avail the benefits of
National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS)? The wages paid in farm
lands in Wayanad are comparable, if not more than the wages paid in Kodagu
ginger farms. Why do they still go? From my long experience of working with
them, I think the problem is their mindset. All you need to make them follow
you is offer a bottle of alcohol. That’s how gullible they are.”
Apropos the connection between
alcohol and Adivasis, there is no dissent. The beverage shops of Wayanad are
overcrowded from when the shutters go up in the morning to when they are down
in the night. Sloshed Adivasis lying in the middle of roads is a common sight.
The churchman and the CPI (M) man, the tribal leader and the District Collector;
everyone is in agreement about the degree of alcohol’s sway over the Adivasi
community, though no one can quite put their finger on the issue. But not
everybody thinks, like the District Collector and the Assistant Tribal Officer
do, that the Adivasis have to be blamed for not co-operating with the
administration’s efforts to set the system right.
***
M.K.Ramadas, senior journalist
who was at the forefront of the Muthanga struggle, a tribal movement to reclaim
land, terms the tribal officer’s claim as “a classic illustration of civil
society’s refusal to recognise and take up Adivasi problems as their own. “The
civil society always wants the Adivasis to play by the rules it sets. Who are
we to blame their slavishness? What is this so called slavishness anyway? For
centuries, the idea of private ownership of land was alien to them. For
centuries their faith was that the forest is theirs, and that whatever is there
in the forest is also theirs. What sense would a rehabilitation project make to
them?”
According to Ramadas, this
sense of ‘their’ problems not really being ‘our’ problems is also the reason for
the media’s silence--except for the occasional and mostly customary pieces of
reporting--on the issue despite its fairly long history. “There is also the
factor of political parties and their influence over media. The agenda is
always laid down by the parties. Not surprisingly, Adivasis and their problems
are not their priorities. And therefore they don’t figure high on the list of
media priorities as well.”
K Ammini too is scathing in
her criticism of the administration’s indictment of the Adivasis. “That’s a
load of bullshit. The Tribal Development Office springs into action only when
there is an election. Despite repeated requests, they have not bothered to
launch even an awareness campaign. Really, the only practical way to address
the issue is to provide an in-depth awareness to the Adivasis.”
Ironically, the administration’s
fundamental tools to provide the in-depth awareness that Ammini refers to are
Adivasis themselves, the tribal promoters. The role played by tribal promoters
brings to view one more intriguing dimension of the issue: hierarchical
formations within the Adivasis. Most of the tribal promoters belong to the
Kurichya and Kuruma communities as they are the communities with most number of
educated members. Since only few of the Kurichyas and Kurumas go to ginger
farms in Kodagu, the Paniyas and Adiyas allege that these tribal promoters are
callous in their approach to the issue. “Most tribal promoters are controlled
by the CPI (M),” Ammini says. “It’s not the interests of the Adivasis that the
promoters have in mind, but only those of the party’s. They don’t even go for
field work; instead, prepare their reports from their homes or party offices.”
The tribal promoters, of course, dismiss these claims as baseless. Rajani R,
one of them, says: “For the last three years we have been going to the Adivasi
colonies, providing them with awareness about the graveness of the issue, and
the things that they need to take care of. We also give them information about
alternative possibilities like the NREGS. In spite of all that, they keep
going.” And keep dying.
***
What surfaces, when the flimsy
human-interest-skin of the story is peeled off, is a meaty, and an ordinary,
political reality: within a system of power that bases its operations on the
might of numbers, the Adivasis are easy preys. The absence of strong, organized
political bodies to represent them provides the ideal breeding ground for
exploitation. To verify this, one only has to draw a comparison between the
plight of the Adivasis in Kodagu to the agrarian crisis of 2004 that triggered
a series of farmer suicides and drew frenetic responses from the state and the
civil society. Those farmers, the farmers of the CPI (M), the farmers of the
Church, the farmers of P Sainath, were economic subjects and hence key
political players in a modern democratic system. Their crisis had ramifications
which the state and the civil society could ill afford to ignore, and therefore
the frenetic responses. When it comes to the Adivasis though, the responses are
tempered and carefully crafted. C K Saseendran, CPI (M) district committee
leader, when asked about the nonexistence of labour unions among the Adivasis
who go to ginger farms in Kodagu, points to ambiguous “practical problems.”
Choosing to focus on the lack of awareness and rabid alcoholism of the Adivasis
as the fundamental causes of the deaths, he goes on to make perhaps the most
poignant observation on the issue. “As a political party we also have to
safeguard the interests of the ginger farmers. It must not be forgotten that ginger
plays a vital role in the economy of the region.”
So what must the Adivasis do?
Who will safeguard their interests? Is it merely the need for a mainstream god
as a last resort that so many Adivasi families now claim to be Hindus, or
become Christians?
***
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