Aound 5000 landless families who are engaged in a struggle to claim land for a living in Chengara in Kerala State are facing violent reprisal from vested interest groups with the connivance of the ruling coalition. In order to show solidarity to the victims and to put pressure on the Government of Kerala to act immediately and secure justice a petition addressed to the President of India by some concerned individuals and organisations are being circulated. You can also participate in this campaign by signing the petition here.
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gurukulam
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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?
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