Land Question in Contemporary Kerala, India: Conflict over Plantation Land at Chengara

Abstract

The article broadly discusses significant debates around the Kerala Model of Development. The question of land redistribution and the significance of land as a vital resource ensuring upward mobility has been widely discussed since the land reform. The land reform of Kerala was reduced merely to a tenancy reform in which the dalits were offered not agricultural land but only homestead land for their mere survival. Landless people, often under the banner of dalit and adivasi organizations, conducted several important land struggles, effectively rejecting the solution of responsibilized welfare proffered by Panchayati Raj institutions. In this debate, the question of the inability of Kerala’s celebrated land reforms to redistribute hugely—concentrated plantation land came into prominence. Some of the most spectacular land struggles, such as those at Chengara and Aralam involved direct action by squatters to occupy plantation land. There were either struggle for access to land or struggle against forced dispossession. These struggles are mostly outside the formal sphere of politics and often regarded with hostility by entrenched political forces, at least in the initial phases. The article looks at the Chengara land struggle in which the squatter poor (landless) and the plantation workers were pitted against each other when the landless started illegally and forcefully settling in the plantation land of Harrisons Malayalam. The marginalization and exploitation faced by the two groups, their sharing and differences in various ways are analysed in this article. The work also questions certain characterizations of plantation workers, which portrayed them as enjoying considerable well-being. The broad framework of compromises—class compromise and caste compromise—is applied in analysing the opposition of the two groups to each other.