Eurasia Review, 20 February 2023
It’s been twenty years since the state of Kerala in South India witnessed an unprecedented tribal land struggle. It was on 19 February 2003 that the Adivasi (tribal) community in the northern part of Kerala experienced violent bouts, including firing, from the state police following their long agitation for land rights. After twenty years, the leaders of the Adivasi movement who spearheaded the agitation admit that the social conditions of these marginalized communities remain as they were, notwithstanding public debates and follow-up land struggles across the state. The Adivasi land struggle has a long history, marked by promises and perfidies in the hands of both the state and the settlers in the Adivasi lands. The most fundamental cause of such struggles is land alienation in the wake of the intrusion of settlers into the Adivasi land. This forced them to organize themselves though they constituted only a small minority of 1.43 percent of the State’s population. Owing to land encroachment, more than three-fourths of Adivasis became landless and their social conditions are still far below the state average. Though the Indian Parliament passed the Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006, which recognizes the rights of the forest-dwelling tribal communities and other traditional forest dwellers to forest resources, the Adivasi community in Kerala remains deprived of all benefits of FRA. For the full text Read
