Low drama in the high range

The drama in Kerala's Munnar hill resort is not just over the "re-claiming" of land by the state government from Tata Tea. The story began on another issue altogether, many weeks ago, when newspaper reports on the rampant construction of illegal homes and hotels in this tea-growing district forced the government to take action. In response to the public pressure to stop the over-development of Munnar (as is typical of such hill-stations) and the illegal exploitation of forest land, and concerned that any routine steps by the executive would quickly result in appeals to the court and the inevitable stay orders, local officials were apparently instructed to resort to tactics familiar to people in Delhi, Mumbai and elsewhere: instant demolition of houses and hotels, and cancellation of leases so that the land returned to the government. Indeed, the charge was that many of the land allotments issued to violators had been given by a lowly local official who did not have the authority to do so""though, to the embarrassment of the Left Democratic Front government, it turned out that the allotments had been personally handed over by the then LDF chief minister, E K Nayanar.

Still, the script was playing to plan until the even bigger embarrassing discovery that both the CPI(M) and CPI, leading lights of the ruling LDF, were violators just as much as all those evil capitalists who had built tourist homes on sacrosanct forest land. Both organisations had ostensibly built party offices in Munnar town, except that these offices were a couple of rooms in the basements of the buildings concerned, with the rest of the structures being rooms that were let out to all comers. In short, the parties were running commercial hotels, though their claim was that the guest rooms were meant primarily for party workers who came to visit the party office. It did not take too long after that for the demolition drive to be called off, with exceptions already having been made for specific categories of buildings, including (and no embarrassment here) the offices of political parties. What began on a high note of outrage against crass commercialisation in violation of the rules ended as low farce.

The face-off with Tata Tea is a sequel to this denouement, and may well be a desperate attempt by the state government to regain credibility with an un-amused public. Whether any one piece of "poramboke" land (or unassessed public land) belongs to the government but is in the possession of the tea company, will become clear over time""Tata Tea claims that it possesses less land than it owns, while the government alleges large-scale land grab by the company. Encroachment on poramboke land is common enough, and the government is in the process of dealing with land title requests made by as many as 27,000 people who have been squatting on such land, sometimes for decades. Whether Tata Tea (in its earlier identity as James Finlay & Co.) indulged in similar encroachment will become clear with time, and the courts are seized of the matter. The state government, meanwhile, has not improved its case, with ministers differing in public over the status of the land that the chief minister made a show of re-claiming from Tata Tea last week. The consequences of all this may not be tragic, as at Nandigram in Left Front-ruled West Bengal, but the effect on state government credibility is no less severe.