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Journalism of Courage
Forget the lameduck Chief Minister of a few months ago, plaintively helpless in a Cabinet full of party rivals and overlooked even in many of the key decisions of his own Government. A few hundred sledgehammers, bulldozers and JCBs are now rebuilding VS Achuthanandan in a way that has even his own party foes scampering for some of its reflected glory.
Landgrabbing, often politically endorsed, has always had a big public resonance in Kerala. Except for localised kneejerks, no government here in the past had tried to do what VS is now pushing for all across Kerala.
Incidentally, the demolition drive that he began in Munnar is now greatly overhauling the notoriety and public ire that VS courted barely a year ago. That was when he was leading another kind of demolition: physically chopping down standing cash crops of helpless farmers so as to force them to get back to cultivating labour intensive paddy, which they could no longer afford.
Now, VS is about to broadbase the Munnar mission and no one doubts anymore that this man means business.
In Kumarakom, where the demolition efforts began on a low key a couple of days ago, the Government today handed a 24-hour notice to eight big encroachers with considerable clout — including popular Malayalam movie actor Dileep — to demolish their tourism resorts on prime land grabbed along the backwater fringes. In Kozhikode, the officials are about to begin smashing about 180 buildings along the Kallai river bank from tomorrow.
In Kochi, about 150 buildings found encroaching the MG Road have been told to remove themselves by tomorrow. “District officials are evaluating the issue in all other districts and demolitions would begin as soon as we sift through the record,” a senior Government official said.
VS’s arch party foe and CPM state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan is now slamming the state’s media for “hijacking” the Chief Minister and putting him on a pedestal for the initiative. VS, according to Pinarayi, is after all “only a party property”, and credit for whatever he does belongs entirely to the party. This, incidentally, comes a bare fortnight after Pinarayi had got the state CPM secretariat to issue an ultimatum to VS asking him to replace his handpicked team of a couple of IAS and IPS officials sent to Munnar for the job.
“I never claimed that all credit is mine. But if the media sees only me behind this initiative and not others in the Left, they had better ask the media why,” VS had said.
But then, even the Congress-led Opposition is clearly staggered by the swelling public support for the drive, though it was Opposition leader Oommen Chandy himself who had first raised the Munnar landgrab issue to slam VS. Chandy, who had later endorsed the mission, even contradicted Vijayan today to claim that VS was actually “Kerala’s property”, and not of the CPM alone.
Meanwhile, the resort owners and encroachers bearing the brunt of the drive have failed to get any reprieve from the courts even as more JCBs move in. The state Government today declared that it would finalise a comprehensive development plan for Munnar within the next four months, after the clean-up is over.
