Chengara land row resolved as Dalits scale down demand

A two-year-old agitation by landless Dalits in Chengara ended on Monday after the LDF government thrashed out a formula to allot land for 1,700-odd families....

A two-year-old agitation by landless Dalits in Chengara ended on Monday after the LDF government thrashed out a formula to allot land for 1,700-odd families that had encroached upon a private estate in central Kerala. The agitation,supported by social organisations,had driven a wedge between the Left and Dalits in the state.

According to the terms of the settlement,1,432 of the 1,738 families would get land and financial aid for building houses. The landless Scheduled Tribes would get one acre of land and Rs 1.25 lakh each for building houses while the Scheduled Caste would be allotted 50 cents of land and Rs 1 lakh each. Other Dalits would get 25 cents of land,apart from an assistance of Rs 75,000. The land would be allotted at available places across the state,said Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan,who had led the discussion with the agitators and the Opposition parties.

What the agitators had demanded two years back was five acres of land each for all landless families. Over the period,they had scaled down the demand as the agitation lost its steam.

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Laha Gopalan,the leader of the agitation,said he was forced to end the encroachment fearing attack from the CPM which,according to him,wanted a repeat of Nandigram at Chengara. The raw deal meted out to the agitators had exposed the CPM stand towards Dalits,he said,adding that had it been an issue of the upper class Hindus,the partys stand would have been entirely different.

Gopalan also said the agitators would vacate the encroached estate only after they were allotted land and financial aid as promised in the package.

The agitation for land had hit the headlines on August 3,2007,when around 3,000 Dalits,under the banner of the Liberation Front of the Poor,had forcibly encroached upon 350 acres of the rubber plantation owned by Harrisons Malayalam Plantations Ltd at Chengara in Pathanamthitta district. They had erected huts,started a parallel education system for children and even tried to make the encroached estate a self-reliant village.

The stir,several times,reached a flashpoint as the police and agitators geared up for showdowns. To prevent forcible eviction,the encroachers even formed suicide squads. Police had to return emptyhanded whenever they tried to flush out agitators.