After its much-hyped demolition drive and half-hearted bids to drive out corporate land encroachers, the Left Government in Kerala is now yet to firm its approach to organised large-scale land grabbing of another kind, now rapidly assuming a pattern.

The latest is in Parvatimala of Munnar, where over a thousand families carrying the flags of the CPI(M), CPI, Congress and even the Tamil Nadu-based AIADMK and DMK have pitched camp over the past four days, hogging hundreds of acres of prime Government land. Claiming to be landless, they have refused to budge from the area until the state Government gave them appropriate land in lieu, even if the Government used force.

Attempts by the local administration to get the sponsoring political parties to ask their people to vacate have had little effect — local leaders of all parties, without exception, had claimed that they were not in the know and that they did not endorse the land grab. But even afterwards, no party has attempted to get its flags and symbols removed from the encroachments, either.

With hundreds of more people now streaming into the area with home-building materials to join the encroachers, the only thing the local police have been able to do as of late evening on Wednesday was to seize some vehicles that fetched them. Local officials said the Government had been apprised of the situation, and the decision to use force to evict needed to be taken “at the highest level”.

Parvatimala follows Chinnakkanal in Munnar itself, where the local CPI(M) had trucked in hundreds of its workers who grabbed a 1,500-acre stretch of Government land, after shooing off some 200-odd landless tribal families that had originally encroached there. The comrades later had to back off under media glare, but the tribals remained, and the Government did not want to use force.

... contd.