Who Cares About Konan?

Konan's eyes are dry as he talks about his daughter who was gang-raped and killed on May 31. She had 142 wounds. When violent death becomes commonplace, perhaps grief gives way to nonchalance. The tragedy of Attappady unfolds in cold statistics: 201 unnatural deaths in three years in a population of just 66,171 of which the tribes number 27,121. "Most of these could be victims of the ganja mafia," says ex-additional chief secretary Madhava Menon.

But the figures haven't shaken the police. Circle inspector T. Raman dismisses these deaths as suicides. Here in Attappady, when a tribal woman is gangraped, some officials paper it over as a drunken orgy. Kerala's first tribal woman block panchayat president, Iswari Resan, says police records are just indicative, there are many more unreported cases and most of them are caused by ganja gang rivalries.

Padavayal, Konan's village, too has attracted the ganja trade. Chellan, a tribal, says with a drunken drawl that for Rs 100 and a drink he used to walk the whole day to bring down ganja from the mountains. Konan's family is a metaphor for Attappady. This 'Vandari' (the traditional No. 2 man in a tribal village) lost his land to settlers from the plains, fought cases up to the high court and has had a deprived life since a settler killed his daughter, Maruthi. She used to sell hooch for a living.

Konan remembers his ancestors enjoying a drink brewed out of velapatta, the bark of a tree. But the onset of settlers and then the migrant ganja farmers has made the tribes totally dependent on hooch. In the only block in Kerala where there is prohibition, almost 90 per cent of the male population is addicted to the brew. And hooch is an integral tool for the ganja cultivators and traders. They ply it to the tribes to make them work for next to nothing or to induce them to carry ganja from the forests. Without the tribespeople, the migrant marijuana farmers from the plains are helpless. The ganja traders sometimes 'marry' a tribal girl to get their stay legitimised. After a while, they vanish. Ponni of Paloor was one such victim.

Any fight over prices or perceived betrayal could end up in a "suicide by poisoning, hanging or death caused by an elephant's kick" in police records. Tribals, who have got into the organised ganja farms, run a greater risk of unnatural deaths if they squabble over wages. There are other tales of gross exploitation. Anakkatty, a village next to Paloor, was where a teenaged tribal girl was entrapped by ganja traders into shedding her clothes for a porn movie. Local CPI(ML activist Sukumaran has exposed two such cases of porn CDs featuring tribal girls being sold in Attappady. Sukumaran's fight against unnatural deaths though is based on the ideological premise of land alienation. But for a people who lost their forests long ago to the settlers and the state and then their bodies to the ganja mafia, what is left is their soul, which nobody seems to want.