“Feed Madhu’s starving family.” That’s the eye of a socio-political storm which has been ravaging Kerala since a mob in Attappadi lynched a 27-year-old tribal youth, allegedly for having stolen a few handfuls of rice and coriander powder. The opposition has been quick to castigate the ruling Left Democratic Front (LDF) for its failure to lift victim A. Madhu’s community out of abject poverty and protect them from exploitation, while the government rejected the charges, framing the tragedy purely in terms of mob violence and the victim’s unique vulnerability. There is the social plane, with a legion of artists having taken to pen, easel and INStrument to pay their own tribute to Madhu, only for some who are closer to the issues to dismiss them as privileged armchair activists looking to salve their own consciences. And finally, there is the need to examine the psychology of mob violence against the marginalised—an increasingly worrying trend in the state.
“What an amazing variety of attempts to establish that Attappadi and Kerala are Somalia, using social, print and visual media,” exclaims M.B. Rajesh, the CPI(M) MP for Palakkad—the constituency which contains Attappadi—in a Facebook post. Decrying the clamour to “feed Madhu’s starving family” as a manufactured rallying cry for the Sangh Parivar to take advantage of Madhu’s death, he, after a visit to the bereaved family in their hamlet of Kadukumanna, describes them as reasonably well-off. When it comes to Madhu himself, Rajesh explains his murder as the climax of an avoidable, individual tragedy.
Madhu’s mother and relatives mourn beside his body, Attappadi
Thambu, an NGO that works with tribal people in Attappadi, has a very different perspective. Its convenor K.A. Ramu, who is now secretary of the Madhu Murder Action Council, went from hamlet to hamlet in the area to inform the people of the young man’s murder—and their subsequent protests would bring the region to a halt. “This death has pained the adivasis and they are frightened by the open display of violence,” says Ramu, clearly associating Madhu’s fate with systemic factors, in sharp contrast to Rajesh’s account. “Our lands have been taken by these encroachers and as we are pushed to the margins, we are annihilated. The infant deaths, malnutrition and now this killing of Madhu is all part of the violence against us. Even the sacred hills that we worshipped are now being converted into resorts.”
There is a second level on which a dichotomy has emerged. As people reacted with horror to the death, artists and poets expressed their anguish through their own accustomed forms of expression. Novelist K.R. Meera exhorts the mob to divide the fingers, legs and eyes among themselves in a macabre poem that is both frightening in its language and painful in its cadence.
