'You Have Blood On Your Hands, Sir'

To
The Chief Minister
Government of Kerala
Thiruvananthapuram

27th February 2003

Dear Sir,

There are some moments in the life of a society when something happens to put its moral fibre on publicdisplay. This is one such moment.

The Muthanga atrocity will go down in Kerala’s history as a government’s attempt to decimate anextraordinary and historical struggle for justice by the poorest, most oppressed community in Kerala. It willgo down in history because, unlike most ‘struggles’ in Kerala, it is not a petty, cynical fight betweenpolitical parties jockeying for power. It is the real fight of the truly powerless against the powerful. It isthe stuff of which myths are made.

I visited the Muthanga sanctuary (partly used as a eucalyptus plantation for Grasim’s Gwalior Rayonsfactory, which has recently been closed) where the Kerala Police opened fire on hundreds of adivasis. Ivisited the Sultan Bathery hospital where the wounded have been admitted. I visited some adivasi settlementsclose to the sanctuary. I also visited the Calicut jail and met C.K. Janu and Geethanandan, both of whom arerecovering after having been badly beaten by the police. Apart from this I spoke with several eyewitnesses tothe firing.

For the Kerala Police to open fire on a group of hundreds of people including women, children, old peopleand infants is an act that has few parallels in recent history. The event that comes to mind is JallianwallahBagh. According to eyewitness accounts the official death toll of two is completely untrue. The people I spoketo reported a much higher toll. Had they belonged to any other community that mattered to mainstream politicalparties, the manner in which the crisis and its fallout were handled would have been quite different.

There is absolutely no justification or excuse for what happened. Even the police version of being provokedby a 'hostage' crisis is not a justification. To open fire like that with no attempt to negotiate shows a deeplack of respect for human life -- not just adivasi lives, but also the lives of the policeman and the forestofficial who were taken hostage. It is not the way governments in the past have dealt with kidnappings andhijackings by real militants. While those who killed the policeman must certainly be punished, you cannot holdall the people present there -- or the Adivasi Gothra Mahasabha or indeed the entire adivasi community --responsible for that act.

Survivors who I spoke to in hospital were less traumatised by their own injuries than by the fact that manyof their family members including small children had gone missing. I met a man whose child had fallen from hisarms when he was brought down by a police lathi and has been missing since then. There are others, women andold people missing. It is not known whether they are dead, or alive or hiding, hurt and hungry in thesanctuary.

A week has passed and no effort has been made to draw up lists of the missing and crosscheck them with jailand hospital records and reassure those who are rigid with grief and uncertainty about their loved ones. Canyou even bear to think how you would feel in their place?

Meanwhile the police is terrorising adivasis in the region. Policemen enter settlements and arbitrarilyarrest the men folk, beating them and dragging them away. Their families have no idea what has become of them.When we approached the villages we found ghost-settlements with only a few frightened women and children. Themen who remained all ran away. It took a lot to persuade them that we were not government officials orpolice-informers. Clearly the intention is to stamp out the struggle completely. By visiting this kind ofvicious reprisal on the whole community, the government hopes that people will blame their leaders for puttingthem on the path that lead to such terrible times for them. It is a ruthless political game by accomplishedplayers.

Journalists and cameramen have been threatened and intimidated. After the firing they were denied access tothe interiors of the sanctuary where people went to hide. For fifteen hours after the firing the place wasclosed to the media. Nobody knows what really happened during that period. In an attempt to terrorise membersof civil society who may have any sympathies with the adivasis, the police have arrested a DIET (DistrictInstitute for Educational Training) lecturer K.K. Surendran. He was tortured in custody and reports say thathe has a ruptured ear drum. At the moment he is being held in Kannur jail.

The result of this police-raj is that adivasis are too frightened to go to work. People are frightened toemploy them. In effect, they are starving to death in their villages -- their ration cards have been burnt inthe carnage. This is an exacerbation of the situation that led them to fight for the return of their alienatedlands in the first place.

This is to urge you to immediately release people who have been held on baseless charges and see that theyare able to return safely to their villages. Most have lost all their worldly possessions -- they have nofood, no vessels to carry water, and no clothes to wear. (People and well-wishers had to take them clothes injail). Everything has been burned and destroyed by the police in their 'action'.

Forgotten in the reportage about the carnage and its aftermath is the fact that this confrontation was theoutcome of yet another cynical promise by the Government of Kerala to provide land to 53,000 adivasi familiesby the end of December 2002. It was another link in the chain of 28 years of unforgivable manipulation. Oursis a nation built on the jagged shards of politicians’ broken promises.

You have blood on your hands, sir. You need to make amends. And quickly.

Yours truly,

(Signed)
Arundhati Roy

P.S: A small observation: In its eagerness to restore the Eucalyptus plantation to its pristine condition,apart from killing human beings, between bouts of firing the police squadron had a picnic lunch. The plasticcups and plates scattered on the ‘eco-sensitive’ battlefield tell a story. This one meal by the guardiansof the State produced more non- biodegradable waste than the homes and worldly possessions of one thousandadivasis families.

Arundhati Roy