Cataclysmic narrative of India’s marginalised

Last Thursday, in Attappady, a tribal district in Palakkad in Kerala, a 27-year-old man, Madhu, was accused of theft and beaten to death. Madhu was an adivasi (roughly translated as original inhabitant), a more or less dispossessed community of late finding their voice in the mainstream politics of the state.

Madhu apparently was known occasionally to have stolen rice and groceries from shops in the town. The fact also is that Madhu had been for a while a mental patient; he had fled the asylum and taken refuge in the thickly forested district. Madhu’s mother and sisters said he had been staying away from the impoverished family. He mostly strayed, and slept in the shade of trees, and in caves.

The adivasi politics in Kerala is gaining a central momentum in state’s politics. Both the left wing and the right wing have been trying to make inroads into the tribal belts like Attappady, where the “natives” are increasingly waging prolonged political fights with established parties.

The context might seem to justify the situation slipping into the usual political dimensions that an incident of this sort normally gravitates to in a political place like Kerala.

Yet the fact is that the mob that lynched Madhu consisted of men of most political and religious hues. Which brings us to a disturbing aspect of the situation: contrary to the general perception that a near 100 per cent literate — and a relatively affluent — state makes for an enlightened people, Kerala is also a violent state.

In the last 17 years nearly 170 political murders alone have occurred in Kerala, mostly in acts of vendetta between the ruling left wing, CPM (Communist Party of India-Marxist) and the Hindu right wing RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh).

But in crimes unrelated to politics too, the state in not lagging behind. A recent National Crime Records Bureau report, quoted by the Times of India, said Kerala was only second (Delhi being the first) in crime rate at 724 per 100,000 population. The incidence of violence is on the rise especially in recent years with the influx of migrants from other states like Bihar, Bengal and Assam becoming easy fall guys. Most of the migrants are construction labourers and field hands. The stigma attached to them often translates into kangaroo trials.

Media reports quote census (1951) figures to say adivasis, who once constituted 90 per cent of Attapady’s population, declined steadily with the arrival and appropriation of land by settlers from other parts of Kerala and neighbouring Tamil Nadu. According to 2011 census figures, adivasis now comprise 34 per cent of the population, a sharp fall.

Deprived of forest land and the sustenance they derived from it, the tribal people are a poor lot. The government has of late instituted a commission and other related organisations for their rehabilitation. But clearly they have not borne much fruit, if Madhu or his family is an indication. That Madhu is accused of theft under the circumstances is ironic: everything he had had been stolen from him by smarter people.

In the event, a bunch of 15 people traced Madhu, shortly after he was “seen” to have made off with some rice from a shop, to a cave. They pulled him out of hiding, tied his hands with his own lungi and set about administering justice.

They seem to have been proud of their violence. Not only were they rigorous in implementing their sentence, but they also took selfies of the act and posted these on the social media. Clearly, they thought they were doing a good deed in getting rid of what they must have considered to be a social pestilence.

Source of succour

To be fair to them, Madhu did not die directly at their hands. After beating him up, the young man was handed over to the police who, as in most Bollywood movies, arrive too late at the scene of crime, took him to the hospital, and he died on the way. Madhu’s last recorded statement was that he was beaten and kicked by the self-styled vigilantes.

Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan promised an inquiry into the matter. He also awarded Rs1million (Dh56,491) as compensation to Madhu’s family. That Madhu is a source of succour to his estranged mother and sisters after his death is just another irony in a story replete with them.

Madhu’s life and death are the narrative of a young man marginalised by Kerala’s development model. But it is also a scathing indictment of a supposedly civilised people, whose life indices are rather aspirational in the South Asian context, and their idea of justice.

What’s on trial in Madhu’s case is humanity. As consumerism gains upper hand in Kerala, human values seem to be losing ground. It just happens that one of the most oppressed Indians had to pay with his life to prove the point.

C.P. Surendran is a journalist based in India.