Court verdict brings wounds of Kerala’s Muthanga land agitation back into focus
Sivan Yogi was just 14 when he accompanied his father, Yogi (Jogi), to the Muthanga Wildlife Sanctuary in Wayanad, Kerala, where hundreds of landless Adivasi
Sivan Yogi was just 14 when he accompanied his father, Yogi (Jogi), to the Muthanga Wildlife Sanctuary in Wayanad, Kerala, where hundreds of landless Adivasi families occupied forest land in January 2003, to assert their right to land. More than a month later, the agitation ended in a violent confrontation between Adivasi protesters and the Kerala Police on February 19, 2003, leaving Jogi and K.V. Vinod, a police constable, dead. The Muthanga land agitation has returned to the limelight after the Kalpetta Principal Sessions Court, on July 31, acquitted all the accused who stood trial, including social activist M. Geethanandan, in the case relating to the murder of Vinod. However, it convicted Geethanandan and three others on related charges, including attempting to murder a senior police constable, abducting a Forest Range Officer and criminal conspiracy, sentencing each of them to five years of rigorous imprisonment. While the death of Vinod was investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Adivasi organisations say Jogi’s death was never properly investigated, reviving long-standing demands for justice and scrutiny of the police operation and the alleged human rights violations during the agitation. For Sivan, the verdict has reopened wounds that have remained unhealed for more than two decades. “I lost my mother, Kali, at a young age.
For my five siblings and me, our father was everything. He was killed in the police firing that sought to suppress the agitation and evict us from the land that was rightfully ours,” recalls Sivan. Jogi, belonging to the Adiyan tribe, died of a head injury after he was struck, reportedly by a rubber or plastic bullet. Following his death, Sivan’s sister, Sita, was offered a government job, and the family was allotted 1 acre of land at Thettamala along with several other landless Adivasi families. However, the land remains uninhabitable and unsuitable for cultivation. “Twenty-three years later, our family is still waiting for justice. No proper investigation has been conducted into our father’s death. We want the government to carry out a thorough investigation. It should also fulfil its promise of providing cultivable and habitable land to our family and the other Adivasi families,” says Sivan, who now earns a living through odd jobs. Following Jogi’s death, the police registered an FIR, but the investigation made little progress. The CBI later concluded that the police had resorted to non-lethal firing in self-defence and to protect the reserve forest and that Jogi’s death, allegedly caused by a rubber bullet, was unintentional. It found that no criminality could be attributed to the police firing, observing that it had been ordered by the Executive Magistrate present at the scene.
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