Mainstream WeeklyTwenty-three years after the police action at Muthanga, the court has delivered verdicts on some of the cases arising from one of the most traumatic confrontations between the Kerala state and its Adivasi communities. However, the judgments also reopen a much larger question that no courtroom verdict by itself can settle: who has really been held accountable for Muthanga? The Adivasis who occupied the land have faced prosecution for more than two decades. Their leaders have moved through courts and criminal proceedings, carrying the consequences of a struggle born out of dispossession. Meanwhile, the political and administrative failures that created the conditions for Muthanga remain largely beyond the reach of accountability.
The latest judicial outcome makes this contradiction particularly striking. M. Geethanandan, one of the principal leaders of the Adivasi Gothra Mahasabha (AGMS), has been acquitted of the charge of murdering police constable K.V. Vinod during the confrontation of 19 February 2003. After twenty-three years, the court found the murder charge against him unsustainable. But, in a related case arising from the same historical episode, Geethanandan and three others have been convicted and sentenced to five years of rigorous imprisonment. The contrasting outcomes—acquittal in one case and punishment in another—point to something of the extraordinary legal burden that the Muthanga movement and its leaders have carried for more than two decades.
The significance of the verdict therefore goes beyond the “criminal liability” of particular individuals. It raises an uncomfortable question about the way justice itself has been dispensed in the aftermath of Muthanga. The criminal justice system has painstakingly pursued cases against Adivasis and their leaders. But there has been no comparable reckoning with the state for the historical processes that dispossessed Adivasis, the failure to implement land legislation, the repeated violation of governmental agreements, the death of the Adivasi protester Jogi, or the injuries suffered by hundreds during the police operation. The asymmetry is difficult to overlook.
The Long Road to Muthanga
Muthanga was never simply a law-and-order problem or an isolated confrontation between protesters and police. It emerged from a much longer history of land alienation and political procrastination.
As early as 1975, Kerala enacted the Scheduled Tribes (Restriction on Transfer of Lands and Restoration of Alienated Lands) Act. The legislation was intended to restore land alienated from Adivasi communities. But successive governments hesitated to implement its central provisions. The reasons were political as much as administrative. Restoring alienated land meant confronting powerful settler interests and the political constituencies that had developed around them. Governments changed, but procrastination remained remarkably consistent. Rules could be formulated and procedures discussed, while actual restoration remained painfully limited.
The result was a profound contradiction within Kerala’s celebrated development experience. A state known nationally for achievements in literacy, health and social development continued to contain communities dispossessed of the most basic productive resource on which their lives had historically depended: land. By the beginning of the new millennium, the crisis had become acute enough for starvation deaths among Adivasis to become a public issue.
It was in this context that Adivasi mobilisation acquired a new political character. In 2001, hundreds of Adivasis came to Thiruvananthapuram and began an agitation near the seat of government. The protest lasted 48 days. C.K. Janu’s declaration that she would undertake a fast unto death intensified the pressure on the government. Eventually, on 16 October 2001, a seven-point agreement was reached. It promised land to landless Adivasi families—between one and five acres depending upon availability—and envisaged livelihood support to enable families to sustain themselves on the land provided.
The agreement represented an important turn. The earlier struggle had concentrated largely on the restoration of alienated Adivasi land. The new mobilisation increasingly articulated the demand as “land for the landless.” It was an attempt to find a practical solution to decades of dispossession without producing another confrontation between Adivasis and settler farmers.
But implementation once again exposed the gulf between governmental commitment and governmental action. Within the first four months of the period earmarked for implementation, only a tiny proportion of eligible families had received land, which itself was not useful for the people to do any meansingful agricultural activity. By April 2002, 568 families had been provided 1,308 acres. The promised programme of redistribution proceeded slowly, while Adivasi families who had suspended their agitation on the strength of a formal agreement were once again asked, in effect, to wait.
Muthanga was born out of that waiting.
Occupation and Police Action
In January 2003, hundreds of Adivasis under the AGMS, led by C.K. Janu and M. Geethanandan, occupied land at Muthanga. They constructed huts and attempted to establish a community there. Their action was a direct challenge to the government’s failure to honour the 2001 agreement.
The state’s response culminated on 19 February 2003 in an enormous police operation lasting approximately eighteen hours. Access to the area was restricted, including for the media. By the end of the confrontation, Jogi, an Adivasi protester, and police constable K.V. Vinod were dead, while many Adivasis were injured. The subsequent CBI investigation became another source of disappointment for Adivasi organisations, particularly because the protesters were characterised as “trespassers.”
But the very description of Adivasis as trespassers brings the historical paradox of Muthanga into sharp relief. Who was trespassing on whose history?
C.K. Janu’s autobiographical reflections offer a powerful answer. Writing about Muthanga, she says: “Indigenous people have been turned into refugees in their own land. The souls of our ancestors who lived in Muthanga for centuries and Jogi Annan are in this soil; no one can uproot that.”
Janu recalls the police action at Thakarappadi and the destruction of bamboo offering boxes that were allegedly treated as weapons caches. More importantly, she challenges one of the assumptions surrounding the occupation: that the Adivasis had simply invaded protected forest or wildlife sanctuary land.
According to her account, documents produced during the litigation showed that the disputed land was neither reserve forest nor wildlife sanctuary nor part of the Nilgiri Biosphere. She argues that documents instead referred to land that had earlier been leased to Birla for eucalyptus cultivation and whose fourteen-year lease had expired. Cases against hundreds of Adivasis under the Forest Act were consequently dismissed.
Whatever the larger complexities surrounding land classification, Janu’s testimony exposes a central feature of the Muthanga controversy: Adivasi claims were too readily represented as illegal encroachment without adequately confronting the historical basis of their demand for land.
Geethanandan and the Unequal Burden of Justice
The latest verdict makes this history impossible to ignore. Geethanandan’s acquittal on the murder charge is important because one of the gravest accusations arising from Muthanga has failed judicial scrutiny after twenty-three years. But his conviction and five-year sentence in another case means that the legal consequences of Muthanga continue.
There is an uncomfortable institutional imbalance here. The death of constable Vinod was unquestionably serious and deserved investigation and justice. Violence cannot be justified simply because it occurred during a political struggle. But justice must also confront the other side of the historical ledger.
Jogi also died. Hundreds of Adivasis experienced the consequences of the police operation. The movement arose after decades of failure to implement land legislation and after the government failed to fulfil an agreement reached with Adivasi representatives in 2001. Still no equivalent chain of accountability appears to have attached itself to the political and administrative institutions whose failures produced the confrontation.
The problem, therefore, is not that offences committed, if any, during political struggles should go unpunished. The problem is selective accountability. When the criminal law examines the actions of protesters in minute detail while the institutional failures preceding the protest remain politically consequence-free, justice becomes detached from history.
The state can prosecute an individual for an act committed on 19 February 2003. But who answers for the failure to implement the 1975 legislation? Who bears responsibility for decades of land alienation? Who is accountable for failing to implement the 2001 agreement with sufficient urgency? And who bears institutional responsibility when people who approached the government through negotiations, protests and agreements eventually concluded that occupation was their remaining means of asserting a right to land?
These questions cannot be answered through a murder trial. But they cannot be excluded from any serious assessment of justice in Muthanga either.
The Deeper Legacy
Muthanga nevertheless changed Adivasi politics in Kerala. It made landlessness impossible to treat as an invisible problem confined to remote settlements. It strengthened Adivasi political consciousness, influenced subsequent land struggles and compelled mainstream political parties to respond to questions they had long postponed. Its most important achievement may have been political rather than material. Adivasis increasingly asserted themselves as a collective social and political presence, claiming not charity but rights—rights to land, livelihood, dignity and citizenship.
Twenty-three years later, however, that political awakening stands beside an unfinished material agenda. Land restoration remains unresolved, access to cultivable land remains uneven, and the distance between statutory rights and their implementation continues to define the Adivasi experience. The legal framework expanded with the Forest Rights Act of 2006, but legislation alone cannot remedy dispossession unless rights recognised on paper become rights experienced in everyday life.
This is why the latest Muthanga verdict cannot simply be regarded as the closing of an old criminal case. The acquittal of Geethanandan in one case and his conviction in another symbolise the contradiction. The institutions of the state have demonstrated extraordinary persistence in pursuing the legal consequences of the Adivasi protest. They have demonstrated considerably less persistence in resolving the injustice that produced the protest.
The lesson of Muthanga is therefore instructive for democracy itself. Courts must decide criminal cases according to evidence and law. But democratic justice requires something larger: governments must honour legislation, agreements must carry meaning, historically dispossessed communities must have effective access to their rights, and state violence must be subjected to accountability no less rigorous than violence directed against representatives of the state.
For the Adivasis, Muthanga was ultimately about whether a community historically pushed away from its land could compel a democratic state to recognise its dignity and agency. Twenty-three years after February 2003, the answer remains disturbingly incomplete. Individuals have been investigated, tried, acquitted or punished. Governments have changed repeatedly. Laws have been enacted and policies announced. But the fundamental question that brought Adivasis to Muthanga—their right to land and to a life of dignity on that land—continues to demand resolution. Until that question is addressed, Muthanga remains a warning about what happens when democratic promises are endlessly postponed and institutional justice operates without sufficient memory of the injustice that came before the crime.
(Author: K.M. Seethi is Director, Inter University Centre for Social Science Research and Extension, Mahatma Gandhi University, and former Senior Professor of International Relations and Dean of Social Sciences)