By Thursday evening Changanassery in Kerala’s Kottayam district wore the look of a ghost city as more than 500 persons including women with tiny tots were brutally assaulted by armed cops in front of live TV cameras.
Infants, who were shocked to see blood stained faces of their mothers were sobbing incessantly even as the policemen continued threatening them. The women who had assembled to stage demonstration against the revenue officials who landed in Changanassery to lay the survey stones as part of the land acquisition for the controversial Semi High Speed Silver Line Rail connecting Thiruvananthapuram and Kasaragod were physically assaulted and dragged along the roads to be dumped into police vehicles. Though many of them sustained injuries, they were in high spirits.
“We do not have anywhere to go. Once they take over this land for the rail project we will be thrown out in the streets,” said Annie, a homemaker who had come to stage the protest march. All the women who had assembled at the site had come with kerosene bottles and threatened to self-immolate if the officials continued with the land acquisition works.
The Kerala Government had suffered a set back on Wednesday as Union Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw informed the Lok Sabha that the Centre has not given any permission for land survey or acquisition for the Rs 64000 crore project.
This is the first time in Kerala’s history women in large numbers are coming out with warning of mass immolation against land acquisition by the State Government. Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan had declared in the Legislative Assembly early this week that his Government would not remain a silent spectator to any kind of agitation or protest against the 529. 45 km long project.
What has upset the owners of land which would be taken over for the rail project is the fact that they would not get alternate land anywhere near their original place of dwelling. “There are no reference to any resettlement or rehabilitation for those who stand to lose their land. The Detailed Project Report (DPR) is silent about these two factors without which one cannot go forward,” said Mary Kuriakose, one of the agitators.
C R Neelakantan, engineer-turned-environmentalist told The Pioneer that the union minister declared on Wednesday that no permission has been given for land acquisition.
“Let the State Government conduct the techno-ecological-environemntal viability of the project. Though the chief minister had said that those who lose the land would be suitably compensated, what they are asking is for fair compensation,” he said.
Neelakantan, who had been in the forefront of agitations against nuclear power plants in Kerala further pointed out that it was illegal to lay survey stones without holding sociological impact analysis. Though the revenue officials laid the survey stones after the women were driven away, the newly laid stones would be removed late evening, said the women.
People elsewhere in the State are following this patterns; officials install the stones after getting the protestors removed from the site and the protestors return with full force and throw away the stones.
E Sreedharan, former chief of Delhi Metro, said that the Government may have to build eight ft tall walls on both sides of the semi speed rail tracks and this would divide the State into two. “Waterways would get destroyed and this is certain to cause floods and landslides in future,” he said.
Neelakantan said what the State was witnessing is blatant violation of human rights. The 2013 Land Acquisition Laws are being breached to stoke the ego of some persons and this is not advisable,” he said.