It's New Year & Another Editor Goes to Jail...

It was on December 19 that the Kerala police arrested P Govindan Kutty, the 68-year-old editor of a pro-Maoist publication, the People’s March monthly, from his small office at a lodge in Trikkakkara near Kochi. Eleven days after his arrest, the civil society in the State still seems to be completely unmindful, except for a few human rights activists who have threatened to launch an agitation in front of the Kerala High Court protesting against the unlawful manner in which the arrest and incarceration has been carried out.

Govindan Kutty has been on an indefinite fast in jail from the day of his arrest, alleging that even the minimum legal procedures with regard to arrest were ignored in his case and the basic rights of a prisoner like access to a lawyer had been denied to him. When he was arrested and remanded to the Alwaye Sub-Jail, the authorities had insisted that he could talk to his lawyer only in the presence of the jail officials.

Govindan Kutty has been a government servant for some time but later on he came in contact with the Maoist thinking in Andhra. He came to Kerala five years ago and launched his small publication, which is sold only a few hundred copies in various parts of Kerala and outside. It has never been proceeded against, and he runs it with all legal requirements like registration with the Newspaper Registrar of India and has permission to post his magazine at concession rates with the postal department.

The charges now framed against Govindan Kutty are under Sec.134, 124 A, 133 B, of IPC and under the 1967 Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, which is normally used against criminal elements like goons and never against a media-person. One of the main charges against him is that in his magazine, he wrote some five years ago an article hailing the attack on the person of the then Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandra Babu Naidu by some Maoist groups.

The arrest and the consequent developments raise a number of disturbing questions. One is the palpable intolerance being shown by the police and the present government in Kerala towards any kind of dissenting views. The second is the scant respect for human rights and the fundamental rights of every citizen, including prisoners. The third, is the selective and arbitrary manner in which the civil society in Kerala, including intellectuals and mainstream media, seem to behave even on issues where violation of fundamental rights are involved.

Govindan Kutty’s arrest comes as a sequel to the arrest of two Maoist activists Malla raja Reddy and Suguna, a tribal woman, who were whisked away by a team of Andhra police men from a public road in Angamally, near Alwaye, at 7.30 pm on December 17. Both were living among the groups of construction workers from outside Kerala, now widely employed in the State. The plain-clothes police team had come without notice to the local authorities, as required by the law, and were making an attempt to drive away with the two, while the local people raised a hue and cry stopping their vehicle. It was then the Andhra police team agreed to produce the two in a court of law and get a transmit warrant to take them away to Andhra Pradesh to stand trial on charges against them.

Such secret police raids seem to have become a routine affair, as earlier this year, on June 22, another Maoist, Raja Mouli, had been forcibly taken hostage by a group from Andhra Pradesh from the Kollam railway station in south Kerala. He was not produced in any court and his body was recovered two days later from Andhra Pradesh.

The Kerala police pounced upon the offices of Govindan Kutty alleging that he was involved in the Malla raja Reddy affair, helping him find a shelter in Kerala. But they could not find any evidence to prove this allegation and hence the decision to charge him for his writings in the magazine five years ago.

The reports about the arrest in the mainstream Malayalam media also raise some very disturbing questions. The police stories about his personal life, his estrangement with his wife and family, etc, were carried without giving his version at all. What was going on in the first few days after his arrest was a media campaign sponsored by the unknown sources in the police which vilified the man as a demon.

There were only a few exceptions. Madhyamam, a newspaper run by a trust supported by the Jamaat-e-Islami, and Thejas, a recently launched newspaper supported by the National Development Front (NDF), carried reports that spoke about the violation of rights in the case of Govindan Kutty. They spoke to him and took his version of the story, highlighting the blatantly false claims made by the police.

In Kerala the left governments seem to be more prone to this kind of irrational onslaughts against the media. A few years ago, police under the LDF government led by E K Nayanar had ransacked the offices of Crime, a small publication from Kzohikode, on orders from the chief minister’s office following a complaint from a Congress MLA. The police had arrested the editor T P Nandakumar and had forced the closure of his office taking away computers and other equipment. It was again the Nayanar ministry in 1986 that arrested P M Antony, a writer and theatre activist, for staging his controversial play, The Sixth Sacred Wound of Christ, raising a big hue and cry from the intellectuals. Now even as the police behave in an unruly manner, there is no such protest from the media and civil society, raising genuine apprehensions about the state of health of Kerala’s civil society itself.

Devil's Sermon is a weekly political commentary.

(courtesy: www.thehoot.org)

Laughing Gas

Laughing Gas will appear every weekend.

Tsunami Breaks Villages, But Fails to Break Caste Walls

Remembering the Tsunami Experiences on its Third Anniversary Day

By N P Chekkutty

The tsunami disaster brought into sharp focus the deep chasm between the two Indias : the India that is marching confidently ahead in the comity of nations and the India that lags behind, discriminated against and sorely lacking even in basic necessities. Even as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, addressing the Confederation of Indian Industry in Kolkata, asserted that India’s decision not to accept external assistance and rely solely on its own resources to fight the calamity was an instance of turning adversity into opportunity, dalit workers who toured coastal areas of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh were briefing the national media in Delhi on glaring instances of caste discrimination, even in the face of this horrendous tragedy.

Activists from the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), Safai Karmachari Andolan and Sakshi Human Rights Watch, who toured dalit villages in the two states for over a week, brought back accounts of serious discrimination in aid distribution and rehabilitation between the fishermen community and dalits, both of whom were equally affected by the tragedy that struck on the morning of December 26. The tsunami knew only geographical boundaries, but we could see the deep and entrenched boundaries of caste dividing the affected people, said Paul Divakar, an activist from Hyderabad who is associated with the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, Delhi .

Dalit activists Paul Divakar, Bezawada Wilson (Safai Karmachari Andolan), Dr S D J M Prasad (Sakshi) and others toured the districts of Kanchipuram, Thiruvallur, Chennai and Nagapattinam in Tamil Nadu, and Prakasam and Nellore in Andhra Pradesh, for an on-the-spot assessment of aid delivery and rehabilitation in the weeks following the tsunami tragedy. They reported several cases of caste discrimination against dalit refugees in both states, even amongst the official machinery.

In a note prepared by the activists, based on their enquiries, they report extensive damage to dalit households and property in all the five districts they toured. Livelihoods have been destroyed and water sources contaminated by seawater. In many places relief camps were organised along caste lines, with separate camps for dalits, with aid distribution in the camps often erratic. There were instances of dalit hamlets being completely ignored by officials and organisations involved in aid delivery. Official estimates of loss of life and property have not been properly carried out in dalit areas; where they have, the losses have been underestimated. There were cases of unidentified bodies being buried close to dalit settlements despite the availability of land elsewhere. Restoration of drinking water, roads, public health services, communication facilities etc were done faster and more efficiently in fishermen areas while dalit areas were neglected. The extrication of bodies was done only by manual scavengers who are exclusively dalits. For this, ‘safai karmacharis’, as they are called, were brought in from neighbouring municipalities and corporations. They were offered no additional benefits and were paid only Rs 25 a day as additional wages. They had to work without proper protective clothing like gloves, face masks, etc.

The team of activists visiting villages in Prakasam and Nellore districts in Andhra Pradesh said relief deliveries of rice, medicines etc reached only fishermen communities, not dalit areas. At Urla Palem, in Prakasam, the district collector, local MLA and MP who toured the fishermen village did not visit the dalit colony which was also badly affected by the disaster.

Activists reported that assessments of dalit loss of property were underestimated as the dalits did not own pucca houses, unlike the fishermen community which was comparatively better off. They said revenue officials generally took the view that fishermen communities were the only ones that were financially destroyed by the tsunami, as they owned tangible assets like boats, nets, etc. In the case of dalits, who are equally dependent on the coastal economy and environment and who suffered just as much as the fishermen, the losses could not be quantified in the official sense. So dalits are at the receiving end of a double loss, as official estimates of losses from the tsunami do not take intangible losses, like damage to the coastal environment, into account.

The Urla Palem salt cultivators are an example. Around 500 dalit families in the village of Urla Palem were engaged in extracting salt from 175 acres of land near the sea, under the auspices of the Binginapalli Scheduled Caste Salt Cultivators Society. These fields are now completely submerged, filled with saline water and sand, and it will take at least another month to clean up the area and resume work. Villagers told the team of activists that officials assessing the losses had not visited the dalit colony once to find out what the situation there was.

A survey by the team in five districts of Tamil Nadu reveals the following information: In Kanchipuram, although 2,332 dalit houses were damaged, 365 head of cattle swept away, and 55 acres of land affected, no dalit family had received any aid. In Cuddalore, 20 dalits died, 614 houses were damaged, 13 boats lost and 19 head of cattle perished. But no aid was given to the dalits. In Thiruvallur (16 deaths, 102 people missing, 3,810 houses damaged), there was some aid distribution among the dalits. In Chennai (30 deaths, 2,825 houses damaged), aid has been made available. In Nagapattinam/Karaikkal (113 deaths, 1,914 houses damaged), aid has been distributed among the dalits.

Dalit activists say the discrimination does not seem to be a conscious effort on the part of the officials. It stems from age-old practices and prejudices. Separate camps for dalits and non-dalits were set up in places where there had earlier been incidents of conflict between the communities.

The activists also came across areas where camps had been jointly organised, and where communities lived together. One example was Poppukar camp, in Nagapattinam, where activists witnessed fishermen, dalits and members of other communities living together in a relief camp after the tsunami struck.

Activists say that once media attention is drawn to instances of discrimination, higher officials respond quickly. But lower down the ladder, apathy and animosity towards dalits still exists in many villages.

(The information detailed above is based on discussions with the team members in Delhi on January 12, 2005 . The situation regarding aid delivery is likely to have changed as local officials have been briefed about the survey’s findings)

(N P Chekkutty is a senior journalist based in Delhi )

InfoChange News & Features, January 2005

Tsunami and the Night of `Live’ Terrors

December 26 this year marks the third anniversary of the tsunami that hit Kerala coasts

N P Chekkutty

As the tsunami waves hit the coasts on the morning of December 26, 2004, Sunday, millions of people all over the world were glued onto their television sets, as the trickle of information that came over the tube was so vital for many of us in those crucial days. As a person living in Delhi leaving a family back home in Kerala-- one of three southern states severely hit by the waves along with Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu—and experiencing the agonies of the night, I think the visual media coverage of the whole incident left much to be desired and there seems to be an urgent need to initiate a debate within the media and also among the policymakers on the matter of information dissemination in calamity situations. The experiences of the week immediately after the tragedy bring to our attention the point that the media ought to evolve a policy on how to report calamities of such immense proportions and affecting a large number of people across such a wide geographical area and also how to tackle the issue of dissemination of disinformation, as it has been the experience in the wake of the recent tragedy.

Let me explain my point with my own personal experience: As the first waves hit, the news was not so alarming for any of us, as in the coastal regions of Kerala and Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh tidal waves are a normal experience especially in the monsoon seasons. When I talked to many of my friends an relatives living in Kerala, most of them in the vicinity of the sea, there was not much of an alarm on the first day. But 24 hours later, on Monday night, the three Malayalam channels operating in Kerala, were reporting on the tsunami developments in such hysteric manners that they were evidently whipping up a scare wave with the oft-repeated rumours of the possibility of another wave of tsunamis hitting the coasts once again, triggering a massive exodus of people from the coastal belt in the entire region.

It was unbelievable to watch the way the channels went ahead reporting on the new threat of tsunamis at their 10.30 p.m. news on Monday , enthusiastically focussing their cameras on the people who started moving out of their beachside homes and running for cover with their little possessions, their families in tow even as they kept on repeating the rumours that water has been rising in various parts of the state till quite early into the day. At 10.30 p.m. news they said the waves would hit in just one hour, and then I could see the same reports being scrolled over the screen even two hours later in the night.

The next day, newspapers reported the horrors of the night of televised rumours when people in the entire area from Thiruvananthapuram to Chavakkad on the Trichur coast had been running away form the coast without any vehicles, with no support from any official agencies only because the rumours first reported at the 10.30 p.m. news remained in the air till early next day. There was no reason why such rumour mongering should continue unhindered all night, because there was no official warning from any corner that night. What is important to note is that these rumours went on air in spite of the fact that there was no official announcement about any threat from tsunami waves on Monday night and the Indian Meteorological department also denied issuing any such warning.

The entire episode of this sordid drama took place on the basis of an unconfirmed report which spoke about a fresh tsunami waves following the after-tremors and an interview with Dr Bhaba, director of the Centre for Earth Sciences Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, who called for caution as there was every possibility of fresh tremors in the wake of a major earthquake. In the usual irresponsible and high-decibel manner in which our channels report, this call for caution by a scientist was developed into a major alarm by the television reporters, who were giving live coverage of the people leaving the coasts from all parts of the state. Unmindful of the consequences and implications, they were also competing with each other repeating the rumours spreading in coastal areas that sea level was rising without even an effort at cross-checking or resorting to any scientific or official machinery for substantiating their claims. In Asianet, a widely distributed channel, I saw the announcement about sea level rise repeated quite a number of times till late into the night even as they went on with other normal late-night programming after predicting deluge in the night news. Kairali News was another channel I watched, and they too were equally irresponsible in their reporting about the imminent waves hitting the beaches.

As the channels went on terrorizing their viewers dishing out the deluge mania in between commercial breaks, there were others who made an equally fast buck that night – they were the thieves, who, according to newspaper reports the next day, had a roaring business in the entire coast line on the night of December 27. Mathrubhumi, a well respected Malayalam newspaper, gave reports on the huge damage done by the channels who went out to report the mayhem live, and in the pocket cartoon of the day, the paper had shown a man throwing out his television set, calling it the real tsunami to hit his household. Most of the readers must have shared the view, I should shy.

Then on December 30, when the Home Ministry in Delhi came out with its half-baked warning of the second tsunami which was laughed off by the Science and Technology Minister, the Malayalam channels showed they did not learn any lessons from their previous faux paus. The Kerala Chief Minister who was in a meeting of the cabinet came out, gave a warning about the threat and soon it was again followed up by the television channels who gave out the alert literally in Red Letter, in full screen even as the national channels like NDTV were giving out the same information in a much more subdued manner, without adding to the alarm among the people. It is sad that these regional channels who speak the language of the local people who are affected by these calamities, failed to appreciate the real implications of such an irresponsible behaviour on their part.

Of course, the catastrophes of the past week are unusual because the tsunami is new to our experiences as the Prime Minister said in defence of the faux paus committed by his own Home Minister who bungled on the warning on December 30. The government is now trying to learn their lessons from the failures, what about the media? There is no comprehensive review or a sustained analysis of the way we reported the national calamity live. There were criticisms on the way BBC and CNN went ahead with cashing in on the Asian tragedy, and the insensitivity they showed towards the Asian victims vis a vis the World Trade Center disaster, etc, but there is no sincere attempts so far on the part of the media here to have an introspection on how we dealt with our own tragedy and how our live television channels across the country handled the situation. Ultimately, the live television is there to stay and they will keep on reporting whether it is death or destruction, come what may, and we will see our own people forced to scramble out of their beds in the dead of night simply because someone in the newsroom heard some rumours and thought it fit to report. So some kind of a commonly accepted norm is now urgently called for on how to report such developments, how to treat warnings from official and non-official agencies, etc. Even in weather forecast for fishermen, the weather department makes use of their own yardsticks with different measures for different levels of perceived danger. But in media, we are still to have any such yardsticks for our guidance.

(Originally published at www.thehoot.org and Meantime Weekly, 2005.)

Bikaneri Bhujia Battles the World's Titans

By N P Chekkutty

The case of Bikaneri Bhujia, an indigenous variety of sweet quite popular in the north, gives a graphic illustration of the impact of the global market forces on the livelihood of the poorer in Indian villages.
The bikaneri bhujia is a traditional snack produced in cottage industries in Bikaner, Rajasthan. It provides employment to around 2.5 million people in villages, the majority of them women who inherited the know-how and skills to produce this delicacy. The snack is prepared from the moth lentil which grows only in the deserts of Bikaner and Jodhpur and it has had a secure local market all these years. It provided employment not only to the producers and traders and street-vendors but also a large number of farmers in the desert region; another ten thousand women were engaged in the preparation of papads, which are eaten together with the bhujias.
But the cycle of secure employment and local consumption of produce is changing, with globalisation. A recent study brought out by the National Commission for Women, entitled Impact of WTO on Women in Agriculture, prepared by the New Delhi-based Research Foundation for Science & Technology after detailed research and field studies, provides many examples of what goes on Indian villages - where indigenous know-how is now being widely exploited by multinational corporations bent on monopolizing the traditional markets. Recently, Pepsi, the global food and beverages company, began using this traditional name in their advertisements with a view to underbid the local producers; this would destroy a market developed in the region through the hard work of many generations. The report says that Pepsi had done no special research input into developing it nor had it introduced any new technology in the production of bikaneri bhujia; it simply took the traditional know-how.
The study asserts that the global agribusiness is now attempting to take over food processing, which provides millions of Indians with a livelihood in their age-old ghanis (oils extractors), chakkis (flour millers) and dhabas (foods servers), by labeling locally produced food as inferior, while promoting their stale and frozen food clothed in aluminium and plastic foils as modern. This is the magic of powerful advertising which promotes the market forces even in a highly decentralized and culture-specific sector like food production. What is being destroyed by the food retail chains and packaged foods is the livelihood of millions who include the small farmers, the traders, the mill-operators or chakkiwallahs and the thousands of family-run kirana shops.
It also points out that the US multinational is now trying to undercut the local producers of Bikaneri bhujia, by taking up high-tech production, which holds disastrous consequences for the people of Bikaner. It would result in their traditional product going to the multinational and their market destroyed by its high volume produce backed by massive advertisements flooding the market, in the process driving out the original producers of the snack.
The book gives a description of how Cargill, a US multinational, was making efforts to take over the sphere of activities of our ancient chakkis with its recently introduced Nature Fresh Atta. It points out that Cargill, which controls over 70 per cent of the world's trade in cereals, can dictate the prices of agricultural commodities. Since they entered the wheat food market in India with their Nature Fresh Atta campaign, half the mills in Punjab, a State where wheat flour is the primary item for food preparations, have closed down. As the authors of the report says, the Cargill company had even used the occasion of Kargil war victory celebrations to launch their new brand of 'Nature Fresh Atta' in an attempt to "exploit the sentiments of the people and to create confusion among the consumers with a dexterous and unethical use of the similarity in the names of the place and the company".
What the study undoubtedly proves is the disastrous ways Indian traditional agriculture is being undermined by the invasion of the multinational corporations in the wake of our entry to the World Trade Organization and its multilateral agreements relating to agriculture.
Over 70 percent of Indian farmers depend on traditional systems of production and majority of them are small and marginal farmers in the rural areas. Often, entire communities are organised around local knowledge and production.
Brains and bullocks
Women are a major part of the food industry in the country as they are primarily responsible for most of the activities related to food, from seed preservation to food production, and their role is now being marginalised by the multinationals who are out to take over the Indian food industry. As Vandana Shiva, who led the study on behalf of the Women's Commission, notes, it was the first gender sensitive study on the impact of WTO on agriculture, based on research as well as field work involving public hearings held in four parts of the country. It focussed primarily on two major aspects; the first a review of the shifts of knowledge and control over seed and bio-diversity from women to global corporations and secondly, it examined the impact of trade liberalization in agriculture leading to loss of livelihood, women's employment and entitlement.
The fist part of the book, where WTO and its various agreements are examined with relation to India, makes an objective critique of the major agreements, viz, the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), Agreement on Sanitary and Phyto Sanitary Measures (SPS) and Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) on Indian peasants, especially its womenfolk. As it elaborately argues, these agreements have had an extremely negative impact on the women with deprival of entitlement and employment leading to massive hunger and malnutrition; divestment of resources and livelihood and an increase in violence against women. It also notes the catastrophic consequences of the shifting patterns of agriculture leading pauperization and consequent massive peasant suicides adding additional burden on their shoulders as most often women are left behind to look after the deprived families.
The experience gained at the jan sunwais conducted in Punjab, West Bengal, Karnataka and Budelkhand actually substantiates what the academic critique of the new regime in agriculture has pinpointed. These jan sunwais were participated in by ordinary peasant women, activists from the peasants and agricultural workers organizations, grassroots level workers, etc. They threw a lot of light on the miserable situation in most parts of the Indian countryside, the deepening debt crisis and the erosion of traditional methods of agriculture, loss of traditional expertise and loss livelihood, and the massive impoverishment of the peasant class across the country.
Here is what Sabitri, a peasant woman from Bhelware, Bishnugarh in Jharkhand says about the way agriculture changed over the years. She said they used to cultivate a number of varieties like bal-bhog, man-bhog, purbi sail, kart baki and maina tho, each of them having different characteristics. They needed less water and no fertilizer. Then came the new varieties of high yielding seeds and what happened? They produced twice as much, but destroyed the fields and drained out the water resources. As Sabiri says, "khet kharab ho gaye. Labh ke liye purao dhan chhod diyo".(Now our fields are spoilt. For profit people have stopped planting the old strains.)
As the book points out, over 70 percent of Indian farmers depend on traditional systems of production and majority of them are small and marginal farmers in the rural areas. Often, entire communities are organised around local knowledge and production; almost the entire population of Bikaner, for example, was involved in one way of the other in the production and distribution of bikaneri bhujias. When traditional methods of sharing and exchange of biological resources like seed sharing are undermined by the new regime being brought in by the Seed Bill and Patent Bill, it would bring more harm to them than the intended benefits. As already seen in the case of Cargill and Pepsi, the traditional systems of exchange of know-how are now being eroded; individuals, organizations and corporations who receive bio-diversity and knowledge from indigenous communities free of charge are converting these gifts into private property.
This work is an important step in the efforts to study the malaise that has befallen the Indian rural life. As the pioneering gender specific study of the impact of the new economic policies, it should attract the attention of policymakers and officials in the government.

(First published at www.indiatogether.org in July 2005.)

Laughing Gas

Laughing Gas will appear every weekend.

Democracy at Grassroots: Kerala's Sea Courts

by N P Chekkutty

The coastal region of south India, especially the western coast, has seen a series of violent communal clashes in the past few years. Rising incidents of communal confrontation, like the Marad carnage in north Kerala where almost a dozen people were hacked to death in two clashes, have spurred the search for a lasting solution to the growing communal polarisation among the fisher people.

The communalisation of Kerala’s fisher-folk is a recent phenomenon that appears contrary to the social image of Kerala as a place where secular forces are dominant politically. But it is also an indication of the tenuous nature of the secular social fabric here. Many scholars and social activists feel that the deterioration of the coastal region into hotbeds of communal politics ominously points to a similar fate for all of society, because what went wrong during the post-Independence years is the basic approach of social engineering under a welfare state. It gave more power and prominence to organs of the state like the revenue and police authorities, political parties and trade unions, while grassroots-level, people-oriented, traditional social systems were allowed to fade away or were forcibly laid to rest.

The death of the traditional sea courts, a grassroots disputes redressal system that once actively presided over the day-to-day life of all the coastal fisher-folk, is a case in point. According to social activist Civic Chandran, the sea courts, or katal kotathi in the regional language, were the most effective form of grassroots democracy in this region for centuries. Chandran has been at the forefront of a campaign to revive the traditional system as a way out of the politics of communal polarisation that’s currently gripping the fishing community.

Historically, the sea courts (an elected body of elders) constituted an effective system of arbitration among the various fishing communities. They enjoyed supreme power and prestige and were even recognised by the British authorities ruling over the Malabar region whose civil courts acknowledged them as a legitimate system of arbitration over maritime disputes.

The sea courts dispensed justice through their own system of hearings, arbitration, compromises, edicts, punishments and appeals to a higher court. Each court held jurisdiction over a small area called turai, enjoying moral authority over all the boat-owners and fish-workers in the region. It ensured the fisher-folk equitable access to marine resources and harmonious social living, as it arbitrated in almost all areas of the fisher people’s lives. These included relations between boat-owners and workers, disputes over catches on the high seas, disputes arising out of a group of boats coming together to encircle and capture a huge catch known as chakara, accidents and quarrels on the high seas, protection of marine wealth with fishing bans during certain seasons and times, disputes over fish sales, etc.

V K Prabharakan, a social activist from Chombala beach near Vatakara in north Kerala, was witness to the trial of a potentially communal case. It was a dispute between a Hindu, Meethale Purayil Vasu, and a Muslim, Paremmal Usman. Both worked in a boat owned by Chulliyil Moidu, another Muslim. There were eight workers in the boat as it went fishing one day, six of them Hindus and two Muslims. Usman and Vasu were involved in a longstanding quarrel, and, while out at sea, Usman attempted to push Vasu out of the boat. Vasu was saved when the other men intervened. The dispute came to the sea court that arrived at a unanimous decision that Usman had been wrong in raking up the quarrel at sea. He had violated a fundamental principle of work on the high seas: that no dispute from the land shall be carried over to the sea, and vice-versa. Usman was found guilty and penalised.

In another case -- Chulliyil Moidu vs Koora Raman and others -- the same principle was applied to dismiss a verdict given by a lower court by an appeal body. The dispute was over the apportioning of catch. Moidu and his workers had joined a group hunt in which around 30 boats participated. There is an unwritten law about the formation of such groups whilst out at sea that is based on mutual trust and cooperation. The proceeds, if any, of such joint operations are shared equally among the participants. However, in the middle of the joint operation, Moidu withdrew from the hunt without formally informing the others. His boat returned to shore and later went back to sea where it got a good catch of catfish. The other boats claimed a share in Moidu’s catch as he had not formally withdrawn from the group. The local sea court heard the dispute, upheld the fishermen’s claim, and asked Moidu to share his bounty. He appealed and the case went up to the fourth appeal court, a record in recent memory. (Appeal courts are formed by enlisting the immediate northern and southern sea courts.) Finally, the appeal court decided that Moidu was right in keeping his catch as he had returned to land before coming upon the disputed catch. The principle was that any agreement formed at sea becomes null and void once someone from the group touches land.

The sea courts fell on bad days in the post-Independence period when the police and civil authorities took over the administration of justice even in disputes relating to the maritime activities of the fisher people, despite the fact that they had no idea of the special nature of their problems.

“We had an effective court functioning in our region and the people had been settling their disputes there till the police intervened in their affairs and the courts were disbanded as a mark of protest,” recalls V K Prabhakaran who has studied the functioning of the sea courts. Prabhakaran explains that it was around 15 years ago that the sea court in his village decided to disband when the police refused to recognise it as a legitimate set-up in a dispute. The incident is an eye-opener: There was a dispute over the landing of catch at the local beach, as the sea courts had unanimously banned fishing at night in order to ensure the regeneration of the species. One particular group of fishermen from outside the area violated the ban and their catch was seized by members of the sea court. But the police decided it was a law and order problem and ordered the sea court to release the catch, forcing it to discontinue its activities.

“It is an instance of how the revenue and police authorities failed to understand the special significance of these traditional systems,” says Prabhakaran pointing out that this was one of the reasons for the demise of the traditional social fabric of the coast, to be replaced by a system of trade unions, commission agents, political parties and communal organisations, leading to disastrous consequences. Indeed, communal clashes became a regular feature of life on the coast only during the last two decades when such traditional systems were destroyed.

But it was not just an administrative lapse or official apathy that led to the disbanding of the sea courts. The inroads made by technology and capital-intensive practices into traditional vocations (especially gadgets like cell phones and mechanised boats) eroded their effectiveness as those who defied the dictates of the sea courts could easily divert their catch to other landing posts, avoiding court members who had jurisdiction over a limited area.

Following the recent communal clashes and the spread of communalism all over the coast, efforts were made to revive community-based traditional methods of maintaining law and order and dispensing justice. But the sea courts are now almost defunct everywhere on the southern coast; if they do make a comeback they will have to be given proper recognition and legal powers by the civil and judicial authorities. As Suresh, leader of a Hindu fishermen’s organisation on Marad beach points out, these courts were based on finding mutually acceptable solutions, but the problem today is that members of the fishing community are badly divided. But there are others who point out that with proper management and support from society, the sea courts could once again play an effective role in bringing communal harmony back to coastal Kerala.

InfoChange News & Features, November 2005