People's Democracy

TAMILNADU

Over 5 Lakh Peasants Demonstrate For Land

PEASANTS and agricultural workers, who thronged the District Collectorates all over Tamilnadu like the gushing floods, raised the slogans demanding land for cultivation and house-site. This flooding of people blocked the traffic in all district headquarters for four hours and more. Neither the state government nor the organisers were prepared for such a massive response by the people to this struggle.

The All India Kisan Sabha and All India Agricultural Workers Union have been conducting struggle for distribution of government lands to the landless and the poor for many years. When the erstwhile AIADMK government tried to distribute land to the big companies in 2002, the struggle picked up momentum and various stages of struggle were conducted. This has led to a situation where in the last assembly election, excepting AIADMK, almost all other parties gave assurance of distributing land to the poor. Particularly, the DMK has given assurance that two acres of government land would be distributed to the landless families.

After coming to power, the DMK government has started implementing their assurance. But the difficulty in distribution has been that most of the government land (which is around 50 lakh acres) has already been occupied by the richer section of people in the villages and the big companies illegally. When there was hesitation in the administration to identify the illegal occupation and distribute those lands to the poor, the AIKS and AIAWU have decided to start a big movement for identification of the illegally occupied lands and clear them for distribution among the poor for cultivation and construction of houses.

The joint conference of AIKS and AIAWU held on August 17 in Chennai gave a call for a one week campaign all over the state and demonstrations to be held in front of the collectorates to hand over petitions demanding land and house sites. When the leaders of Kisan Sabha and Agricultural Workers Union went for the campaign, the response was very much visible in the villages. Many poor people stood in the queue for hours to get the petition and sign it.

The September 21 demonstrations in front of collectorates was held on these demands. In each and every collectorate, thousands of men and women thronged the gates. In many collectorates ten or more officers were deputed to receive the petitions. Even then it took more than eight hours to receive all the petitions by the officials.

More than five lakh people, topping the list with 50,000 and more in Theni and Kanyakumari, have participated in the demonstrations before this handing over of petitions. 

It was declared in these demonstrations that this is the first stage of the struggle. The next step of direct action – to directly intervene and remove the illegal occupants and distributing it to poor – will be taken up by both these organisations.

The struggle was effectively supported by CITU, DYFI, AIDWA, SFI and other Left organisations. The CPI(M) has not only supported this struggle but also propagated these slogans during its August campaign in the state.