The plunder and the price

K Govindan Kutty

Crudely rendered, a Malayalam saying suggests that mosquitoes find ‘bloody’ pleasure even in ‘milky’ udder. Such mosquitoes had a field day last week in Kerala when clouds burst and lands slipped away in murderous zeal. Death brought stories of sorrow and survival, acts of heroism. But they were enlivened by scandals of misappropriation, chicanery and pathological fault-finding.

How such misappropriation was attempted is a matter of inquiry. So also who thrust into circulation canards to discredit the government! A BJP busybody made it a point to remind the CM that his minions had not yet used half the money the Centre gave last year. Amid muffled cries and sighs, a political game apportioning blame is well under way. 

More than a hundred people have died. Whole chunks of earth have disappeared. Small hills in Wayanad suddenly gave way, leaving behind no trail other than a whispering void. A village with a hoary history, Kavalappara, which was the seat of power of an eponymous feudal overlord and a killer tusker which went into distant folklore, was gobbled up by mother earth. The fear is if it will happen year after year, in an abject enactment of what Nietzsche called eternal recurrence. 

Wayanad, which Rahul Gandhi now represents by political chance, has been under exploitation for long. Writing about its aborigines and their sad lot, K Panoor likened it to Kerala’s Africa. Geologically, Wayanad has undergone wanton reclamation for purposes of construction and cultivation. When SK Pottekkat, former MP and literary chronicler of north Kerala, explored in a novel such human ambition and endeavour, it yielded, ironically, a tragic depiction.

Half a century later, Prof Madhav Gadgil was engaged to study the devastation of Wayanad and other vulnerable parts of the Western Ghats. Stretching from Maharashtra to Kanyakumari, the Western Ghats were, to Kalidasa, a captivating damsel. Gadgil’s mission was to examine how that winsome show of nature had been defiled. His team presented the denouement of human vandalism. For the benefit of those who would hear or care, he had sounded two decades ago a warning about the wreck of the Ghats. Earth was not holding itself together. Shorn of poetic melody, the warning had a terrific starkness. 

A leftist science body, Sastra Sahitya Parishad, endorsed the report. Politicians were anxious to debunk the theory. A lone politician who championed the cause of the Ghats was Congress’s PT Thomas. The Marxist party was in two or more minds. The parishad made bold to say: ‘Hill today is no hill to us; it is plain mud. Mountain is no mountain; it is plain rock. River is no river; it is water and sand. Forest is no forest; it is mere timber. And this is all for us to loot.’ Parasurama, who reclaimed this part of the subcontinent from the waters in the west, would wonder at the speed with which his inheritors could spell ruin.