On the night of 6 August, a fatal landslide struck Pettimudi, a village in Kerala’s Idukki district, amid heavy floods that have become an annual occurrence across the state since 2018. The torrential rainfall, which continued from 1 to 6 August, triggered a landslide that reduced settlements in Pettimudi to rubble and killed over eighty people. Among the people affected in the district were tea plantation workers. A vast majority of them are descendants of Dalit communities from Tamil Nadu, who were brought to Kerala in the British era. But even now, they are branded as “outsiders” within the state.
On 10 August, when rescue operations were still underway, the Kerala government decided to bury the dead in three mass graves. Several activists who visited Pettimudi after the landslide told me that the burial of workers in mass graves was dehumanising and as an insult to the community. On 13 August, Pinarayi Vijayan, the chief minister of Kerala from the Communist Party of India (Marxist), refused to meet leaders of the community when he visited the village to oversee rescue operations.
The incident highlighted the systemic mistreatment of tea plantation labourers, and the Kerala government’s habit of brazenly ignoring the plight of the community. Left-leaning trade unions in Kerala have for decades worked closely with plantation companies in Idukki district to suppress plantation labourers whose contracts closely resemble bonded labour. The labourers are easily ignored both because they are Dalit and Tamil speakers, and thus, outsiders in Kerala. Activists and academics working with plantation labourers told me that with the connivance of both Congress and communist governments, tea-plantation companies rule almost as a state within a state. They asserted that the plantation companies are not the rightful owners of the land where they have set up operations.
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