Land for the People

Tamils who return after war fight for their seized land

One of the first books read to me as a child by my parents, was a parable on land drawing from one of Leo Tolstoy’s short stories, made available in Jaffna by affordable children’s publications from the Soviet Union. The parable goes like this: that a man was offered as much land as he wished, provided he walked the perimeter of the land from sunrise to sunset on a certain day. Having set his expectations too high, and worried that he could not return by sunset, he ran back all afternoon to claim his large area of land. But soon after his arrival, he died of exhaustion, and all the land that he needed was just six feet long to bury him.

  That parable, I find, might be appropriate for our tragic history and uncertain future. The great nationalist ambition of the LTTE in its protracted war for territory, and its suicidal end on that small strip of land in Mullivaikal is one instance. The great financial ambitions of the current regime in power to convert the sea off Galle Face into land, and create a financial city, may with time prove to be the cause of its downfall. Regardless of the ambitions of those in power and their despicable adventures, it is the people who pay the price with their blood, sweat and suffering.

  From colonial times to the present moment, the land question has been central to our history. Land as an asset for rural livelihoods, as a natural resource that sustains our environment, as territory constituted by borders and as vested in the sovereign state, are some of the meanings that it embodies. Aspirations for land and fears of losing it are tremendous challenges for coexistence in these times of authoritarian rule, majoritarian shenanigans and ethnic polarisation. In this context, I draw on a series of recent discussions initiated by the Jaffna People’s Forum for Coexistence on the question of land in the East and the North towards forming a progressive perspective on land

Homes and livelihoods

The questions I want to ask about land, are for what purpose and whose use? Six feet is all the land we may need when we die as taught during my childhood, but how many perches do people need for a dwelling and how many acres does a farmer need for a livelihood?

   Some years back, at the height of the housing grants for the war devastated population, we found that close to 15,000 households or 10% of the population of the Jaffna District were absolutely landless. These deprived people consisting of oppressed caste wage labour and destitute women with dependents lacked even seven perches of urban land or 20 perches of rural land. This section of Jaffna’s population who had been through harrowing cycles of displacement and pummelled by the war, were automatically denied the donor and state grants of a cement house, because they did not own the minimum land necessary to build a house.

    Next, it is no secret that a few acres of irrigated land will greatly stabilise the economic situation of rural households. In the North, for example, in the sparsely populated Vanni districts, some sections of the population are condemned to the margins without land for livelihoods. Those who form the mass of landless labour belonging to oppressed caste communities, the excluded peoples of Up-Country origin and Muslim returnees after the eviction, and thousands of single women with dependents—they all have in common the denial of viable land to generate rural incomes.

State and capital

From the demands of “land to the tiller” that emerged with the land struggles during the late colonial period we are now facing many more logics of the state and capital that are determining the political economy of land. These include the nationalist, environmental, conservationist, agri-business and speculative real estate logics of land that have led to land grabs and the attendant dispossession of people.

To this day, a majority of our land is owned by the state, a legacy of British colonial appropriation as crown lands. The focus on building an export oriented economy on plantations and colonisation schemes to increase paddy production in the dry zone, have not only led to severe forms of exploitation of those who work on land, and exclusion in ownership of land, but also created historical narratives of contestation over land that have polarised communities. 

These land debates have lost sight of who gets to use land and for what purpose, and rather ethnicised the land question by claims about which community owns that land and who lived first on that land. There is little reflection about the inequalities of land ownership within ethnic communities and that ethnic identities themselves are historically recent constructions, and that communities coexisted without rigid ethnic and religious markers until a century or so ago.

The developmental push of the state with allocation of land for agricultural production has now been compounded by environmental and conservationist logics, leading to grabbing of land as forest lands and nature reserves, without considering the livelihoods of the people living in those regions. Worse now, archaeological initiatives of demarcating land have become Sinhala Buddhist nationalist sign posts in regions inhabited by minority communities. These recent land grabs with the majoritarian workings of the state beholden to Sinhala Buddhist lobbies, disregard and undermine the concerns of minorities, resulting in further polarisation on the ground.
The state itself is not monolithic, with various state structures and myriad networks of local officials. With land powers regionally delegated to Divisional Secretaries, local dynamics of exclusion are formed along caste, gender and class lines. Furthermore, the regional elites in turn have a way of accessing and grabbing land. These local dynamics were compounded during recent decades by the neoliberal logic of accumulation;where powerful speculative financiers grab prime lands, including for coastal real estate investment in tourism.

Back to the people

During the current conjuncture, with the worst economic downturn since Independence, there is now the increasing realisation among the people of the importance of agriculture and food. Survival itself has come to depend on our own domestic production and consumption, as the colonial and neo-colonial projects of production of agricultural exports for the West have come under question. 

There are those in power and with wealth that run from sunrise to sunset to grab more land. And there are those of our fellow citizens who are excluded from six feet of land even during their lifetime. Land from the point of view of the marginalised will necessarily relate to the fundamentals of life including food, shelter and livelihoods. 
However, irrigated lands continue to be the domain of the landed elite in the regions, pasture lands necessary to raise cattle are taken over as forest lands by the state and coastal lands to access the sea by fisher folk were grabbed by the hotel industry that are now empty. At this time of great crisis, shouldwe not rethink the question of land?