The Muthanga verdict: Justice for whom and at what historical cost?

Follow TNM's WhatsApp channel for news updates and story links.The recent judgement of the Wayanad Principal Sessions Court in the Muthanga cases has once again brought Kerala’s unresolved question of Adivasi land rights into the political foreground. The acquittal of the accused, including Adivasi movement leader M Geethanandan, in the case concerning the death of police constable KV Vinod removes a grave allegation that had remained over them for more than two decades. But the conviction of Geethanandan and three others in a related case, and the imposition of five years’ rigorous imprisonment, remains deeply troubling. The prospect of M Geethanandan returning to prison is especially disquieting because he is not an individual remembered for personal gain or political office, but one of Kerala's foremost Dalit intellectuals and social activists who has devoted decades to the struggles of Adivasis and other historically marginalised communities. A co-founder of the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha alongside CK Janu, Geethanandan abandoned a secure government career to dedicate himself to the cause of land rights, dignity and democratic justice for the landless. For over three decades, he has remained one of the most articulate voices questioning Kerala's celebrated developmental narrative from the standpoint of those excluded from its benefits, consistently arguing that democracy remains incomplete so long as Dalits and Adivasis are denied substantive access to land and livelihood. Moreover, the verdict appears particularly unfortunate when viewed against the disputed circumstances of the police operation, the absence of comparable accountability for the death of Adivasi activist Jogi and the violence inflicted upon the protesters, and the long history of governmental failure that produced the Muthanga occupation itself. The judgement cannot therefore be understood merely as the conclusion of an isolated criminal trial; it must be located within the broader history of landlessness, caste exclusion, state repression and the criminalisation of Dalit–Adivasi political assertion in Kerala. Muthanga: The politics of dispossession and state violenceThe Adivasi question in Kerala reveals a severe, historically distinct process of dispossession. The expansion of settler agriculture into the hill districts had resulted in widespread alienation of Adivasi land. Transactions were frequently conducted under profoundly unequal conditions involving deception, indebtedness, coercion and nominal compensation. In 1975, following directions from the Union government, Kerala enacted the Scheduled Tribes (Restriction on Transfer of Lands and Restoration of Alienated Lands) Act. It was intended to invalidate specified transfers of Adivasi land and restore possession to its original owners. Yet the rules required to operationalise the legislation were framed only after a long delay, and successive governments avoided meaningful implementation. The state’s failure was not merely administrative. It reflected the political power of settler communities and existing landholders. Governments repeatedly claimed that the restoration of alienated lands would produce social conflict. The anticipated resistance of those occupying Adivasi land was treated as more politically consequential than the legal and historical rights of the dispossessed. In effect, the 1999 legislation exhausted the constitutional promise of restitution without fulfilling it. Deprived of meaningful legal remedies and confronted by successive governments unwilling to restore alienated land, Adivasi communities, and later Dalit land movements inspired by their struggle, turned increasingly to land occupation as the only viable means of reclaiming rights that the law had failed to secure.Muthanga was the most definitive expression of this accumulated history. The immediate background was the state government’s failure to honour the agreement reached after the Adivasi agitation of 2001, under which cultivable land was to be provided to landless Adivasi families. Having exhausted petitions, negotiations and symbolic protests, hundreds of families entered the Muthanga forest area in January 2003 under the leadership of the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha. They established settlements and asserted a right to livelihood, land and a measure of political autonomy. The occupation was not an inexplicable intrusion into a protected landscape, as it was sometimes represented. It was a political response to the repeated breaking of governmental promises. It also exposed a contradiction within environmental governance: Adivasis could be displaced in the name of forest protection even though commercial plantations, settler expansion and official development projects had already transformed extensive forest regions. The language of conservation was thus deployed selectively, often against communities whose livelihoods and cultural histories were inseparable from the forest.On 19 February 2003, the government undertook a massive police operation to evict the protesters. The confrontation resulted in the deaths of Adivasi activist Jogi and police constable KV Vinod, while many protesters and a couple of police personnel were injured. Women, children and elderly inhabitants of the settlement were caught in the operation. Contemporary accounts documented allegations of police firing, beatings, intimidation and abuse during and after the eviction. The agitation was the logical culmination of the state’s refusal to restore Adivasi land and its unwillingness to recognise autonomous Adivasi political mobilisation. Although Jogi remains the only Adivasi whose death has been officially acknowledged in connection with the Muthanga police operation, Adivasi organisations, human rights groups, and several independent fact-finding reports have consistently maintained that the actual death toll was considerably higher. More than two decades later, these allegations remain unresolved, reinforcing the demand for an independent inquiry into the full extent of the violence at Muthanga. Justice loses its moral authority when it isolates the alleged actions of protesters from the coercive operation within which they occurred. The state cannot claim a monopoly over the definition of violence while treating its own armed intervention as politically neutral. The police firing occurred during the chief ministership of AK Antony, whose government ordered the eviction of the protesters. Adivasi leaders and several observers have long contended that the State failed to undertake any meaningful negotiations with the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha before resorting to force, arguing that the eviction reflected a preference for coercion over genuine political engagement. Antony later expressed limited regret over the violence while continuing to defend the operation as a legal necessity. Consequently, his expression of remorse was widely perceived as formal rather than substantive, doing little to address the deeper questions of the State’s political accountability.Whose violence counts? The asymmetries of justiceThe recent verdict, delivered twenty-three years later, must be assessed against this historical background. The Wayanad Principal Sessions Court acquitted all the accused of the murder of Vinod after concluding that the prosecution had failed to establish murder and criminal conspiracy beyond reasonable doubt. The court reportedly held that the fatal injury had been inflicted by an accused who died during the protracted trial and therefore could no longer be sentenced. The acquittal of the surviving accused is significant because it rejects the attempt to impose collective criminal responsibility for the constable’s death upon the leaders and participants of the movement.Yet the same judgement convicted four activists – M Geethanandan, Binu S, Koyalippura Remesan and Anilkumar – of conspiracy and the attempted murder of constable Abdul Salam, sentencing them to five years of rigorous imprisonment. The conviction is profoundly unfortunate. The punishment raises serious political and evidentiary questions. The events occurred during a chaotic police eviction involving a large crowd, armed personnel, firing, smoke, confusion and competing accounts of what transpired. An Adivasi struggle, a false case, and brutal torture: The story of KK SurendranDefence lawyers argued that eyewitnesses were positioned at considerable distances, that police testimony contained contradictions and that the circumstances surrounding the temporary shed in which the officers were held were inadequately established. The convicted activists have announced their intention to challenge the judgement before a higher court.According to the CBI prosecutor’s reported statement, the agency’s investigation did not cover Jogi’s death because it occurred during what was classified as a law and order operation in which the police were performing official duties. This reasoning reveals the structural inequality at the heart of the case. The death of a police officer became the subject of a lengthy central investigation, criminal prosecution and trial. The death of an Adivasi protester during police firing was treated as external to that process. CK Janu has rightly described such an outcome as selective justice and called for renewed investigation into Jogi’s death and the allegations of police atrocities.The law recognises the bodily injury of the state’s agents with extraordinary seriousness, while the injuries and deaths suffered by marginalised citizens are absorbed into the administrative category of “law and order". The policeman appears before the law as an individual victim; the Adivasi appears as part of a disorderly population to be controlled. Such asymmetry does not merely affect the result of one trial. It establishes a political lesson: the state may break promises, defer land redistribution and employ force, but those who resist may continue to face punishment decades later.Beyond Muthanga: The continuity of Dalit–Adivasi resistanceMuthanga was followed by several other movements that kept the land question alive. Similar demands animated the Chengara, Aralam, Arippa, Perinchamkutty and other land struggles. These struggles form a continuous history rather than a collection of isolated agitations. Their recurrence proves that Kerala’s land question was never conclusively resolved. The land reforms changed the state’s agrarian order, but they did not destroy the relationship between caste and property. Dalits remained concentrated at the lowest levels of land ownership, while Adivasis continued to struggle for the restoration of alienated land and protection from further encroachment. The survival of large plantations outside effective redistribution created a geography in which extensive estates coexisted with colonies of landless workers. The autonomous Dalit–Adivasi public sphere emerged from the necessity of naming this exclusion. It challenged the tendency of dominant political formations to translate caste oppression into a general language of poverty or class exploitation. Class remains indispensable to the analysis, since landlessness and labour exploitation are material relations. But caste determines who historically became landless, whose labour was appropriated, who was confined to colonies and whose claims to property could be postponed without threatening the dominant political order. The land struggles therefore brought caste and class together without reducing either to the other.The 2026 Muthanga verdict arrives at a moment when the democratic legitimacy of protest is increasingly under pressure. Social movements are frequently remembered not for the injustices that produced them but for isolated moments of confrontation. Their leaders are subjected to criminal proceedings that extend across decades, turning the judicial process itself into a form of punishment. Twenty-three years of uncertainty, repeated court appearances and social stigma cannot be treated as inconsequential merely because a final verdict has now been delivered. The conviction of Geethanandan and the three other activists should therefore be challenged both legally and politically. This does not require denying the injuries suffered by Abdul Salam or romanticising every action committed during the confrontation. It requires insisting that responsibility be individualised, evidence be assessed rigorously and the coercive actions of the state be investigated by the same standards applied to protesters. Above all, it requires recognition that Muthanga originated not in criminal conspiracy but in the state’s prolonged failure to fulfil constitutional, legislative and political obligations towards Adivasi communities. An appeal may reconsider the evidentiary basis and proportionality of the conviction. But the larger judgement must be delivered in the public sphere. Kerala must decide whether those who exposed the unfinished history of its land reforms are to be regarded as criminals or as political actors who compelled society to confront an injustice it preferred to forget. The answer cannot be found in the progressive mythology of the state. It lies in the colonies of the landless, in unimplemented agreements, in alienated Adivasi territories and in the continuing struggles at Chengara, Arippa, Aralam and elsewhere.The recent acquittal in the murder case removes one grave accusation that had hung over the movement for more than two decades. The simultaneous imposition of five years’ rigorous imprisonment on four of its activists, however, casts a shadow of criminalisation. It is an unfortunate verdict, because justice cannot be credible when the alleged violence of the marginalised is isolated from the longer history of dispossession and the coercive exercise of state power that produced the confrontation. The demand must now be for a fair appellate review, an independent investigation into the death of Jogi and the allegations of police atrocities at Muthanga, and, above all, the implementation of genuine land redistribution for Dalit and Adivasi communities. Justice for Muthanga cannot end with the punishment of four ageing activists. It must begin with the recognition that the original offence was the systematic dispossession of Kerala's Adivasi and Dalit communities, and the repeated refusal of successive governments to restore to them the land, livelihood, autonomy and dignity that history has denied.Ambedkar employed the term Bahishkrit to describe those who had been excluded from the social, political and moral community of rights. The history of Kerala's land struggles invites us to extend this insight to the political economy of land itself. Dalits and Adivasis have remained, in a profound sense, Bhoo Bahishkrit — people excluded from the ve