On the night of February 28 this year, residents of Ebbanad village, around 15 kilometres from Udhagamandalam in the Nilgiris, staged a protest. They blocked a Tamil Nadu State Transport Corporation (TNSTC) bus on a newly extended route to Koranur, a Dalit village two kilometres from there. Following the protest, the police asked the passengers to disembark and walk to their village. The Ebbanad residents, belonging to the dominant OBC, known as the Badagas, refused to allow the TNSTC to extend the bus service to Koranur. The extension would mean that around 25 Dalit and Adivasi families of Koranur and Bikkapathy Mund would have an easy access to transport, and children and adults could reach the district headquarters easily.
Eight-km walk
Dinesh Kuttan, a resident of Bikkapathy Mund, around four kilometres from Ebbanad, says the Toda residents there would have had their daily commute by walk halved, had the service been extended to Koranur. This is the habitation where he and his family have been forced to move to from their village for lack of bus services. “Our children can go to school only if we live in Koranur. Otherwise, they would have to walk a cumulative distance of eight kilometres, cutting through a reserved forest — populated by elephants, sloth bear, and tigers — to get to Bikkapathy Mund,” he says.
Bhuvana Rani, one of the Toda residents on the bus when it was blocked, says that in times of emergencies, the residents could not even reach Udhagamandalam or Kotagiri for lack of buses. “There are elderly people here, and if one of them falls ill, we have to fashion a makeshift stretcher and rush him or her to Koranur, the nearest point an ambulance can reach.”
Had the bus service been extended from Ebbanad to Koranur, the residents would have had at least three trips available to get to Udhagamandalam, the nearest town.
‘Feeling of superiority’
While the district police have maintained that the refusal of the Ebbanad Badagas to allow buses to Koranur was due to “a dispute between two villages”, the residents of Koranur and Bikkapathy Mund argue otherwise. “The refusal of the Badagas to allow buses was due to a feeling of superiority and ego, borne out of caste pride,” alleges P. Natrajan, a daily wage worker of Koranur.
N.H. Shivakumar, headman of Ebbanad, says the bus had been terminating at Ebbanad for the last three decades. “If the service is extended to Koranur, invariably, the TNSTC will decide to halt the bus in the village in the evenings, and the people of Ebbanad will lose out,” he claims. “We have no objection to a separate service operated to Koranur,” he adds. Dalit villagers, however, don’t think a separate service is viable. As Koranur and Bikkapathy Mund have a combined population of only 25 families, they fear that any new service will eventually be terminated because it may not be profitable to the TNSTC. But Mr. Shivakumar remains unmoved. “That is a decision for the TNSTC, and is not our concern,” he says.
The incident has highlighted the tensions that continue to simmer underneath the surface, especially between the Badagas and the Dalit settlers who arrived in the Nilgiris to work as labourers in farms and tea plantations. “The idea that there are no caste divisions in the Nilgiris is unfounded,” says M.S. Selvaraj, State convener of the Vivasayigal Thozhilalargal Munnetra Sangam. He says that while caste tension in the Nilgiris rarely vitiates into violence, its pervasiveness cannot be denied. “In the decades since the arrival of the Tamil Dalit labourers, they have had to face a tremendous amount of discrimination and marginalisation from all the landowning classes, including the Badagas,” he adds.
No amenities
The feeling of discrimination is particularly stark among Dalit repatriates from Sri Lanka, most of whose settlements lack roads, footpaths, bus services, street lights and water connections. R. Hariharan, a resident of Ketti Palada, who lives atop a hill overlooking the farmland of Ketti, says his settlement still lacks amenities. “Till today, we do not have piped water supply to our homes; we have to make a trip to the nearest tap in the village and walk back with water,” he says.
The lack of infrastructure itself adds to the sense of discrimination among the Dalits, says G. Sathish, a district functionary of the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK). He says most of the communities in the Nilgiris that do not have access to amenities are invariably Dalits or Adivasis. “The discrimination is institutionalised as most of the government offices have officials from the Badaga community who occupy positions of power. So, if a decision needs to be made as to whether a Badaga or non-Badaga village needs investment for infrastructure, it invariably reaches the Badaga villages first,” he alleges.
“For example, there are places like Haalan Nagar in the Ketti town panchayat, where people still do not have a road to reach their village. They have been denied the right of way by a private school. The feeling among the community is that the district administration and the police would have intervened and ensured that a road was laid, had the village been home to the dominant caste community,” he contends.
Raees Muhammad, founder of Dalit Camera and general secretary of the Nilgiris All India Sanitation Workers Self-Respect Trade Union, says the caste divisions manifest themselves in the geography of the settlements themselves. “If you notice where Dalit villages are located, it is usually along the sides of stream beds, or along steep slopes which are prone to flooding and landslips. The most-affected people during any natural calamity are invariably the Dalits,” he says.
Mr. Muhammad says the location of the Dalit villages itself is indicative of how settlers were given portions of land that were less desirable for the land-owning classes. “The government also needs to acknowledge that it too was a party to this by allowing communities to settle on poromboke land and revenue land where access was limited,” he says. The struggle for land ownership among the Dalits is ongoing. It has led to tensions between the land-owning Badagas and the settlers. One such struggle was for the founding of Selavip Nagar in the Ketti valley, named after the Selavip Foundation that helped to construct the houses in the village in the 1990s.
Help from a foreign NGO
R. Kalingam, an administrative committee member of the Malaiya Makkal Maruvaalvu Mandram, who was working in a tea factory at Adhigaratty in 1988, says there was a realisation that land ownership was imperative to improve the living conditions of the Dalit labourers. “Without land or housing, labourers would have to rely on Badaga estate owners to decide wages. So we decided to request the government for land to set up a village for labourers,” he says.
He says that after being denied land by the government, it was decided that the labourers would pool money to buy a 1.77-acre plot in the area on the pretext of setting up a tea estate. “When it came to be known among the Badagas that the land was for housing, there were protests against the sale of the land.” Despite the protests, the land was purchased for ₹2 lakh with funds from the Malaiya Makkal Maruvaalvu Mandram and the residents. “Even after the purchase of the land, there were efforts by the landowners to scuttle the construction of the houses, and we only managed to build the houses with materials given to us by the Selavip Foundation in Belgium,” he adds.
“Though Selavip Nagar is surrounded on all sides [within a kilometre] by the Badaga villages of Muttinadu, K. Oranalli, and Kattery, where buses ply regularly, we still do not have access to buses,” says R. Mani, a resident of Selavip Nagar.
The tensions still exist between the Badagas and the Dalit labourers, admits Vignesh Ramalingam, a Badaga youth from Kuruthukulli village in Udhagamandalam, who is working as the head of marketing in a software company based out of Mumbai. Mr. Ramalingam says the settlers’ upward social mobility in recent decades has led to a feeling of resentment among the land-owning Badagas. “Many of these labourers had been working in the Badagas’ land, and their prosperity, combined with other factors, has led to some resentment.” Mr. Ramalingam says intercaste marriages between the Badagas and the Tamils are still frowned upon.
Divisive rhetoric
In the run-up to the 2021 Assembly election, the Badaga Ilaignar Peravai, a fringe outfit aligned with the Hindu right-wing, had even highlighted how the “encouragement” of intercaste marriages by the DMK posed an existential threat to the community. Mr. Ramalingam says such divisive rhetoric has contributed to the feelings of animosity between the two communities.
Arokiasamy Vincent Raj, of Evidence, an NGO that works on issues concerning marginalised communities, says that in hill stations, such as the Nilgiris and Kodaikanal, and in Kanniyakumari district, discrimination is far less visible, compared with the other parts of Tamil Nadu. “Owing to lack of awareness among SCs/STs, combined with a lack of access to redress mechanisms, many of these issues remain hidden,” he says.
Mr. Ramalingam contends that discrimination in the Nilgiris is more nuanced. “The only reason that the Ebbanad residents don’t want the bus to go to Koranur is that they feel that they are being insulted when Koranur residents will be seated on the way back as it is the last stop on the line,” he claims.
Activists say it is grossly inaccurate to label the Badaga community, as a whole, as casteist or discriminatory. Mr. Muhammad, who runs a septic tank cleaning service in the Nilgiris, says that unlike other communities, many Badaga villagers welcome sanitation workers and cleaners to their homes and even offer them meals inside their homes. “However, there are many Dalit communities who treat us with disdain. So, we need to remember that all these manifestations of caste are more complicated than simply being a case of Dalits versus non-Dalits,” he adds.
For the last few decades, the Badagas have been demanding the Scheduled Tribe status. Sobha Madhan, an Adivasi rights activist from Gudalur and district co-ordinator of the Nilgiris Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups Federation, says it is a hallmark of all Adivasi communities to live in cooperation with other communities. “While there is not much in the way of collaboration between the Dalit and Adivasi groups in the Nilgiris, neither would actively try to scupper access to development or basic services for each other. Certain Badaga groups, which have been demanding the Scheduled Tribe status, also need to learn to cooperate with others and not antagonise the underprivileged communities,” she says.
In the meantime, citing the ongoing dispute, the TNSTC has restricted the service from Udhagamandalam to Koranur to just one trip a day. The bus leaves Udhagamandalam at 5.45 p.m. and reaches Koranur one hour later. The residents continue to walk, deprived of a morning bus service to Koranur.
