Maybe it’s a quirk of irony that a task force authorised by the Kerala High Court has just begun removing land encroachments in Munnar when the tall Communist leader V.S. Achuthanandan – Comrade VS to all and sundry – turns 100 years on October 20.
A daunting mission to free Munnar of encroachments steered by him as Chief Minister in 2007 had hit the walls of opposition raised from within the Left Democratic Front (LDF) and his own party – the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)], which led the ruling alliance.
While the demolition drive cemented his image among the masses as a crusader against land grabbers, brickbats were not in short supply either. Writer M. Mukundan, heading the Kerala Sahitya Akademi then, unleashed a storm of sorts with a story, ‘Dinosaurukalude Kalam (The Age of Dinosaurs) portraying a dim-witted old man fondly inviting a monstrous bulldozer to raze his own hovel. Eventually, the mission stopped in its tracks. Legal debacles followed.
