Text and Context
How the act of gaslighting isolates people from society and distorts their immediate reality
Irshad, Mohammed S. and Solaman, Christin S.S, ‘Identity, Space and Disaster: A Case Study of Pettimudi Landslide in Kerala’, Sage Journals, Vol 71, Issue no. 3, May 9, 2022
Among theories about the relevance of space as a social product and its relation with an individual’s or communities’ understanding of social realities, S. Mohammed Irshad and S.S. Christin Solaman’s article ‘Identity, Space and Disaster: A Case Study of Pettimudi Landslide in Kerala’, draws attention to the role of space during natural calamities such as landslides, in terms of the disaster vulnerability of a community and State interventions. The authors through the study of a landslide that hit Pettimudi, a tea plantation estate in the Idukki district of Kerala, discuss the ‘geographical and sociological space’ in which the incident occurred and how the State’s approach towards the incident was influenced by the social position and historical vulnerability of the community living in the landslide-prone region.
On August 6, 2020, a landslide caused by relentless rainfall in Pettimudi, a tea plantation estate in the Idukki district, killed over 65 workers. They lived in a ‘layam’, a line of 10 residential spaces in a building provided by the company as accommodation. Presently owned by the Kanan Devan Hills Plantations (KDHP), the tea estate was first owned by a British official, John Danial Manro, in 1877.
While in 1843, slavery was abolished in the State, estate owners found a work-around by bringing workers from other regions as bonded labour. Moreover, theorists argue that the Plantation Labour Act, of 1951 failed to provide the workers with social security and socio-economic mobility. Currently, most workers are part of the second and third generations of Tamil migrant workers who were provided with accommodation by the estate owners. Without decent accommodation or land of their own, the workers have continued to live in the accommodation (layam) provided by the estate owners in an ecologically vulnerable landscape. Layams, about 80-90 years old, were built when the plantation was set up and are not maintained well. In the landslide, 22 such layams were washed out, killing 66 people (four people are still missing and are considered dead), all of whom were buried together due to scarcity of land.
The Pettimudi landslide was analysed through a qualitative research approach with the help of secondary data. The authors interviewed labourers, trade union workers, and environmental scientists to understand the complexities behind the incident. The article also considered newspaper and media reports as well as comments of Ministers, officials and community leaders to understand the different narratives surrounding the incident.
The response and rehabilitation facilities provided by the government and the various descriptions of the incident show how the disaster was singled out and provided with only conventional relief measures. The spatial inequality that impacted the disaster vulnerability of the community due to their social position was also ignored.
Narratives have an immense impact on how one perceives reality. The authors explain how the media and government’s portrayal of the Pettimudi landslide conveniently labelled it as a single incident without interrogating the socio-economic complexity behind the situation. This was also reflected in the relief and rehabilitation provided by the State. Through a series of interviews, the article brings out a different narrative. Labour union leaders explain how the placement of the layam in a landslide-prone region with poor maintenance, coupled with the lack of socio-political and economic power of the workers factor into the situation. The company’s attempt to control how the news spread by only informing the government about the incident the morning after, once the situation was under control and the delay in the arrival of the government’s rescue team is proof of the negligence in the incident. The authors believe that the apathy of the State was evident in its response to the landslide when compared to an air crash that took place in the State the very next day and in the solatium offered to the victims.
The article explains how the ‘space’ of Pettimudi and the air crash determined the different treatments it received. Finally, through an analysis of the economic loss in the landslide, the authors discuss how the States’ accountability towards the victims of Pettimudi was minimal, with the government sharing the responsibility of rehabilitation with the private company which has been using the land to control the lives of its workers.
Social theorists like Edward Soja and Andrzej Zieleniec have theorised about individuals’ interactions with space and how space becomes a social product and a place for practising discrimination. Spatial vulnerability results from the intersection of social relations of production, class relations, institutional relations and entitlement relations. Considering the private plantation land as a social space, the authors explain how the land is symbolic of the economic vulnerability of the labourers which has its roots in the history of slave labour, and how this vulnerability forces them to continue living and working in such deplorable conditions. The company, with its ownership of the space, claims power over the workers. The social exclusion of the community pervades public discourses and government policies as they are considered mere beneficiaries of State schemes. These victims rarely have any say in their rehabilitation process and are forced to accept government funds.
In such situations, the state often has a very visible textbook response. Instead of looking at the root causes of such calamities, the government does the bare minimum. In disaster-prone areas, the following are the standard procedures followed by a government — alert the residents of the area in case there is a weather forecast and provide a temporary space for shelter, and if a disaster occurs, plan to rehabilitate the community with rarely any consideration of the socio-economic impact of such a shift of space.
In the recently released Malayalam movie, Malayankunju the portrayal of the socio-economic status of the residents in the disaster-prone region and the government’s response is important to analyse the relationship between space and vulnerability. While separated by caste, the economic positions of the protagonist and his neighbours are similar, grouping them in terms of disaster vulnerability. When the weather becomes threatening, the government’s response is to give a public service announcement and provide shelter in a nearby building, a standard state response in case of a predicted disaster. Even at the end, there is no mention of rehabilitation, with the protagonist accepting his disaster-vulnerable position and returning to his daily life.
Vulnerability to a disaster is isolated from the people’s socio-economic status at the administrative level for their convenience in the intervention process. In doing so, the root causes of the issue are ignored. The authors claim that such dissociations have led to more disaster vulnerabilities among poor communities as disaster-prone areas in India are a result of unequal development or overexploitation of resources.
