Daniel Little: A horrendous massacre in Tamil Nadu, 1968

Daniel Little discusses A horrendous massacre in Tamil Nadu, 1968

This event illustrates the workings of oppression involving both caste and class. The landless workers were predominantly dalit — the lowest caste. And they were the poorest of the poor, with very little power to assert a fair share of the harvest. Land owners were in a position to resist increases in wages (the primary demand of the workers in this dispute), both through their structural advantage within the property system (land ownership) and their coercive power (through their ability to call upon armed thugs to carry out their violence against the dalit protests). A solution for the property disadvantage for the dalit workers is land reform, and during the years following the Keezhvenmani massacre there was a reasonably strong organization dedicated to land reform and dalit land ownership, the Land for Tillers Freedom (LAFTI). However, land reform based on NGO activism is likely to remain small-scale, in comparison to state-wide land reform programs.

Kanagasabai quotes V Geetha and Kalpana Karunakaran in the introduction to Mythily Sivaraman's Haunted by Fire (2013):

That episode and visit brought home to Mythily the starkness of life in this grain rich part of Tamil Nadu… She realised that the price for dignity, for daring to declare oneself a communist was very high in these parts – many had paid with their lives… Unsurprisingly, in her subsequent reflections, she refused to concede that the monstrous incident at Kilvenmani was only a wage dispute gone wrong, and argued passionately for it to be recognised for what it was: class struggle in the countryside. (Geetha & Karunakaran, 2013)

Class struggle in the countryside, indeed — landlords exercising horrendous violence against landless workers.

Emphasis Mine

Without the control of the means of production (in this case, land), workers are unable to defend themselves against the violence of others. The state only defends the interests of the ruling class (in this case, landlords). Little cites examples of the courts and police siding with the landlords against the farm workers.

Little acknowleges that this is an example of class war with the resolution lying in the control of the means of production by the workers.