Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Tuesday said that Union environment minister Bhupender Yadav's remark that the Wayanad tragedy was caused by "illegal mining and human encroachments" was born out of the minister's sheer ignorance of the long history of Kerala's settler farmers. He said that it was unfortunate that certain people were using the tragedy for narrow political ends.
Here is what the Union Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change told ANI the other day. "It is an illegal protection to the illegal human habitation by the local politicians. Even in the name of tourism, they are not marking proper zones. They allowed the encroachment of this area. It is a highly sensitive area. We have already constituted a committee headed by former Director General of Forests Sanjay Kumar. There has been illegal human habitation and illegal mining activity in the protection of the local government."
The Chief Minister termed the Union minister's remark as a "motivated charge". "By making this charge, he was insulting the victims of the tragedy. Are the poor plantation workers encroachers? Did the people who were destroyed by the landslide do anything illegal? It was their hard work that had made them own small parcels of land in the area. They are no encroachers but bonafide land owners," the Chief Minister said while talking to reporters in Thiruvananthapuram on Tuesday.
Moreover, the Chief Minister said that Mundakkai and Chooralmala regions were flatlands. "No one had ever thought that such a tragedy would befall such regions," Pinarayi said. He termed as "improper" the Union minister's attempts to paint the entire settler population as "encroachers".
The Chief Minister described as "weird" Yadav's statement that illegal mining had triggered the landslide. "The nearest mine from the landslide area is 10.2 kilometres away," he said. "This being the case, it is hard to fathom why the minister is uttering such falsehoods," he said. He emphasised that there was no illegal mining in the Mundakkai region.
Pinarayi said that the minister's comments seemed to confirm media reports that the Centre, through the Press Information Bureau (PIB), had approached scientists to put out articles in mainstream media criticising the Kerala government for the Wayanad tragedy.
Yadav had also accused the Kerala government of ignoring the Centre’s committee on environment zoning and urged Kerala to demarcate eco-sensitive zones. He also said that Kerala had granted environment clearance for two non-coal mining projects in Wayanad last year. Pinarayi did not touch upon these issues.
