Kannur: “The airport is the main culprit,” says Vijayan K, a retired Indian Coffee House employee. “The airport is not making money for those running it, and it has ruined the lives of people living downhill.” He stands in what is now a ghost village, Kolipalam, beside Kannur International Airport in Keezhallur grama panchayat.

There were once 12 families in his neighbourhood. All except Vijayan and his wife, Anitha, have abandoned their houses and farmland. “We haven’t left because we have nowhere else to go,” he says.

During the rains, runoff from the tabletop airport rushes down in seven streams, ripping through the land below, bringing down retaining walls, flooding houses, swallowing wells, and smothering paddy fields under sand, metal chips and concrete waste.

“That field you see there… that was my livelihood,” Vijayan says, standing at the edge of a six-foot-deep stream carved out of his land. It has severed access to his field, not that there is anything left to farm. The soil lies buried under airport debris.

“If only the government cancelled the land acquisition notification, we could get on with our lives,” says Phalgunan P K, an elderly cancer patient from Kanad in Keezhallur panchayat. “I have 65 cents, but I cannot sell even five cents to pay for my treatment. My two sons have moved to places without proper road access. They aren’t even finding brides,” he says.

Phalgunan and Vijayan are among the 165 families of Keezhallur -- home to Kannur International Airport -- who have spent nearly a decade in limbo, watching their lives erode while planes fly past the towering airport wall.

On October 22, 2018, the government issued a Section 11(1) notification under the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition Act to acquire 245.32 acres in Keezhallur and Kanad. The land was meant to extend the runway from 3,050 m to 4,050 m. On paper, the government has earmarked ₹942.9 crore for acquisition and compensation. The valuation of land, houses and trees was completed years ago. Yet the government has not deposited the money.

Left living in houses and on land they don’t practically own, people cannot repair damaged homes, build extensions, or sell even a fraction of their land to fund their needs. Loan-takers are now receiving attachment notices from banks. Anger against the government -- and particularly the CPM -- runs deep in Keezhallur, Kanad and Kolippalam.

In February 2016, at the fag end of the Oommen Chandy government, when the Air Force carried out a flight test for the Kannur airport, CPM leader E P Jayarajan led a mammoth protest demanding that the runway be extended from 3,050 m to 4,000 m.

“The government issued the notification to acquire our land in 2018 because of his protest. But he hasn’t come here even once since then or used his influence to get us our money,” says Phalgunan. “When I raised this at a protest meeting recently, CPM leaders waylaid me afterwards and threatened me,” he says. To be sure, the length of the runway remains at 3,050 m.

Ashraf Pathikalan, in his mid-60s, remembers the then district collector visiting his home six days before he was to fly to Riyadh. He was asked to stay back to complete the acquisition. “I cancelled my ticket because the collector said everything would be completed in six months,” he says. “Six months became seven, eight years.” Ashraf now lives with a neurological tremor that keeps his hands constantly shaking.

Like Phalgunan, Ashraf wants to sell a portion of his land for treatment, but he cannot. His niece, a kidney patient, is in deeper trouble after a cooperative bank issued an attachment notice on her house for a loan default. “The notice came weeks after the chief minister told the assembly that banks should not attach houses. Either the chief minister does not value his own words, or he does not care about us,” said Phalgunan.

P Ramlath, a homemaker, owns 50 cents on the edge of the airport. She lives in a small house with her two adult daughters and their families, and two sons. “Ten people live in our house. We want to build more homes for my children. But neither are we allowed to build a house nor is the government rehabilitating us,” she says.

Her neighbour Bhaskaran is furious. His tiled-roof house leaks, and every year he spends ₹3,000-4,000 on plastic sheets to keep the rain out. A ₹12 lakh loan taken for his daughter’s wedding hangs over him, with attachment notices now looming. Yet he cannot sell even a small portion of his land. “They marked our land and left. No one can buy or sell now. We cannot even sell the adjacent plot. That is our plight,” says Bhaskaran, who retired this year as a support staff member at the airport. He blames CPM leaders E P Jayarajan and K K Shailaja, the past and present MLAs of Mattannur, for the mess.

'Will hurt CPM in the election'
Keezhallur panchayat is a CPM bastion, with the UDF never winning more than three of the 14 wards. But the issue of land acquisition for the airport is likely to reverberate in the upcoming local body election, just as it did last time. In 2020, the CPM won Kanad, the most affected ward, by just two votes. “We did not even campaign there last time,” said UDF’s panchayat member Shabeer Edayannur from Edayannur ward.

There was a time when the CPM used to win Kanad by more than 300 votes. “This has come down to two. Of that, four were bogus votes,” says Phalgunan, a Congress supporter. “The people want to teach the CPM again,” he says.

Vijayan, the former Indian Coffee House employee, says he was, is and will remain a Marxist -- but this time, out of the three votes in the local body elections, he has decided to cast one against the CPM. “The Chief Minister said in a speech that if the government applied its mind, it could raise money for any project. That means he does not care about our problems. That’s what I will say. And not just me, everyone affected by the airport,” he says.

In the run-up to the December election, when the Youth Congress and Youth League held two protests demanding compensation, the turnout was huge. “But how did the CPM respond? MLA Shailaja held an explanatory meeting and told people that if any organisation held protests over this issue again, the government would not give them a penny,” says Shabeer, the Youth League leader, who, along with Youth Congress district vice-president Farzin Majeed, is leading an aggressive UDF campaign in Keezhallur.

Phalgunan, who has undergone 12 chemotherapy sessions, does not have the strength for another fight. “Save us somehow. Those who see this… please raise your voice for us. All of you. That’s all I can plead.”