The man whom no one took to court

People become self-conscious when they realise that their greed can affect another’s income. Representation pic

Eapen Mottakose woke up the nation on the day he took his home town of Chullimanoor to court. His charge was that Chullimanoor was guilty of not having taken him to court first.

As no advocate was willing to defend Mottakose's case in court, he pleaded on his own behalf, and his impassioned oratory was recorded in most national dailies, including the Malayala Manorama.

"Your Honourability," he said, tears streaming down his face, "as the eldest issue of the Mottakose family, I have brought up my seven brother and four sisters like my own progeny since my late father became late. We began disputing the division of family property in 1981. The dispute developed satisfactorily and within a few years, most of them had filed court cases against each other.

"Your Honourability, despite all that I have done for my family, none of them has thought me worth filing a case against. I am a judicial outcast. This is my final recourse. If they will not take me to court, I will take them to court."

Doubtless, you are perplexed. So was I when I first met Kerala's Litigation Syndrome. But thanks to people like Eapen Mottakose, who I met in a filter coffee shop in Matunga, I have an appreciation of the phenomenon, and of course, its cure.

Kerala is a fillet of land shaped much like its own stunted ushi chillies. Bounded to the west by the western ghats, its habitable area is just a coastal strip along the state's length. Combine this with a large, literate and wealthy population of joint families and you have a state where every square inch is owned by someone or the other.

Families that haven't found the occasion to take someone to court over a property dispute are considered nearly illiterate. Fortunately, the opportunity arises when property is being divided up and everyone sues everyone else. Families that simultaneously manage between seven and twelve court cases under one roof come under the top bracket of social distinction in Kerala, perceived as highly literate in an already highly literate state.

"My last but one brother Manickam offered to take the last but one sister Charu to court for willfully eroding his topsoil, making jackfruit cultivation impossible. There was great excitement in our family.

With eight cases, we would be neck to neck with the Chief Minister himself. However, Manickam got married to a nice girl from Thiruvayur and forgot all about it."

In all this, it was Mottakose himself who was neglected. He would sit forlorn and dejected while his brothers conducted heated discussions peppered with words like tu toque, sui generis, mala fide, quid pro quo and status quo.

"When I tried to join the conversation, they would shut me up by saying that the matter was sub judice," he said miserably. He was an outcast, almost by law.

Trying to attract litigation, he let his bull walk all over Kichu's tapioca field.

"But Kichu mistook the culprit, and started litigation against Chellu, making him a hero." As for Mottakose, he was fired, his wife stopped talking to him and his children shunned him.

This was when he decided to do something drastic. However, the historic case of Mottakose vs. the People of Chullimanoor also backfired. The case was dismissed, with Mottakose declared to be of unsound mind, and by implication, I suppose body.

I easily persuaded Mottakose that a legal problem should be solved within a legal framework. "Your problem is that you are found to be blameless," I told him. "You must put yourself in a position where you are automatically considered guilty."

He nodded and I could tell that I had started a thought.

You will already know how it went. Mottakose's long journey to the top ended last year when he became Union Minister for Housing and Land Reforms. One of his first actions was to impound all property in Chullimanoor on the grounds that the government required it for LIG housing projects.

Within a fortnight, the many residents of Chullimanoor had filed a staggering 547 cases against him.

With growing excitement, Mottakose repeated the exercise elsewhere in the country, with identical results. He now has 12,308 cases pending against him. He is also accused of complicity in a variety of land-grab deals, extra-legal demolition of tenements, encouraging sub-standard construction, and robbing poor people of their homes and shelters.

When I last met him again in the coffee shop, I congratulated him on having so successfully solved his problem.

With an almost fanatic gleam in his eye, he whispered at me, "I have proposed an even more revolutionary idea to our beloved Prime Minister. It is guaranteed to provoke litigation on a national scale."

He gave a dramatic pause. "I am planning to abolish private property."

Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com

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