Land Revenue: India
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Judgements of the Superior Court
Kunnathat Thathunni Moopil Nair vs The State Of Kerala/ c.1958
Shaju Philip, March 29, 2025: The Indian Express
Kunnathat Thathunni was a ‘Moopil Nair’, a title held by some of the feudal landlords in Malabar — so rich that besides vast tracts of agricultural land, he owned at least 50,000 acres of forest land filled with “rocks, rivulets and gorges” in present-day Palakkad district of Kerala. The Moopil Nair family even had its own forest department with officials and check-posts.
So when the state government — the first democratically elected Communist government led by EMS Namboodiripad that came to power in 1957 — imposed a flat tax of Rs 2 on every acre of land owned by private individuals, irrespective of the kind of land, Thathunni was quick to move the Supreme Court. In 1958, he petitioned the court against the state government’s uniform tax regime on the grounds that it violated his right to equality — and won.
Kunnathat Thathunni Moopil Nair vs The State Of Kerala set a guiding rule for the state to tax individuals, one that is relevant even today — that any tax would be arbitrary and unequal if it is not based on a reasonable classification. For a new republic that would experiment with more socialist and communist ideas, the ruling laid down the principle that the state cannot impose a tax without a rational classification.
Nair argued that the government’s intention was “not to levy a tax on land, but to expropriate the private owners of the forests without payment of any compensation whatsoever”. As per the amended Travancore-Cochin Land Tax Act, 1955, Nair was sent an annual tax demand of Rs 50,000 for the forest land he owned.
Nair’s case was that the land did not give him returns to even match the tax demand. His income from the forest land, he said, was Rs 3,100 a year that he got from the highest bidder who bought the rights to chop trees in about 450 acres of his forest land.
He said the Madras Preservation of Private Forests Act anyway placed certain restrictions on forest owners such as Nair. They could not sell, mortgage, lease or otherwise alienate any portion of their forests. Besides, they needed the District Collector’s permission to cut trees or do any act that was likely to denude the forest or diminish its utility.
On December 9, 1960, a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court agreed with Nair and struck down the Kerala government’s flat tax. Then Chief Justice B P Sinha said that the Act “does not lay down any principle or policy for the guidance of the exercise of discretion by the Government”.
The case was important for another reason. Though the Supreme Court challenge was by a private individual against a state law, then Attorney General for India M C Setalvad and then Solicitor General of India C K Daphtary appeared for the landlords. Central government law officers can appear for private parties as long as there is no conflict of interest for the Union government. However, the presence of the bigwigs against Kerala shows that the stakes of this case were raised to mount a challenge by the Congress-led Central government against the Communist government, which would later be dismissed mid-term.
A story passed down in the Supreme Court Bar is that after winning the case, when Setalvad visited Ooty, Thathunni paid him a visit and brought a silver-crockery set as a gift. The no-nonsense Setalvad promptly returned it, telling Thathunni that a lawyer does not accept gifts beyond his fee.
Senior advocate Arvind Datar, who specialises in constitutional law and taxation, told The Indian Express that the Moopil Nair ruling continues to be relevant. “The spirit of the ruling is the reason why we have different income tax slabs for people with different earning capacities. The government has to classify equals and unequals and treat them differently,” Datar explains.
Thathunni’s youngest son, Dr P Sreekumaran, a retired medical college professor and the only surviving one from among his six children, recalls that his father died before the verdict came.
“As the youngest, I was not very familiar then with the details of his legal fight. My late elder brothers may have helped our father with the case. He died at the age of 79 on January 3, 1960. For me, memories about my father are related to attending the annual pooram festival at our family temple (Udayarkunnu Bhagavathi temple at Mannarkkad),” he says.
Sreekumaran says that in their landholding family of Kunnathat, it was the most senior member who held the title of ‘Moopil Nair’. The family lived at Mannarkkad in Palakkad district and owned thousands of acres of unsurveyed forest land spread over the Attappady Hills and the present-day Silent Valley National Park.
His father, says Sreekumaran, was the last Moopil Nair. “Those were the initial years of democratic rule and as per the Hindu Succession Act (passed by the Madras Assembly in 1956), titles such these ceased with the death of the person who held it. However, even now, there is a namesake Moopil Nair — usually one of the senior male members of the family — but he has no rights,’’ he says.
Thathunni may have won his case, saving his tracts of forest land from the state, but the family’s legal battles over the land weren’t over. In his last days, the executor of his will allegedly alienated large portions of land, a case the family continues to fight. A partition suit and a suit for recovery of the “missing land” are still pending at the sub-court in Ottapalam. The court had then appointed a receiver for the landlord’s properties and it still continues.
“Over the decades, the family lost its properties to land reforms and revolutions. Hence, the receiver has now only a Shiva temple at Erattakulam in Palakkad to manage,’’ says advocate Mohan Kumar, who has been the receiver of the “missing land” of the Moopil family since 1996.
