How we lost our tea plantation to India’s underworld
Briton claims his family was bullied into selling estate by untouchable politicians, thugs and a liquor baron
‘I’m a foreigner so that would make me stand out, but the local communities suffered at their hands just as badly’
A BRITISH former tea plantation owner claims his family were bullied and harassed into selling their estate by corrupt politicians who ran a southern Indian state for more than 25 years.
Peter Craig-jones, 60, is at the centre of a scandal over the Kodanad estate in Tamil Nadu, which was the private residence of the late J Jayalalitha, chief minister of Tamil Nadu between 1991 and her death last year.
She acquired the property from the Jones family in 1994, and had subsequently claimed that the scenic garden estate was an ancestral heirloom. Mr Craig-jones alleged this week that Jayalalitha, and her close aide, VK Sasikala, used a cast of characters – including a liquor baron, a wanted businessman and 150 “goondas” (thugs) – to coerce his father into selling the 906 acres of land, valued at Rs11 crore (around £1.3million in today’s money) for as low as Rs7 crore (£845,000).
Jayalalitha died in December last year. Sasikala is currently in a Bangalore jail serving a four-year sentence for illegal land seizures, while NPV Ramasamy Udayar, who made his business in breweries after Tamil Nadu stopped being a “dry” state in the mideighties, died in 1998.
The businessman P Rajarathinam, who, it’s claimed, made the initial approach to the Jones family, has not been seen since 1997, after facing fraud charges and going on the run. Some claim that he has been hiding in the UK.
Mr Craig-jones, who moved to his father William’s Kodanad estate in the Nilgiri mountains in 1975, when he was in his 20s, revealed the tale in an interview last week with a magazine. It combines the murky world of forced sales or confiscation of real estate and goods, a matriarchal state leader and a colonial backstory.
The Craig-jones family, which has been in India for decades, bought the Kodanad estate, near the town of Kotagiri, in 1974 and developed it into a tea plantation. In 1992 the family was approached by Rajarathinam and entered negotiations. What followed was a sustained period of intimidation and threats, claimed Mr Craig-jones.
He said: “It’s one thing to accept corruption in the system, but it’s quite a different thing to be living in a system where corruption is no longer something to be feared or something that has any comeback, and you can openly indulge in it, and no one can touch you.
“I’m a foreigner so that would make me stand out, but the local communities suffered at their hands just as badly if not worse. It needs to be addressed, it makes a mockery of the whole system of democracy.”
The courts are pursuing ways to return the land to its rightful owners, and Mr Craig-jones hopes this will mean he can recoup some of his family’s losses.
This picture painted by Mr Craigjones is echoed by A Shankar, a former anti-corruption investigator for the government and now an activist with the RTI (Right to Information) pressure group. “There is no doubt that this state was run through fear. The media here was never willing to publish anything about Jayalalitha and her aides, and everyone else was in their pockets.”
Mr Craig-jones himself said: “For the past 20 years I’ve been talking about this, but it seems the media has only recently been brave enough to talk about it publicly.”
He said Jayalalitha and her cohorts commanded such an air of menace that few would have been foolhardy enough to take them on. “I want to get the whole world to see this picture of corruption among these few people, that has affected an entire state.”
Mr Craig-jones – who holds a British passport but is an overseas citizen of India, granting him unlimited residence – says he will remain in India to fight his case.
“It’s never occurred to me [to leave]. My family has been here for genera-