“Beedi Wars” explores how a humble hand-rolled cigarette became the axis of decades-long political violence across coastal Karnataka and Kerala. When RSS-linked Mangalore Ganesh Beedis shut operations in 1968 to avoid new labor laws. Workers lost their jobs and founded the Kerala Dinesh Beedi cooperative in 1969, which became among the world’s largest worker-led ventures. The murder of Jan Sangh activist Vadikkal Ramakrishnan soon after sparked tit-for-tat killings between CPI(M) and RSS-BJP supporters, claiming over 200 lives. The article contrasts Kerala’s blood-won labor dignity with Karnataka’s fragmented, exploitative industry, where the Left’s cultural disconnect let the Sangh Parivar organize the working class. The conflict ultimately reflects a deeper struggle between worker ownership and redistribution versus hierarchy and anti-labor politics.
Bound in a pink paper wrapper with a bold ‘501’ imprint, the artwork on a packet of Mangalore Ganesh Beedis feels strikingly retro today. In Mangalore, the southern coastal Karnataka city, the beedi industry's legacy remains visible with locations like PVS Circle, named after another prominent brand.
Hare, in coastal Karnataka, beedi rolling remains the chief household industry. Women remain the primary workforce as they can earn a living while doing domestic chores. Raw materials, tendu leaves from Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, tobacco from Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh, are distributed through a network of agents and offices.
There are no factories. Most of the work is done at home by hand, primarily by women. Firms use agents and offices to distribute raw material, collect the finished product, and pay wages. Unorganised, conditions for workers remain precarious here.
Just three hours south, lies Kannur in North Kerala's Malabar coast. In the late 1960s, a conflict over these modest beedis would ignite a bloody conflict whose embers still burn today.
The spark that lit the fuse was the murder of Vadikkal Ramakrishnan, a Jan Sangh activist, in April 1969. Pinarayi Vijayan, now Kerala’s Chief Minister, was initially accused but later acquitted, and this killing is widely cited as Kerala’s first recorded political murder and the beginning of a cycle of retaliatory violence that has claimed over 200 lives in the Kannur region over five decades. Many victims were poor working-class individuals, including beedi workers, from the Thiyya community on both sides of the political divide. What began as a labour dispute had morphed into a sustained territorial battle for political control of North Kerala.
In Kannur: Inside India’s Bloodiest Revenge Politics, journalist Ullekh N.P. writes that the rise of the rise of the Kerala Dinesh Beedi (KDB) workers’ cooperative, opened in response to the closing of Ganesh Beedis, led to escalating political friction and confrontations between supporters and workers of the RSS aligned Ganesh Beedi subsidiaries in the state and the pro CPI(M) workers. The RSS saw the Left’s labour dominance as a threat and sought to replicate the "Shiv Sena model" from Bombay, using sectarian rhetoric and regional frustrations to dismantle communist unions.
The beedi remains India's most widely consumed tobacco product, outselling factory-made cigarettes. These hand-rolled cigarettes use tendu leaves to wrap tobacco, a simple product requiring skilled hands but minimal capital investment.
In the 1940s, Mangalore Ganesh Beedis discovered a compelling economic logic: Kerala's Malabar coast offered lower wages and abundant labour. The company shifted substantial production southward, leading to thousands of skilled workers, primarily women and men from the OBC Thiyya community, to establish themselves in Kannur.
They arrived in a region already stirring with consciousness. As early as 1937, the Kannur Beedi Thozhilaali Union (Kannur Beedi Workers Union) had struck for better conditions, winning a modest but symbolically important concession. Workers could read during idle periods. This seemingly small victory became a crucial factor in educating workers about their rights.
The tipping point came in September 1968 when the communist-led E.M.S. Namboodiripad government introduced the Beedi and Cigar Workers (Conditions of Employment) Act. This legislation mandated crucial protections, including minimum wages, limiting working hours, overtime pay, social security, and improved working conditions.
As a response, Ganesh Beedi, which had links to the RSS, shut down its operations in Kerala rather than comply with the new labour laws. Twelve thousand workers found themselves jobless overnight. In the meantime, the management attempted to bypass regulations by introducing a system of 'kangani pani' where raw material would be delivered to workers' homes, shifting work outside of factory oversight.
Faced with unemployment and management's refusal to negotiate, the workers, supported by the left parties and local union leaders, rallied around a radical solution. They would employ themselves.
In February 1969, the Kerala Dinesh Beedi (KDB) workers’ cooperative was established. Each unemployed worker contributed a symbolic one rupee. The state government invested ₹20 lakh overall as well.
The cooperative's primary goal was to employ thousands of jobless workers, which also made them the industry's owners, with profit-sharing and elected leadership.
Despite political violence, Kerala Dinesh Beedi grew into one of the world's largest worker cooperatives by the 1980s, becoming the fourth-largest beedi firm in India. At it’s peak, KDB employed 42,000 workers, 94% of them women, across Kannur and Kasaragod districts. The cooperative provided significantly better wages, with bonuses reaching 17%, along with healthcare and pensions. It fundamentally altered living standards and offered thousands of families workplace democracy and dignity.
From the 1990s onward, KDB faced a number of struggles including rising production costs, falling sales, and competition from fake Dinesh beedis. Today, the cooperative retains only 2000 workers. The state government has attempted stricter enforcement against trademark violations, state support for diversification, uniform zonal wages, and excise duty exemptions for cooperatives. Still state-owned, KDB has attempted to diversify into umbrellas, apparel, food, and even software to create employment and to ensure its survival as beedi
In coastal Karnataka, the home of Mangalore Ganesh Beedis, the same industry took shape under very different political conditions, with almost no factories, weak cooperative experiments, and a steady saffronisation of working‑class life.
For a time, strong beedi workers' unions did emerge in Ullal and Dakshina Kannada, with left organisations mobilizing beedi, tile, and agricultural workers. Yet the region ultimately tilted rightward. Commentators cite the left's failure to engage with local cultural practices, particularly Deiva Aradhane, the worship of local deities, creating a vacuum that Sangh Parivar organisations filled by reworking shrines, rituals, and oral legends.
Today, while unions may retain numerical membership, the children of union families have largely shifted allegiance to Bajrang Dal, VHP, and other Sangh wings. Voting and organisational loyalties have migrated across generations.
Political anthropologist Ruchi Chaturvedi in 'Violence of Democracy: Interparty conflict in South India' notes that decades of cyclical political killings between the CPM and RSS-BJP in Kerala’s Kannur region have led bereaved families across the political divide being turned into symbols and beneficiaries of competing martyrdom cultures.
Parties provide compensation, jobs, housing support, and legal aid to victims’ families. There has been a normalisation and institutionalisation of violence, keeping detailed martyr counts, publishing pamphlets, while official data records over a hundred political killings in Kannur in three decades. Relatives remain torn between trauma and ideological commitment. Some vow to keep children away from politics while others remain devoted to their party or cause despite severe injuries and loss.
Chaturvedi has argued that competition in electoral democracy inherently creates violent, polarised political communities. While this framework captures something real about the Kannur violence, it risks a fundamental misreading of what is actually at stake.
Political violence along ethnic or community lines is indeed a global and historical phenomenon. But when violence occurs between politicised communities, as in Kannur, where working-class Thiyya families fight on both sides, we must ask a more fundamental question. What is the nature of this polarization?
Yes, both sides maintain patronage networks and compete for electoral dominance. But to what end? One side emerged from a struggle for worker ownership, democratic workplace control, and redistribution of economic power. The other side's project has been to preserve and expand a particular vision of cultural and religious hierarchy, often in explicit opposition to labour militancy and worker organisation. One cannot understand the Kannur conflict without grasping this asymmetry.
The patronage networks, the electoral competition, the cycles of revenge, these are the mechanisms through which the conflict perpetuates. But they are not its essence. At its core, this remains a conflict over whether workers should control their workplaces or remain atomized, exploited labourers in an informal economy.
The cycle of violence in Kannur is neither to be romanticized nor glorified, it represents a profound failure of political culture and human decency.
Working conditions in the two regions form almost a mirror image. Organised work, better conditions, democratic workplace participation, and dignity in Kerala versus fragmented unorganised, exploited and precarious conditions in Karnataka as across much of India.
Must better conditions emerge only through conflict? The Kannur region has paid in blood for its labour victories, while Karnataka's workers have paid in precarity and exploitation for the absence of effective organisation.
Perhaps the real lesson lies in finding ways to secure workers' rights and dignity without the generational trauma of political violence. That is, if those who hold power allow it.
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