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As Kerala braces for another round of local body elections, a small but haunting absence defines this democratic season in the northern district of Wayanad. Amid the banners, door-to-door campaigns, and manifesto promises echoing across the hills, there lies a deep, damp, unbroken silence. The silence of Mundakkai, a gram panchayat ward that no longer exists.
Last year, it was one among Meppadi panchayat’s 22 wards, a quiet, self-sufficient hamlet where plantation workers and small farmers lived side by side, their lives woven into the slopes of tea and coffee estates. Today, Mundakkai is gone, wiped off not just from the geographical maps but also from the electoral rolls.
In the aftermath of the catastrophic landslides that struck Wayanad on July 30, 2024, killing nearly 300 people across Mundakkai, Chooralmala, Punchirimattam and Attamala, the landscape itself was reconfigured. The earth had shifted, roads vanished, streams changed course, and entire clusters of homes lay buried under layers of rock and sludge.
Now, as polling preparations unfold across Kerala, Meppadi’s Ward 11, once Mundakkai, has disappeared from the Election Commission’s map. It no longer exists as a separate entity. Instead, a new ward has emerged, merging the devastated Mundakkai with neighbouring Chooralmala. The new Mundakkai-Chooralmala ward, with 2,241 registered voters, symbolises not renewal but survival.
The old polling stations at Mundakkai GLP School and Vellarmala GVHSS have been erased from the list. Their replacements, Noorul Islam Madrassa and St Sebastian Church, now host voters who live far away from where they once cast their ballots.
“The landslide scarred our electoral map too,” says Meppadi panchayat president K Babu, who once represented the now-extinct ward. “We lost Ward 11, the heart of Mundakkai. Almost all voters from there are scattered now, living in rented homes, government shelters, or with relatives. They will return only on polling day, and even then, just to vote.”
At nearby Chooralmala, C K Noorudeen, who had broken the Left’s decades-long dominance by winning as an independent backed by the UDF in 2020, has decided not to contest again.
“Many of those I used to meet every day are not alive anymore,” he says, his voice steady but heavy. “Party leaders wanted me to contest. But how can I go to families who lost everything and ask for votes? This land has suffered too much. I will sit this one out.”
His words reflect the mood of a community caught between memory and displacement. Many survivors of Mundakkai, mostly plantation workers, are now scattered across Wayanad, living in temporary shelters and waiting for the promised rehabilitation project at Elstone Estate near Kalpetta. The government plans to build a township there for over 400 displaced families, complete with model homes, schools, and basic infrastructure.
But in the meantime, life remains in limbo.
Until that night in July, Mundakkai had been a picture of quiet rural Kerala, its people bound by generations of shared work, small rituals, and a belief that the mountain would always hold them. Men went to the tea slopes at dawn, women carried firewood, children walked to the village school through misty paths.
There were churches, small shops, a ration depot, and a bus that came twice a day. Evenings were for laughter, politics, and tea. The people did not have much, but they had each other, and that was enough.
However, decades of deforestation, road cutting, and reckless construction had already loosened the mountain’s grip. The signs were there — soil erosion, sudden streams, and sinking courtyards. Scientists had warned that Mundakkai was at risk. The people heard, but they stayed. Where else could they go?
When the slopes of Mundakkai collapsed, they buried more than homes. They buried lineages. Families that had lived side by side for generations were gone within minutes. Entire households disappeared without a trace.
In the morning light, rescuers could barely locate where houses once stood. The road had been replaced by a river of mud. The landscape itself had been rewritten.
Months later, those who returned to look for their land found nothing but cracked slopes and silence. “It’s as if the earth swallowed our village,” says Mary George, who now lives with her two children in Meppadi town. “Even the birds don’t come there anymore.”
For the survivors, the merging of their ward feels like a second death, a bureaucratic burial of memory. “First, the landslide took our homes,” says Babu, the panchayat president. “Now, official maps have taken our name.”
Many among the displaced still struggle to rebuild their lives. The trauma runs deep. Government aid and NGO support, like that from the People’s Foundation, which reportedly spent over Rs 60 crore on relief and housing, have kept hope alive, but only barely. Delays in rehabilitation, confusion over beneficiary lists, and the fatigue of prolonged uncertainty have pushed many to despair.
A few families have found temporary relief at makeshift shelters. Others have rented homes in Kalpetta or Meppadi. They meet occasionally, in church compounds, tea stalls, or during official hearings, to remember a place that now exists only in their minds.
A drive to what remains of Mundakkai today feels like entering a no-man’s land. The air is damp, the soil still unstable. A few uprooted trees and broken walls bear witness to what once was. Someone has scrawled a name on a cracked wall, a desperate reminder that this was once home.
On anniversaries, a few survivors come back with flowers and lamps. They light them near what used to be the village stream, now a debris-strewn trench. They stand in silence, mourning what they lost and what can never be reclaimed.
Kerala, often hailed for its resilience and model disaster response, must confront the limits of its preparedness. The Wayanad tragedy—from Puthumala in 2019 to Mundakkai in 2024—is a grim reminder that ecological neglect is no longer a slow crisis. It is sudden, fatal, and final.
Experts say the warning signs were clear — fragile hills destabilised by unscientific development, climate extremes, and human indifference. The state acted, but always after the damage. Now, as voters line up across Kerala’s wards to cast their ballots, the people of Mundakkai will travel miles back to a place that no longer exists to vote in a ward that has replaced their own.
In a democracy that counts every voter, their tragedy stands as a profound irony — a ward that once lived, voted, and dreamt, now erased from both earth and paper. Mundakkai is gone, but it votes still, as memory, as metaphor, and as warning.