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PROPERTY prices along National Highway 11, which connects Jaipur and Agra, have soared in recent years, and clear signs of prosperity dot the stretch from Jaipur to Dausa. On both sides of the road, there are pieces of sculpture carved out of sandstone, waiting for buyers. The recent agitation for Scheduled Tribe status by the Gujjars of Rajasthan, which spilled over to Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Uttarakhand and even Madhya Pradesh, disturbed the upbeat mood. It stopped work, inconvenienced travellers and affected supplies of essential commodities. (The Supreme Court has criticised the handling of the agitation and rapped the police in four States.) For instance, Ram Avatar Saini, who owns a stone-cutting unit in the Jaipur-Dausa stretch, is an embittered man: the agitation made him incur losses running into crores.
Further down the highway, Peepalkheda village is trying to come to terms with a different kind of loss. Six people died here in the police firing on May 29; two of them were from the village. On the same day, another six were shot dead on the Jaipur-Kota highway at Bundi. All the dead were Gujjars.
The police officers who ordered the firing in both cases happened to be Meenas, members of the S. T. that has emerged as the chief adversary of Gujjars in this conflict. At Bundi, as at Peepalkheda, the police fired on unarmed people early in the morning, before the planned blockade could take off. In Peepalkheda-Patoli villages, all the victims of the police firing, barring one middle-aged man, were young men. One of the victims, Ram Vir from Peepalkheda, was only 19 and had been married for a year.
Most of the Gujjars in Peepalkheda, as in the rest of the State, are engaged in agricultural work - kheti baadi, they call it. The population is mixed, but Gujjar households outnumber other communities in Peepalkheda: 300 of the 500 households belong to Gujjars. Patoli, a few kilometres down the highway, is similarly structured with around 200 Gujjar families. These two are the only Gujjar-dominated villages on the highway; Meenas form the majority in the rest. Understandably, therefore, the blockade of May 29 was planned at a point between the two villages.
Bacchan Singh Gujjar, a resident of Peepalkheda, recalled that the call for the "chakka jam" (roadblock) was given for 11 a.m. The police firing around seven o'clock that morning was completely unexpected. Ram Niwas was on his way to a temple when he was caught in the firing and died. Villagers alleged that police harassment started the previous night when policemen picked on women and children at random and beat them up. Teejo, a woman in her seventies, said she was sleeping outside her home when policemen hit her on her legs.
The police had camped at the Reliance-owned, fancy A I Plaza outlet at Peepalkheda on the highway from May 27. Plaza employees said they witnessed villagers being beaten up around 1-30 a.m. on May 29. "When the situation got out of control, the police ran away. Our plaza got destroyed because the `administration' was staying here. We provided them with food round the clock. They stayed here for three days until the firing," one of the employees said. Angry agitators vandalised the A I Plaza after the police firing, but other private eateries on the road were left untouched.
The woes of Peepalkheda and Patoli did not end with the death of six men. As the agitation spread to the nearby districts of Alwar, Sawai Madhopur and Bharatpur, a new adversary emerged - the Meenas. In much of eastern Rajasthan, where the agitation was concentrated, Gujjar and Meena villages lie side by side; in larger villages with mixed populations, the two groups live more or less in harmony. But Meenas, who as a S.T. occupy many of the posts reserved for this category, presumably felt threatened by the Gujjar agitation for S.T. status though they far outstrip Gujjars numerically in the State.
Egged on by powerful leaders such as Minister Kirori Lal Meena of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the community laid siege to the Gujjar blockade from all sides. If the government was unable to clear the highways, the Meenas said, they would do it. Armed groups came out on the streets and a truck carrying supplies from Delhi to the two Gujjar villages was set on fire. Manohar Singh Gujjar, a local resident, told Frontline that there was no water or power in Patoli and Peepalkheda during the "siege". The villagers survived on ghoogri, a loose porridge made with wheat and water. "Our battle was not with the Meenas; it was with the government, but the Meenas played a very negative role," he said.
The road from the Dausa district headquarters to Lalsot, NH 11 (a), runs parallel to NH 11 all the way to Sawai Madhopur. After the police firing on May 29, members of the Gujjar Arakshan Sangharsh Samiti blocked this road. On May 31, Meenas wanted to hold a meeting at Nangal Pyaariwas, some 5 km from Lalsot town; they planned a session of their "high court", an euphemism for the caste panchayat, as a Meena elder explained. "We told the tehsildar, Kamal Singh Gujjar, that he should get the road cleared, otherwise we would be forced to do so," he said. The Meenas had their way; four Gujjars died as they tried to prevent the Meenas from attending the meeting. A week after the clashes, the atmosphere was still tense in Lalsot.
At Maujpur village on NH 11, Dhandu Ram Meena, a Zilla Parishad member from the Congress and a former sarpanch, recalled proudly how some 250,000 Meenas surrounded Patoli and Peepalkheda and cut off supplies. The administration, he said, was nowhere in sight. Meenas were mobilised from five districts, including towns like Mahwa, Todabhim, Rajgarh, Nandoti, Laxmangarh, Sikrai, Dausa, Baswa, Lalsot and Alwar. He is opposed to the Gujjar demand for S.T. status: "The future of our children will get affected. Gujjars should stay as Other Backward Classes." He added that his community, unlike the Gujjars, spent on children's education: "They don't study beyond a point. After Class 8, the men join the military and the women drop out of school. We even mortgage our meagre landholdings to educate our children," he said. The former sarpanch has memories of Meenas and Gujjars having fun together at the annual Jain Mela but says that the rift is too wide to bridge.
Meghraj Meena, an undergraduate student of Bandikui College, said there were 10 or 12 government employees at Maujpur, a village of some 40 households. (In Peepalkheda, which has 300 Gujjar households, there are only a couple of government employees.) The Meenas' landholdings were very small, he said, adding that the Gujjars were not well off either. "But our traditions are different. Why don't the Gujjars demand for an increase in the OBC quota?"
Manohar Singh Gujjar explained why his community is not able to educate its children: "We cannot send our girls to Mahwa. It is not safe. And it is only now that our school got upgraded to senior secondary; otherwise, it used to be only till Class 8."
Gujjars complain that they now face police harassment. Dashrath Singh, a resident of Peepalkheda, said at least nine first information reports were filed against members of the community, though nobody was arrested from the village. "We are with the Colonel," he said firmly, referring to Colonel (retd) Kirori Singh Bainsla, who led the agitation.
Agreement and aftermath
On June 4, Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje finally met the leaders of the Gujjar Arakshan Sangharsh Samiti. She announced the setting up of a three-member committee to be chaired by a retired High Court Judge. A few days later, it was announced that Justice Jasraj Chopra would head the committee and that a report would be submitted in three months. The committee's terms of reference were not revealed. In a statement, Bainsla apologised for the inconvenience caused by the agitation and described the constitution of the committee as a positive step.
Soon after the truce, charges including those of attempted murder were filed against Bainsla, his close aide Roop Singh and several hundred Gujjars. In areas like Bayana in Bharatpur district, Mahwa in Dausa district, and in Sawai Madhopur district, the police began rounding up people they suspected had been involved in arson and destruction of public property. Several Gujjar men fled their homes. These actions drew strong reactions from several other organisations such as the Dev Sena (named after the Gujjar deity Devnarayan) and the All India Gujjar Mahasabha.
On June 8, the Gujjar Mahasabha organised a "mahapanchayat" at Pushkar, Ajmer district, and demanded that every family should donate at least "one son" for the cause. The meeting, which was chaired by Nasirabad legislator Govind Singh Gujjar, culminated in the formation of a new front, the Samyukta Gujjar Arakshan Morcha. The meeting also demanded that the government stop persecuting Gujjars. Another meeting was scheduled for June 24 to decide the future course of action. Avtar Singh Bhadana, a Congress legislator from Haryana, was among the Gujjar leaders who participated. Bainsla and Roop Singh were unable to attend.
Almost every Gujjar leader is now keen to join the the fray, not willing to miss this opportunity of caste mobilisation. According to a political scientist at Rajasthan University, the BJP lured Gujjars with the carrot of reservation because Meenas and other S.Ts in the State mostly supported the Congress. Gujjars were also traditionally Congress supporters, but that changed after Rajesh Pilot's death.
Politics of reservation
The assurance of reservation to Gujjars reaped fairly rich dividends for the BJP in the 2003 Assembly elections. Before that, the BJP had only two Gujjar legislators; now it has six. It wrested the Mahwa Assembly seat from the Congress on the promise of reservation to the community. In Bayana, Mandal Todabhim and Khetdi, too, sitting Congress legislators lost to the BJP. In Ramganjmandi, Kota, Prahlad Gunjal, a relative newcomer, defeated a Congress Minister, Ram Kishen Verma. In 65 constituencies, the Gujjar vote was decisive.
It took the BJP some time to wake up to the dimensions of the genie it helped unleash. On June 3, a day before the agitation was called off and the agreement brokered, central leaders such as Gopinath Munde who is in charge of Rajasthan, former Minister Ananth Kumar, and party spokesperson Prakash Javdekar and State president Mahesh Sharma held day-long confabulations.
On June 10, the Rajasthan BJP leadership suspended Gunjal and Attar Singh Bhadana for taking part in a Gujjar Mahasabha meeting at Jhalawar where a resolution was passed against the Chief Minister. Perhaps to show that no bias was intended, 20 other legislators, including three Ministers from the Meena community, were also issued warnings.
Driving force
R.D. Gujjar, who heads the Geography Department in Rajasthan University, said that Gujjars were mostly poor, illiterate and culturally isolated. Over the years, they have watched Meenas prosper. Another Gujjar academic pointed out that even if the community was given the benefit of reservation, it would have very few members who would be able to make use of it. The demand for reservation, says R.D. Gujjar, is an expression of frustration in a community that finds itself in crisis with extremely small landholdings and a threatened pastoral existence in the face of dwindling grazing lands.
Rajasthan University employs 650 teachers, of whom only five are Gujjars. "Even if you assume that Gujjars constitute 5 per cent of the population, there should be at least 25 teachers from this community," said R.D. Gujjar. Four of the five Gujjar teachers teach in the Geography Department. Here, too, there is a pattern, he explains. "If any one person gets in, it acts as a leverage for others to get in." Of the 25,000 students on the campus, only around 400 are Gujjars. In the prestigious Maharani College with 6,000 students, there are hardly 20 Gujjar girls in the undergraduate courses.
Historian R.K. Pant and sociologist Rajeev Gupta from Rajasthan University believe that with Assembly elections due in 2008, the issue will be kept alive one way or the other. In a system where education is seen as only a tool for economic and social mobility, Pant says, Gujjars have similar aspirations as others.
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