Narrating contemporary struggles

The book looks at a padyatra organised in Madhya Pradesh for the land rights of adivasis and dalits. Movements like the Ekta Parishad, through non-violent means, attempt to give back to the deprived their humanity and dignity which the State and other power structures have denied them in the name of development, says MAJA DARUWALA.

A SHORT book and a quick-read, Defeated Innocence is about the struggles of the poor for jamin, jal and jungle. It looks at one single event - a padyatra for land rights in Madhya Pradesh by Ekta Parishad, an umbrella organisation of Adivasis and Dalits - and analyses its genesis, implementation, underlying vision and the chronology of the struggle. The book is privately published and will probably get little attention except among the converted.

This is a real pity, because books like this should be required reading in courses on development, sociology, law, political science and certainly Indian administration. This is not because it is particularly learned but because it speaks from the point of view of local experiences and captures the richness and dignity commonplace in millions of every-day lives. For the most part, governance is not studied as a subject. But it should be and narratives of contemporary struggles told simply and sympathetically must not be unfamiliar territory to the educated. This book is an illustrative primer on ways in which development can deprive people of all they own, especially their dignity. It profiles the eminence that exists in village after village amongst the most poor and disadvantaged and the inordinate amounts of courage they must bring to their everyday lives simply in order to survive the day. It forces respect for the average Indian citizen. This is a quality especially missing in the education of those who go on to govern large tracts of India and in the course of their careers, increasingly forget about, and become alienated from, the people whose servants they are.

The book concentrates on the padyatra as a method of highlighting issues, creating awareness of rights amongst the unlettered, mobilising a dispossessed people and finally forcing response from the State. It stresses what goes into these efforts: into the psychological preparation and the physical organisation. Self-help groups and local leadership sit night after night thinking out the campaign strategy and implementation. As they work through the logistics, they think about the consequences and agree to face up the risks. They have to find food, water, shelter for the night, blankets and transport. Amazingly, people who have barely enough to cover themselves provide handfuls of grain, wood for their fires, utensils, and a safe haven wherever the swelling numbers come to rest. Everyday brings a triumph of spirit - as when the yatris win a long negotiation for compensation while the body of the dead woman killed in a work accident lies rotting in the sun. Or it brings a test of mettle - as when the Chief Minister will finally only agree to announce yet another task force to look into land distribution. Throughout it all, those entrusted with the leadership make efforts to keep up spirits, keep the fight focussed and get the message out to the world that there is a fight for justice going on here.

In the absence of an effective and self-confident State - a state that can free its people from want, ensure personal security and safety and assure equity and human dignity - more and more the business of governance is slipping into the hands of non-state actors. The poor have few alternatives. They can choose to remain passive receivers of uncertain government largess or remain oppressed and ruled by traditional systems of caste and power. Or, as is often the case, the vacuum is filled by violent actors from the far left and far right who depend on oppression and violence to ensure dominance.

Large self-help groups like Ekta Parishad offer an attractive alternative to these options. In an area full of armed feudal landlords, disaffected bands of violent Marxists, caste-based vigilante groups, dacoits, and everyday traffickers in women, the leadership of Ekta Parishad espouses a declared policy of non- violence. The ideological position of Ekta Parishad is "to rediscover the radical in Gandhi". They base themselves in the notion of village revitalisation and getting empowerment to the very last person. Something which the market economy of today thinks is so quaint, so anthropologically interesting to observe and examine, but so helplessly out of tune with the realities of the day. Its arguments and persuasion are framed in terms of the demand for implementation and realisation of constitutional guarantees and protections provided by law.

Groups like Ekta Parishad organise lakhs of people across thousands of villages into self-helping communities. They can do so only because they are welcome. But by challenging power relations and indicating the ineffectiveness of the local administration, the Ekta Parishad, and its ability to mobilise the victims into a force for change, has come to occupy a very contested space. For one, it has become an affront to the State in a way that the presence of absolute poverty itself has never been an affront. On the other hand, the very real armed revolutionaries of the locality see their own ability to capture peoples' imagination and loyalty blunted by non-violent struggles and meet this with violence and intimidation. The long absence of any meaningful land reform also ensures that the final weight of the mill-stone in which the Adivasi and Dalit poor are ground down, is added to by the unbroken oppression of the feudal landlords. The intervention of independence and constitutonalism have made little difference here. A slew of laws, against forced labour, usury, untouchability, women's equality and caste-based discrimination have not budged old power structures. In fact the old power elite have made a transition into modernity smoothly and transformed themselves from feudal overlords into present day political representatives without much of a wrinkle to their ancient power base.

Since both Naxals and constitutionalists struggle from the same cause of action, movements like the Ekta Parishad are often branded as incubators of revolution and seen as a threat to local law and order by a tense administration that is unused to being questioned by the poor. Unsubstantiated accusations of being the cat's paw of foreign influence, religious proselytisers, or fellow travellers of violent groups, dog efforts to promote a development that is not centered around profit but around people. While the State is often in open armed confrontation with violent groups, it nevertheless resents the power and independence of non-violent organising groups and seeks to curb them in a thousand ways. You have only to look at the steady growth of curbs on NGOs and their right to associate to discern this pattern.

Ideally, the law should adjudicate these conflicts dispassionately. But the thought that legislation or the legal system can come to the rescue has little mention in the book. Given how increasingly far away the legal system is from ordinary lives, it is hardly surprising that large mass movements place little stress on the law as a tool for social change. Instead, it becomes clear how at every stage the legal system vandalises the poor of their possessions. To add insult to injury, the laws mock at the poor by requiring that at every turn they need to read and write in order to resist a land acquisition order, or to stake their claim to be the tiller of land, or to protest if someone has encroached on it, or get permission to use forest produce or even to retrieve illegally confiscated tools. Whether it is to steer clear of infringing the many rules and orders that bind their lives or whether it is to get just about any entitlement, the citizen needs to present authority with a card, a registration, a ledger entry, release, license or official certificate. Deprived of education for 50 years, the majority must rely on bribing their way through, or be subservient to the powerful so they can catch the crumbs of patronage as they fall off the tables of the mighty. They are reduced to seeking audience and making groveling petitions to the magistrate or local authority who continue to be their mai-baap in a way that would have made any coloniser or conquistador envious.

It is hard to understand why people so tragically poor, so ground under the heal of "law" and so cheated by its provisions should continue to rely on its ability to provide some protection and seed change. But despite all, peoples' movements like Ekta Parishad are rooted in notions of rule of law. With little evidence to back it up, there remains a touching belief that in the end the law will come to the aid of the true. They often approach the higher courts and even win their cases. But court directions hardly benefit the ground situation. In fact, a win at court often exacerbates the situation on the ground. Often it only leads to complete flouting of the law, lays bare the dumb defiance that is prevalent in the officials in the system and increases the bitterness of the sufferers. While activists can make the courts annunciate a broad principle of social justice, the time and energy wasted in approaching local courts to adjudicate urgent issues of every day survival seems laughable in the context of the rural poor. So direct action is increasingly the option emphasised by those seeking remedies for wrongs done to them. Certainly the risk may be great but the possibility of seeding change can be greater than waiting for your day in court.

Rahul Ramagundam, a Ph.D. student at JNU and the author of Defeated Innocence, identifies himself, as all advocates of good governance must, with the uphill struggle for equity, social justice, and human rights being fought by the majority of India's people - the poor. The author teases out all the strategies and the methodologies that can lay the foundation for sustained activism for social justice.

Written with deep sympathy by a clear and sharp eyed observer of the struggle for survival, the author walks along with the yatris as they try to regain the basic entitlement which are theirs by right, theirs by law, theirs by history and yet made unavailable to them by the design of modern development, the machinations of the system and the neglect and lethargy of the administration. What accompanies the reader throughout the text is the extraordinary will, determination and courage that must be needed by each very poor, unlettered, often hungry and neglected individual, preoccupied with issues of survival, to join together, handful by handful, out of isolated hamlets to become a great and purposeful march for justice. In coming together they stake their all in concerted acts of protest in the best traditions of the Mahatma. There is little promised and no guarantee of success. Indeed as the book's title indicates, there is every possibility of defeat staring them in the face, yet it would seem that they need this effort of self-determination if only to give themselves a sense of their own humanity even if no one else will recognise it.

The logic of the marchers' cause is so commonsensical that it is bewildering to understand why so many lives must be lost, and time and money wasted, in wresting each entitlement from those entrusted with democracy. The sheer effort, and energy of dispossessed people to wake up each morning and determine to take on the system in solidarity with each other must become more widely known. On reading this slim book, there is the faintest chance that envy, if not full blown admiration, will jerk more privileged readers at least half way out of their seats and summon a weak cheer even as the tired elite hand sinks back into lethargy with a moan about "where this country is going to". Quite clearly, it is going to the people.

Defeated Innocence: Adivasi Assertion, Land Rights and the Ekta Parishad Movement, Rahul Ramagundam, Grassroots India, p. 156, Rs. 299.

The writer is Director, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative.

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