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Padayatra of cautious hope
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A padayatra organised by the Ekta Parishad in Bihar has helped spread awareness about landlessness and women's rights. SIDDHARTHA writes on the organisation's goals of development and equality.
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A mass meeting in a district town.
GUNSHOTS rang out just as the Ekta Parishad padayatra entered the town of Bikram, in Bihar. The couple of hundred marchers had walked much of the day and covered 25 km. They had stopped at four villages and discussed issues related to landlessness and the rights of women. Each week they had a different theme. Ekta Parishad was spreading the message that it was possible to have a different Bihar if people were not indifferent. They had started walking at Jamui on September 11, 2001 and when they finished a month later at Patna, the line of marchers was two km long. The leaders of the neo-gandhian movement believed that Bihar could be transformed in a completely non-violent manner.
But the gunfire at Bikram appeared to say: "Don't be naïve. This is Bihar. Even MLAs have criminal records here!" The gunfire was not aimed at the non-violent marchers but was targetted at a moneylender who had come to collect his dues in his Maruti van. The attackers were not political radicals out to teach a lesson to an extortionate moneylender but a couple of youth on a motorbike who had no compunctions to kill and loot for money. The money they grabbed turned out to be around two lakhs. The killers did not wear masks and at least a dozen people would have seen their faces. Yet by the time the police turned up there were no witnesses. When I queried a shopkeeper he told me that it was a pattern the town was by now familiar with: witnesses were too terrified to speak.
"People are now also worried about the self-employment groups," continued the shopkeeper. "What do you mean?" I interjected, uncomprehendingly. "Who are the self-employment groups you speak of?" "You don't know about self-employment groups! Everybody in Bihar knows about them. They are the kidnappers who have sprung up all over the State. Kidnappings happen all the time. Some are reported and some are not. Just look at today's paper. It says that a college student, the son of the assistant manager of a jute mill in Samstipur, has been kidnapped. They will now demand a ransom of a couple of lakhs at least."
Leading the band of padayatris is a remarkable young Gandhian called Rajagopal. He is actually in his mid-fifties but young and robust, compared to the octogenarian Gandhians who hold on to their positions of influence and power, refusing to quit. To his advantage, Rajagopal does not have the bearing of an unapproachable guru but comes across as friendly, witty and unpretentious. Affectionately referred to as "Raja Babu," he is a legend among the tribals of Madhya Pradesh. His touch is light and he has never solved problems with a sledgehammer. In Madhya Pradesh, he is as much respected by the Chief Minister and his bureaucrats as the tribals whose cause he has so effectively champions.
At the end of a six-month padayatra, in which hundreds of thousands of tribals took part, the government of Madhya Pradesh set up a task force for tribal affairs whose primary mandate was to distribute land to the landless. The Chief Minister is the chairman of this no-nonsense task force that also includes Rajagopal.
Before embarking on his mission to Bihar, Rajagopal stated that they were planning to set out on foot, moving from village to village and district to district, with "the dream of peace in this land of Buddha and Mahavira, the land of `Bhoodan', of Ganga and the land that has claimed and fostered the ideal of `samagra kranti' (total revolution)." Gently but passionately, he argued that "the waves of violence in this land of ahimsa are like a patch of dark clouds, which are trying to cover the sky. It takes strong winds to sweep these dark clouds. This Bihar padayatra is the first such attempt to face this challenge with firm determination."
After Jharkhand was carved out of the State, Bihar has become even more desperately poor. It does not have even a single significant industry; all the mines and industrial units having gone to Jharkhand. The only two sources of livelihood are agriculture and government jobs. "Bihar could feed the rest of India if the right conditions existed" said one member of the padayatra, Rakesh Nath Tiwary, an NGO worker. "And this need not be a boast given the rich rice growing tracts of the Gangetic plain. Yet the lack of government plans leads to floods in the north and drought in the south. So despite all the potential, extreme poverty still stalks the villages of Bihar. With a large population of landless agricultural workers, the pressure on land is enormous. This is the root of much of our caste violence."
One of the journalists associated with the padayatra told me that Laloo Prasad Yadav was too busy with his legal problems to be worried about the affairs of State. "He leaves each morning for the court and stays there till about 1 p.m. Then he goes back for lunch and takes a siesta till about five. The evening is spent with his courtiers. There is hardly any review of the government. Rabri Devi does not have the ability to do this. So the drift goes on and there is little governance worth mentioning." I could see that he was probably right. The roads of Patna were filthy with garbage strewn all over. The garbage collectors had been on strike for the past six months for a variety of grievances. They had also not been paid their wages for several months. Interestingly, I found the public water taps in the State were not fitted with taps. Water spouted out of the tap-less pipes as if they were perennial springs, leading to enormous wastage. I thought of all the electricity that was used to pump the water into overhead tanks so that they could flow from these tap-less spouts. One person told me that there were no taps because the public works department was afraid they would be stolen; although I wondered if that was giving too much credit to the imagination of the municipal functionaries.
I travelled in a jeep from Bikram to Bodh Gaya, a distance of less than 100 km, to visit the temple that drew Buddhist pilgrims from all over the world. The journey took six hours. In places there was no road at all and the jeep had to negotiate small craters. It was the time of the bombing of Afghanistan and I couldn't help imagining that this particular road had been carpet bombed by enemy planes. It was early October and the condition of the roads stood in sharp contrast to the luxuriant rice fields all around. Despite the floods and the droughts rice production in Bihar was still close to national average. Bur many people looked malnourished. Obviously, the presence of food stocks did not mean that the poor would have enough to eat. Even the pigs in the dalit villages looked malnourished. The pigs, kept by the mostly landless dalit Musahars, were a source of conflict in the villages since they destroyed crops when they sneaked into the fields in search of food.
It took us more than an hour to travel from Gaya to Bodh Gaya, a distance of about 10 km or so. Narrow roads piled with flies, garbage, vendors, horse carts, pedestrians, jeeps, cars and buses made us advance almost at snail's pace. Vast amounts of filth and dirt lined both Gaya and Bodh Gaya and the stench was all pervading. One couldn't help wishing that at least at Bodh Gaya, the place where the Buddha attained enlightenment, the government would make some efforts to spruce up the city from time to time. After all tourism to Bodh Gaya could rake in considerable revenue to the State exchequer. But perhaps it was appropriate that the Buddha shared the fate of the poor and ordinary Biharis. After all Buddhism is about overcoming suffering and what better place to confront suffering than Bihar itself.
The padayatra walked through 342 villages in six southern districts of Bihar — Jamui, Nawada, Nalanda, Gaya, Jahanabad and Patna. A group of volunteers surveyed 84 of these villages and came up with some disquieting facts. The main issues were landlessness, entitlement without possession of land and possession without entitlement. The percentage of landlessness was very high — 47 per cent among the families of the villages surveyed. Of the landless families, 60 per cent were dalits and a little over 30 per cent were OBCs, less than five per cent came from upper caste households. There were many villages where the entire dalit population was landless. In 51 of the 84 villages all dalits were landless. Upper and backwards castes controlled the land in almost all the villages and put down the grievances of the dalits with threats and violence.
Despite the incessant violence in the country the padayatra went through almost 700 km without incident. Neither the Ranvir Sena, an upper caste organisation of goons who massacre dalits regularly, nor the naxal outfits, made any attempt to obstruct the marchers. The Ranvir Sena today possesses a large number of AK 47 and AK 56 rifles and even some deadly turbines. The Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) uses terror to defend the interests of the dalits and the poorer Yadavs and Kurmis. The People's War Group (PWG), another naxalite organisation, has landmines in its arsenal. In the 1999 parliamentary elections, 40 policemen were killed by mines going off.
Shaibal Gupta, of the Asian Development Research Institute, Patna, told me that the recent panchayat elections in Bihar had certainly empowered the backward castes and dalits but this did not even remotely imply that the economic stagnation in the countryside was at an end. In South India, social empowerment sometimes followed economic development, as far as the backward castes were concerned. But not in Bihar, where economic development was a non-starter. Shaibal quaintly classified Bihar's elites into the "traditional", the "vernacular" and the "cockney". The traditional elites were relegated into the background several decades ago. Today the vernacular elites, the motor behind the green revolution, and represented by the upper-backward castes, were abdicating in favour of a loose formation called the cockney elites. The vernacular elites were represented by the wealthier backwards like the Yadavs, Kurmis, Koeris, Banias and others. The cockney elites were drawn from the lower backwards who represented 33 per cent of the population. Some of the poorer vernacular elites might also be classified as lower backward. This represented a formidable political formation in Bihar, and Laloo Prasad Yadav, in alliance with the dalits and Muslims, was their leader. The emergence of the lower-backward cockney elites was the result of electoral rather than economic empowerment.
Shaibal went on to state that the cockney elites had no aspirations to imitate the vernacular "bhadralok". They were a rough and ready variety, non-sanskritic in their sensibilities, with a worldview that was provincial. Nor were they attracted to dynamic western ideas of development. "Their social experience does not extend beyond the limits of caste-based wheeling and dealing and their language is <147,1,0>self-sufficient with the local dialect. Intellectually, and through their caste-class disposition they are equipped to manage just the panchayats as local power centres. They are either on the fringe of the market or outside. Development is beyond their horizon."
If one goes by this analysis, Laloo Prasad Yadav represents the culture of the cockney elites quintessentially. In a well-reported incident a villager approached him about the state of neglect of their local primary health centre. He is stated to have retorted with irritation that his concern was not the primary health centre but the capture of power in New Delhi. Although he had briefly hoped to become the Prime Minister of India his concerns had still to do with power sans development. It was still a cockney vision. Shaibal's analysis may sound somewhat elitist and patronising but his insistence that in the absence of a modernising impulse Bihar could only limit itself to social empowerment is worthy of note.
The awakening of women was a significant issue in the padayatra. Jill Carr-Harris, a Canadian born social scientist who took part in the march, stated that women have a special role in non-violent action. "The landless families need a minimum plot of land to have the necessary food security not only to survive but also to protect their sovereign rights," she said. "Women are the greatest guardians of food security because of their reproductive and productive roles. They form the majority of agricultural labourers and marginal farmers. The resistance to privatisation of agriculture is a concern for women as they have a rootedness to the land. Women also have a great tendency to non-violent action, as they are the protectors of the family. They have the most to lose when there is an atmosphere of personal insecurity because of their vulnerability in having few land entitlements." One of the demands of the Ekta Parishad is to allot to women the titles of all new land that is redistributed.
What does the Ekta Parishad hope to achieve in Bihar now that the padayatra is over? Rajagopal had this question uppermost in his mind as he talked to peasants during the march. It was clear to him that land rights were to be the centrepiece of any follow-up strategy. The land ceiling had to be lowered to enable hundreds of thousands of landless labourers to have a patch of their own to cultivate. In this he was fortunate to find that the Rabri-Laloo government was thinking along similar terms. Of course there would be stiff opposition even from the Yadavs as some of them will stand to lose land. The Ekta Parishad, which is strongly committed to non-violence, would be seriously weakened if violence broke out. The question of distributing bhoodan land and government land would be less controversial, though even here much of the land was already in the possession of the wealthier landowners and they would be unwilling to part with it. As already mentioned, the women in Ekta Parishad insist that the fresh land titles handed over should be made in the name of women as they are the ones with primary responsibility to look after the children and nurture the family. If this happens it would usher in a new age for women's rights in Bihar.
There are many who believe that Ekta Parishad should put its energies into strengthening democracy in Bihar, and what better way to do this than getting the new panchayats to work. If they succeed here this may unleash fresh energies that could catapult development as the central issue in Bihar. Whether it will eventually lead to a new political process where caste slips temporarily to the background and development to the foreground is too early to say. But now that social empowerment has got well under way the only way for the State to avoid stagnation and large-scale violence is to progressively create jobs in the modern sector and shift some of the pressure from the land. But this is easier said than done, as Bihar has to first put adequate investments in infastructural areas like roads, power, irrigation and transportation to attract investment. Agro-industries are probably a safe bet to begin Bihar's industrial journey.
The Ekta Parishad may also create an élan in the small middle class population by helping create civil society processes that act to reduce corruption and inefficiency and usher in a measure of accountability. For example if civil society initiatives lead to the disappearance of the garbage heaps on the streets and a reduction of crime it could awaken the now despondent urban citizenry to a sense of their own relevance. One thing the Ekta Parishad is determined to do is to carry out large-scale training of youth in non-violent direct action programmes. This means two things; one, assimilating non-caste values and insights that can motivate such action, and two, acquiring the skills to intervene in concrete issues related to the democratisation of panchayati raj. Its still too early to say if a movement like Ekta Parishad can stem the rot and prevent the withering away of the State in Bihar. But an impressive beginning has been made and the timing is right to harness the new energies emanating from a people who are realising that the present caste-based politics can only lead them deeper into the abyss.
The Transforming Word
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