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PHOTOESSAY
BY RAGHU RAI |
Nothing can prepare
you for the man in the ambulance waiting under the seething keekar tree.
The arms are stumps; the left leg is amputated at the knee. The right
leg socks the wind out of you. Four steel screws plunge out of his bone
from shin to knee, girded together by a steel bar. The skin strains against
the intrusion, protesting in blood. Inside another steel plate grates
against bone, struggling to keep the smashed pieces together. The bandaged
foot cannot hide the gangrene setting in. Bant Singh, 45, is about to
lose his remaining toes. But his spirit — it soars. Spiralling unimprisoned
beneath the baking hot sky.
“What is
a little more pain?” he laughs. “They left my real weapons
intact. My tongue, my voice, my mind.” His stump reaches up —
a memory of earlier agility — to touch his lilac turban with pride.
Every time he speaks, you sense his missing limbs. He cannot move, but
everything about him suggests quick movement. Bant Singh is a handsome
man. It is one of the reasons a band of upper caste Jat Sikhs beat him
so mercilessly in the field that fateful January night. He wore his
head too high, his turban too proud, his moustache too stiff. He insisted
on living like a man in a land accustomed to shirking his shadow. That
was the root enmity; the rest was just trimmings.
The ambulance waits
in the compound of the CPI (ML) office in Mansa, a district in Punjab.
Bhagat Singh is everywhere. A little distance away, legions of dalit
landless labour and small holding Jat farmers are gathering at a rally
beneath surging white canopy and red flags. The Naxal movement of the
70s had staggered feudal excesses in the better part of Punjab, but
Malwa remained a preserve of old ways. Now Bant Singh has become a defining
moment.
In a few minutes,
he will be among the crowd, a powerful tableau on a stage, a symbol
of gathering resistance across the region. As his story is told again,
people break down and cry. “I remember what he looked like once.
Then I remember all the suffering of my own life,” says Gulab
Kaur from neighbouring Barnala. Leader after leader approaches the mike
and thunder for a change in social order. Then Bant breaks into song:
“The history of our country teaches us this, the oppressed always
wins, and our looters are destroyed.” The song rips through the
crowd like electricity. Out of this will Bant has turned his broken
body into an effulgent sign of hope.
It is four months
since Tehelka first wrote of Bant Singh, the dalit revolutionary singer
brutalised for his rebel spirit. Three, since it put out an appeal for
support. Readers across the country responded with generous cheques. We
are travelling now to deliver the tribute — Rs 3,85,000 sent by
strangers — to him. He receives it at the rally with quiet grace.
“We will never forget the people who have reached out to give strength
to poor men,” he says. “We will continue to fight till we
have breath.”
WHY
BANT MOVED ME
SOME
CONTRIBUTORS TO THE FUND SPEAK
You
need guts to call a spade a spade. Like the way Bant Singh and
Aamir Khan did. So when I read about Bant Singh, I was moved and
wanted to contribute in my own little way. Even in the future,
I shall contribute in whatever manner possible.
Dr PK Lakhani | New Delhi
I
felt mad to read of another rape case. “My tongue is there.
I can still sing.” His willpower touched me. Hats off to
his fighting spirit. We hardly meet such strong-willed people
and I am glad though in a small way I was able to touch his life.
Sona Sareen | New Delhi
In
spite of being one of the most developed states of the country,
Punjab still has landlordism. Bant Singh’s story testifies
to the existence of caste system there. Every secular and progressive
person of this country should support him. In fact, I felt guilty
at sending in my contribution two weeks late.
Sheoraj Singh Bechain | New Delhi
We
hear of injustices but do nothing about it. But Bant Singh did.
He had everything to lose, he lost everything, including his motion.
But he still went on and on. He is one of a kind. In what he has
done, he is an inspiration to many of us.
Kunal Kapoor | Mumbai
|
You would not expect
the village of Burj Jhabber to throw up a giant spirit. But Bant Singh’s
hut — a smudge of packed mud and crumbling, loose brick, a structure
so tentative in its expectation of the world, it is not even cemented
together — is testimony to the unpredictable gifts of Nature,
the unpredictable visitations of the human spirit. Bant grew up in this
village, the son of a landless labourer. Hungry, barefooted, often possessed
of no clothes, a restlessness ran in his blood. When he was about 10
or 12, he heard the wandering mazdoor poet, Sant Ram Udasi sing at a
gathering. “I heard him and felt he was singing about us,”
says Bant. He was rivetted. “After that I would chase him everywhere,
I thirsted after his songs.” The Sant’s voice illuminated
a world Bant could never have imagined. It sang of equality and pride
and revolution. It evoked the possibility of change.
Bitten, Bant signed
up with the underground Vinod-Mishra led Indian People’s Front
when he was about 17. Around 1992, he moved away briefly, then rejoined
the overground CPI (ML). The faultlines in the village began to grow.
Mentored by veterans leftists like Sukhdarshan Singh Natt, Bant began
to mobilise landless labour within and around the village, enlisting
membership into the Mazdoor Mukti Morcha, galvanising them to demand
minimum wages and relief from debt traps. He insisted his pigs drink
from the same pond as the buffaloes of upper caste landlords. He ran
a thumbprint campaign against Amrik Singh, a corrupt ration depot holder,
and got his license cancelled. He took up people’s cases with
the police and negotiated better deals for them from the establishment.
In 2000, he committed the ultimate transgression. His 17-year old daughter
Balwant Kaur was raped by two boys, Mandhir Singh, a Jat, and Tarsem
Singh, a Mazbhi Sikh. Breaking established custom, Bant and his family
refused to compromise. Hostilities mounted dangerously. One day, Navdeep
Singh, the depot holder Amrik Singh’s son, banged his motorcycle
into Bant’s pigs. According to Amit Prasad, ssp, Mansa, the police
had to take preventive action on both sides. But these were just symptoms.
As Prasad told Tehelka, “Bant used to give them back in equal
measure what had traditionally been the right of the upper castes. Undoubtedly
the upper castes harboured a bias against him.”
On 5 January, 2006,
the bias erupted into a brutal beating. Bant Singh was cycling home
late after collecting memberships for the Mazdoor Mukti Morcha from
neighbouring villages. A group of youngsters attacked him in the field
with hand pump handles. Bant tried to give them the slip, but they ran
him down on a scooter and pulped his limbs. When Bant’s rescuers
came hours later, one of the farmhands fainted at the sight. But Bant
retained consciousness throughout. “I was a very strong man,”
Bant laughs in the ambulance, a quicksilver gleam in his eye. “I
was full of muscle. I could eat two chickens at a go!” His wife,
Harbans Kaur, a stoic sturdy woman, mother of eight, smiles slightly
at his side.
The story of Bant
Singh is the story of a giant spirit. Fired by that spirit, it is easy
to forget that symbols are smelted out of the pain of flesh. The grist
of life has to be lived. The brute contraption must be borne. Bant Singh’s
songs spiral unimprisoned beneath the baking hot sky, but as his daughter
Balwant Kaur takes her place next to him on the stage, she weeps uncontrollably
by his side. His stoic wife trembles briefly. After the crowds leave,
there is still the hospital bed, and the jerking, wincing ride home.
The pigs are gone — there is nobody to look after them. The family
is scattered. And when you enter the tentative structure of loose brick
and crumbling mud, the heat hits you like a nuclear blast. There is
not enough space for five people to stand.
Yet, yet, the spirit
is indomitable. Soon after the savage attack, the Congress government
in Punjab awarded a Rs 10-lakh compensation to Bant and his family.
(It has still not denounced the incident publicly though.) Sukhraj Natt,
a local Congress politician and a known supporter of Bant’s assailants,
went along with the dc and ssp for a photo-op to hand the money over
to Bant’s wife. Harbans Kaur, sick, needy, marooned alone in the
village with her eight children, scorned the cheque. “Take that
man Sukhraj out of my sight,” she raged, “if he touches
the cheque I will not take it.” Natt had to beat an undignified
retreat. The officers were forced to return later with the cheque.
What will Bant do
with the money, you wonder. “Raise my children,” he says
quietly, lying in a charpoy outside his failing hut, flanked by two
police guards. The seven boys who beat him are in jail, but their benefactors,
the two sarpanch brothers Niranjan Singh Sidhu and Jaswant Singh live
barely half a kilometre away in a faux haveli, with bougainvillaea spilling
out of their walls. “And when I am better, I will build a pucca
house a little further away, closer to my people. We are too isolated
here. If they ever come again, it will be too late before anyone can
come to our help.”
Ask the thin, attractive
daughter what she will do if the men come their way again. Fire flashes
in her eye. It is not easy for a rape victim to speak out in these parts.
She was having an affair they say. But Balwant Kaur refuses to be cowed
down. She has spoken at a labour conference in faraway Rajahmundhry,
Andhra Pradesh. “I will answer their bricks with stones,”
she says now. “My father never stopped fighting for me, I will
never stop fighting for my father. When I went to meet him the first
time in the hospital, he broke down. I told him there is no time for
tears now. We must be strong.” Her ailing mother is having a fit
outside. Balwant steps to her without a fuss, grips her nose tightly,
and waits for her to open her eyes. Her young siblings watch her mutely.
Her tiny baby, Satwant is passed from arm to arm. The heat presses down
on everyone. Bant, lying a little away, holds himself quietly, unable
to turn.
Then suddenly, it
is dusk, and time to leave. The men gather around Bant to heave him
onto the stretcher. “Careful, careful,” he jokes, “if
any of you get a jerk, you’ll drop me like a moongphali!”
Harbans Kaur enters the ambulance with him. The children must remain
behind. Two daughters married, one son studying in a police school in
Bhatinda, and five left to fend for themselves with neighbours and aunts.
Bant Singh’s
song will soon be summoned to sow thirst for dignity elsewhere. Another
rally, another stage, another place. As the years pass, his story will
pass into folklore and strangers will draw strength from it. For the
moment, we cross his ambulance in the twilight on our way home, his
eyes agleam in the shadows, his leg held aloft by his wife to ease the
pain of the ride.
