Many Feet One Step

Thousands of people whom development has cheated are marching to New Delhi this month to ask the Centre some hard questions. CHARU SONI reports

Photos:Raoul Amaar Abbas

AS YOU READ this, some 25,000 men and women from across India’s Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are making their way up the Grand Trunk Road, walking over 340km from Gwalior to the capital, covering 12km a day on a single meal. Their sole slogan: “Hal karo, bhai, hal karo, zameen ki samasya hal karo (Solve, please do solve the land problem).”

The march set out on October 2, on Gandhi Jayanti, and is expected to reach Delhi on October 28. The day after that, the padyatris will make their way to Rajghat to attempt to arrest the attention of the people and the government, something they have already managed to do in Madhya Pradesh, where politicians of various hues have put in appearances in their support and the state police have had no option but to block highways to traffic to allow them to walk on.

To match step with this march of the landless — evocatively named Janadesh 2007 — is to match the present with the past. This is not just a march of the dispossessed, the marginalised, the displaced and the hapless. It’s the march, in many ways, of the India that, even after 60 years of Independence, has had its voice and vote repeatedly manipulated and disregarded.

The issue at hand is one of the most critical of this century: land, who owns it, who ought to own it and why. Says veteran Gandhian PV Rajgopal, the man leading the march under the banner of the Ekta Parishad, “We want the government to set up a national land commission.

Let the Centre and state governments decide once and for all what land is surplus land, wasteland, scrubland, forest, what’s for roads and railway lines and what’s for SEZs.” Rajgopal minces no words as he points out that the 20- odd years he’s spent working among tribes and village people have repeatedly thrown up the same issues. “Land promised under the Bhoodan movement is yet to reach people. Nearly 30 percent of people here,” he says, tak-ing a wide sweep at the thousands surrounding him on the Jalalabad field outside Gwalior, “have been jailed and dubbed Naxalites for raising the issue of their ancestral lands that today fall either under the Forest Act or have been appropriated for railway lines, roads, dams and sezs. For the last 60 years, people have been either pushed out of their spaces or locked |into interminable court cases, jailed or shunted around by laws made with no concern for them.”

THE MARCH has already elicited some response, with Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan announcing that the MP government would set up a state land commission and establish fasttrack courts to look into land disputes. The CM, in fact, went to so far as to announce that irrespective of the Central stand on the issue, MP would start distributing land pattas to the needy by November 1.

Ram Dehi Manji has come for the march from Naravat village in Gaya district of Bihar. Eyes twinkling in a face wrinkled with age, he points to my pen and notebook. “Write,” he orders. “Crime, violence and politics combine to mean that land intended for us reaches only the “developed castes” and the Bhumihars. What of our people?” Krishnandan and Rajesh Prasad, displaced by the Tarakol Dam built 20 years ago in Bihar’s Nawada district, pitch in, “We are yet to be given land pattas.” Budhwa Bhagat from Ghumla district in Jharkhand stoically adds, “Sixty years ago, we were promised land under the Bhoodan movement. We have been taxed since then but where is the land?” Guni Ram from the Oran tribe of Chhattisgarh’s Sarguja district is equally blunt, “We had lands, rivers and freedom. Now we have mines, no home, no freedom.” Says S. Devraj from Palakkad in Kerala, “My people belong to Attapady, near the Silent Valley forests. I can go back five generations to prove we are the original settlers of the land but no one wants to accept that.”

These are, for most of us, voices from thewilderness. Where you are not heard, but are counted as just another addition to statistics on the growing population or as one more thumb impression to swell a vote bank. Where the land you work is not your own, and the land supposed to be yours is most often siphoned off by vested interests.

Out of the margins On the road to Delhi

TAKE THE example of the recent State Level Task Force Committee meeting, held on August 28 by the Orissa government’s SC/ST Development Department. According to the minutes of the meeting, “Regarding control and check of transfers of immovable properties in scheduled areas as per Orissa Regulation No. 2 of 1956, the Commissioner- cum-Secretary Revenue and District Magistrate Department stated that till June 2007, 56,709.84 acres of land have been restored in Scheduled Areas of the state and the delivery of possession has been given to 65,772 ST families.”

That’s roughly an acre per family. Sounds good, only it’s on paper. The minutes further observe an injunction made by Padmashree Tulasi Munda that explains who owns or uses the land. “In the Balani Mines area, the Steel Authority of India Ltd. has forcibly occupied the land of 22 tribal families on whose land the mining operation in that area is going on. They (the tribals) are paying land revenue, rents to the government.” The minutes then note that the Commissioner- cum-Secretary Revenue and District Magistrate Department will look into the matter and that the Keonjhar Collector will “be instructed to cause inquiry into the field”. In response, the Collector had this to say: “The STs are in occupation of the land but it is not settled in their name. Hence, no residential, caste or other certificate is issued (to them) by revenue officials.”

While this example illustrates the disenfranchisement of the “landless” in favour of “development” and “progress”, it is unfortunate that they are now additionally pitched against environmentalists, who have been voicing alarm over their demands for agricultural land at the expense of shrinking forest cover.

The issue says Shiv Visvanathan, a sociologist based in Ahmedabad who has been studying the pattern of disenfranchisement, has its origins in the dawn of Independence when Sardar Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru sought to lay aside the rights of tribal India in the face of the Partition holocaust. “Nehru and Sardar were clear. The tribals were not razakars. Their culture was different. Their needs and their demands were different. Their world and their arguments made an appeal to a different imagination.” According to Visvanathan, initial talks with tribal representatives highlighted the fact that, “Indian democracy would always have to be fluid or different. It was not a stock of collectivities but a flow of people — in India, citizenship belongs not just to a domesticated middle class, but to its millions of nomads as well, its pastoral groups, its tribals, even if they were not part of the Constituent Assembly and had probably never heard of it.”

At that time, says Visvanathan, “Both Nehru and Patel were too preoccupied with Partition. Patel had become more Bismarckian than ever, refusing any negotiation on the nation-state, ‘We need a copybook nation,’ he said; ‘if I allow you the freedom to experiment, it would set the whole of the Northeast on fire.” Nehru struck a different chord, echoing the other half of Patel’s mind, saying that Partition had been too traumatic. Over one million people dead and 16 million displaced. People needed to heal.”

WHAT THEN of the tribals? The landless? They were upstaged by History with a capital H. “Given the gigantic technological projects emerging around roads, factories and dams, the old panchayat of consensus and participation is not adequate. We need a new concept that brings the tribe, the policeman, the healer, the shaman, the doctor, the psychiatrist, the vaid and the hakim into a conversation of knowledges. But a mere dialogue is not enough,” concludes Visvanathan. Ironically, the 25,000 people who are making the arduous journey from Gwalior to Delhi are talking of these very things. They are not interested in the copybook nation Patel and Nehru created for them. They are asking the questions Patel and Nehru refused to address.

To voice Guni Ram’s painful words again, “We had land, we had rivers and we had freedom. Now we have mines and no home. Does that mean no freedom as well?”