The Youngest Among The Young

Journalist PHILIP GEORGE was so moved by Baba Amte’s irresistible force, he worked in his ashram for several years. He remembers the highly personal, acetylene energy of Baba’s struggles

I FIRST MET Baba Amte in 1984. He was 70 at the time, an age when most people would be getting ready to hang up their boots and reminisce about their past achievements. Baba had plenty of reasons to call it a day. Ill health was one. He suffered from severe spondylitis which meant he could not sit but had to either stand or lie down. Congestive heart disease was another problem, high blood pressure a third, and there were a whole lot of others. He had achievements enough to crow about too. Many years before, Vinoba Bhave had told him it was time to rest, because he had done enough work for two lifetimes.

But what I noticed at that first meeting was that this old man with the build of a wrestler and the passion of a teenager did not talk about the past at all. He was full of plans for tomorrow, next month, next year. He wanted to start a youth village. He wanted to do more for the tribals. He wanted to … Baba lived his words. For the next 20 years, almost until he was 90, he was to push himself through a gruelling series of initiatives. He led a struggle against two dams in Maharashtra which would have submerged large tracts of forest and the homes and livelihood of thousands of tribals. He led two cycle marches of youths, the first from south to north, and the other from east to west. He led several peace missions into Punjab. And finally, he lent his prestige and voice to the struggle of the people who were displaced by the Narmada dams.

At that first meeting I told Baba that I was planning to drop out of college and join his ashram. Baba advised me to return and complete the course. I followed his advice and joined the ashram six months later. Below I describe some incidents that I was privileged to witness or learn about at close hand.

Sometime in 1985, Tinny, a Spitz bitch at the ashram, gave birth to a litter of six puppies. It was a beautiful sight to watch them ranged around a platter, lapping up milk, while Tinny looked on, a bit surprised at it all. Baba was there too. But then he disappeared. When he returned ten minutes later, he had five or six blind children in tow whom he led to the puppies. You could literally see them shivering with joy as they fondled the puppies they could not see.

At the time of this incident Baba had been running Anandwan for nearly 35 years. In any large organisation a thousand problems crop up every day and much energy is spent firefighting. Inevitably there is a drive towards maximising efficiency, and in that drive large organisations tend to become all machinery and no soul. They forget that they are being run for people, not to fulfil some abstract principles. Yet here was Baba remembering that joy is to be shared, and who better to share the joy of the puppies than blind children who could not see them. In the words of the poet he was fond of, he had not lost himself “in the dreary desert sand of dead habit”.

A visitor to Anandwan cannot fail to be impressed by the fact that everything seems to run like clockwork. Someone takes you to your allotted room, ensures that the toilet is in order, reminds you to come to the communal kitchen at mealtimes. Every action speaks of efficiency. But Baba had his own way of ensuring that the organisation did not become tied down by dead routine. You could call it creative disruption. Just when systems were being established and in danger of being frozen he would upset the applecart and everyone would be sent scrambling.

In 1967, when Anandwan was getting over its birth pangs he launched another project, Somnath, a hundred kilometres away on 1,800 acres of land. Just as a few hundred acres of this project had been cleared for farming, Baba set up a tribal project in Gadchiroli district, 250 km away. In between there were a dozen other smaller initiatives — a college of arts, science, commerce and agriculture, a school for the blind… If you worked with Baba there was just no question of settling down, of being lulled by routine.

LEPROSY DAMAGES the nerves. So even after they are cured, leprosy patients often have no feeling in their hands and legs. This anaesthesia is what leads to limb damage. If you cannot feel that the cup of tea you are holding is hot you will continue to hold it even after it burns you. Baba often used to say that while his leprosy patients suffered from anaesthesia of the body, society at large suffered from moral and mental anaesthesia. For Baba these were more than just words. Indeed it would not be an exaggeration to say that he was an open wound which a passing wind could fan into excruciating pain. When he was moved by something he would become restless. For days on end he would be agitated, toss and turn without sleep until a plan for action stirred within him. In 1984, the massacre of Sikhs had agitated him. And when in 1985 there was a spate of killings in Punjab and communal problems elsewhere, Baba decided to lead a cycle rally of youths from Kanyakumari to Kashmir with the slogan “Knit India” or “Bharat Jodo”.

As people grow older they tend to colour the days of their own youth in rosy hues and lament the growing materialism of the modern generation. Baba, on the other hand, always placed his faith in youth. Each year in Somnath he had organised summer camps for youths — they have been conducted almost without a break for 30 years now — which had over time produced a great number of activists in various causes. At the camp in May 1985, he suggested a plan for a rally across India and in December that year it set out from Kanyakumari.

At the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Baba saw that in one room the photographs of Indira Gandhi’s assassins adorned the walls. How can you honour these traitors in this manner, he said in his speech. People with him were aghast. You did not go into the den of the militants and castigate them, they remonstrated. Eventually Baba yielded when it was pointed out that he could be endangering the lives of the cycle rallyists with him.

But the speech seemed to have made an impact on some of the militants. They were not quite sure what to make of this strange animal who seemed to know no fear at all. Feelers were sent out to him and he had an affectionate meeting with Wassan Singh, one of the socalled Panj Pyaras or five most important militant leaders. Eventually nothing came of the meeting, partly because Baba was no politician and partly because his initiative did not have government backing.

OVER THE next couple of years Baba was to lead several missions into Punjab, each time travelling all the way from Maharashtra by bus. At the time it seemed as if the Punjab problem would go on forever. This may seem strange now, especially when one recalls how quickly the militant movement was finished off in the mid 1990s. But in 1986 the problem looked intractable and the militants appeared to have considerable popular support.

Baba was one of the few who thought otherwise. At every meeting there was one refrain to his speech: only 0.01 percent of people support the militants. On subsequent visits I think he added another zero after the decimal. This was no bombast. The warmth with which he was welcomed everywhere was proof of people’s desire for peace.

I experienced this warmth on one trip to Punjab, on which I accompanied him. It was in Patiala. We were a motley crowd travelling with Baba. And each morning we required a large bunch of newspapers — Hindi, Punjabi, English and Urdu. I accosted a newspaper delivery boy, a Sikh, and managed to get all the newspapers we needed. Who wanted papers in so many languages, he wanted to know. When I told him that we were accompanying Baba Amte, he simply refused to accept any payment.

Each time there was a killing by militants Baba would travel to the spot and empathise with the families of the victims. The killings were quite secular. Sikhs, Punjabi Hindus, Bihari migrant agricultural labourers, no one was spared. In between, he would address meetings and speak to visitors.

One incident is memorable, though not directly connected with the Punjab problem. It was at the Harike barrage where photography was forbidden. The only person among us with a camera, unaware of the regulations, clicked a photograph of the area around the barrage. A paramilitary jawan observed this and asked us to remove the roll of film and surrender it to him. We were aghast because that roll contained the entire record of our first week of activity. The jawan was insistent and we were equally importunate. Baba was lying in the bus watching us. After the argument went on for some time he came down from the bus, shook hands with the jawan, commended him on sticking to the rules, and asked us to hand over the film.

Baba’s routine during the Punjab trip was to wake up at around 4 am, have a bath in ice-cold water that had been stored overnight, eat a scanty breakfast and then set off on the day’s programme. For years he had never eaten food that contained chilis, and a message would usually be sent in advance to the organisers of the meeting that Baba’s food should be entirely free of chilies. When the time came for lunch he would start eating and discover that the food was spiced. On several occasions he would go hungry. After more meetings in the evening Baba would meet visitors, most days until after midnight.

After a month and a half of this, I began to anxiously await the end of the mission so that I could have the luxury of a full eight-hour sleep. Baba on the other hand, although half a century older, appeared to have the capacity to go on forever at the same pace. In any gathering of young people he was the youngest of all.

Towards the end of the 1980s the agitation against the construction of the many dams on the Narmada river began. Baba threw his wholehearted support behind the struggle. As always he was not content to issue statements of solidarity from Anandwan. He had to be in the thick of events.

He participated in demonstrations in the Narmada valley, including a 200 km march to the Madhya Pradesh-Gujarat border where the marchers were stopped. He squatted in Delhi for days on end along with the tribals who were to be the victims of the dams. Finally, in a decision that surprised even his own family he decided to settle on the banks of the Narmada.

A makeshift house was built on the outskirts of a village called Kasrawad in Madhya Pradesh, a few minutes from the Narmada. And Baba began to camp there. The anti-dam movement was led by the Narmada Bachao Andolan, headed by Medha Patkar. Baba himself was a sort of father figure, to whom activists would come to discuss issues and draw on his experience.

As much as a struggle against the dams, the Narmada agitation was for Baba an occasion to voice his opposition to a developmental model in which one set of people reaped the benefits and another set of people, much poorer, paid the cost.

When Baba said that there were alternatives to big dams he was speaking from experience. In the early 70s, when rain water harvesting was a term not yet invented, it was being carried out at the project in Somnath that Baba had founded after Anandwan. At the time villagers around the project had agitated against Baba and forced him to agree not to use water from the only stream that flowed through it. Starved for water Baba hit upon a plan of constructing large ponds to store water during the monsoons and use it during the rest of the year.

I was witness to the construction of one such reservoir in 1986. It was unbelievably simple. Taking advantage of the topography, an arch would be drawn on the ground. The concave side of the arch would be dug and deepened and the earth so dug out would itself be used to create an arched barrier that would hold back the water during the rains. Somnath was irrigated almost entirely by a series of such dams.

I USED TO joke that everyone who came to Anandwan, whether patient or volunteer, was in some sense handicapped. If his or her limbs were intact, the handicap was more deeply rooted: it might be mental or emotional. In a sense, I fell in the latter category. When I went to Anandwan in 1984, I was recovering from a particularly virulent attack of leftitis. By 1986, though, I had concluded that I had no bent for social work and left to begin a career in journalism.

Then, in 2000, I returned for a brief visit, having in the intervening period had little contact with Anandwan or Baba. The visit was an eye-opener. As a business journalist, I had wholeheartedly embraced the new orthodoxy and the shibboleths of free enterprise, private initiative and the like. I had effortlessly swung from one extreme to another. Now, back at Anandwan, I could see that no for-profit venture would ever have cared for leprosy patients. There was no way the patients could have been anyone’s customers. Even harder to believe, the semi-communal lifestyle being followed at Anandwan had survived for 50 years. Here, I told myself, was a story that needed to be told. With Baba’s permission I began work on a biography.

The modern visitor to Anandwan sees a collection of fine buildings and a constant stream of visitors. It is impossible for him to imagine that when Baba landed there in 1951 with his wife and two children under five, leprosy was a dreaded disease and that anyone even associating with leprosy patients was shunned. Even I, who had lived there for a couple of years in the 1980s, did not appreciate the fact. It was only when I began interviewing the oldest residents at Anandwan and heard their stories that this struck home.

In the early 1950s, Baba had decided that raising dairy cattle and selling the milk would be a good source of income for Anandwan. To reassure would-be buyers of the milk who were wary because of the presence of the leprosy patients, Baba’s wife would milk seven cows herself for which she earned herself the title of “milkmaid” from Annasaheb Sahasrabuddhe, a leading Gandhian. Milking cows was, however, only half the job. The problem was that there were no buyers. A patient recalls that they could drink all the milk they wanted. “People usually add ghee to rice, we were adding rice to ghee. There was so much to go around,” he said.

I heard dozens of such stories and began work on the biography in earnest. Baba was generous with his time, patiently answering my endless queries. Several others too, were working on biographies, in various languages. On one occasion in 2004, Baba, who had a wicked sense of humour, joked: “I am surrounded by biographers.” But after reading a couple of these books and my own paltry attempts, I decided to abandon the project. Baba needed a worthier biographer.