The Colonel Of The Gujjar Militia

Kirori Singh Bainsla is that rare leader who rose from the sunk valley in which his community now finds itself, only to drop back to uplift his people, finds RAGHU KARNAD

WITH THE same dogged resistance to harsh elements and hostile fire that once held him to his post in Kashmir, Colonel Kirori Singh Bainsla, 69, stands guard over 12 dead bodies and a thin stretch of railway track in Rajasthan. The track runs on a raised embankment, from Bayana into the dusty middle of nowhere; this is where a few thousand Gujjars have followed Bainsla, settled onto the hard-baked earth, and laid their lathis across their knees to wait until he announces victory. In the field of poor farmers and labourers, Col Bainsla is a sole, concentrated point of leadership, and as he moves from point to point, a huddle of dusty white turbans follows him like a spotlight.

It has been four days since Col Bainsla announced the resumption of the Gujjars’ agitation for Scheduled Tribe (ST) status, which he ended last year after empty government assurances. Four days at Bayana, sticking to the railway line, the air shivering with heat, alertness and anger. The first day was a terrible beginning: as the protestors approached the track, police fired down at them, killing 16 men. The bodies of 12 are still there, packed in fast-melting ice, not to be cremated until the agitators’ demands are met. Elsewhere in the state, 24 others were shot dead by police.

That same police force has now charged Bainsla with IPC 121 — waging war against the Government of India. The protest site looks like a refugee camp though; it is the government presence that looks like a war force. Two companies of the Rapid Action Force, six companies of the Central Reserve Police Force and six columns of the Army have rolled up around the periphery. Viewed from above, the tight white fist of the Gujjar camp would be encircled by a thin blue-grey line, ready to close in. The Gujjars — half expecting another attack, half expecting to be left and forgotten — are focused on not budging either way. In 2007, when the news media first took notice of a huge Gujjar agitation, swarming towards Delhi, it reacted with indignation and alarm. The blackened shells of buses and the torn-up railway tracks were summary evidence that the Gujjars were a crude, lawless national nuisance. Leading the agitation, though not always in control of it, was a man whose face became famous under a wide red turban. Bainsla’s appearance, like the Gujjars’ reputations, made it easy to accuse him of being a rural rabble-rouser out for cheap political gains. But like the Gujjar agitation, Bainsla is not what he seems.

What he is, is a man who rose from the sunk valley in which the Gujjar community now finds itself — rose high enough to acquire elevated tastes, skills and position in society — but dropped back down when he saw the chance to uplift his people at large. Now he sits indistinguishable among them, amidst the dust and the bristling lathis.

He is a figure rarely seen, a social leader grown out of a military man: he lacks the serenity of a saint or the nuance of a scholar, but also appears to lack any of the motives — money, social position, political career — associated with populist leaders. Instead, he has a martial commitment to rescuing his community, a pragmatic attitude toward violence and an unblinking eye for the strategic objective: ST status.

Photo: Trilochan Singh

Bainsla was born in 1939 in Mundia, in Karanki district, to a jawan of the British Army. He had a brave and typical childhood: married at 14, walking to school in a neighbouring village, working to raise himself above his peasant birth. He went to college and dreamed of joining the army, but being married, he could not join as a commissioned officer. So he joined as a sepoy, fought in the ’65 war with Pakistan, took postings in Kashmir and the Northeast, and eventually retired a Colonel, the fifth highest rank in the Army. At his wife’s insistence, he returned to Mundia. She died two years later. “He always told us,” one of his children says, “that as soon
as he stepped off the train he left his rank behind.”

His success in doing so is obvious from the way he sits, in Bayana, in the middle of a reeking, suffocating press of farmers and labourers. He switches fluidly, mid-sentence, between Gujjari and English. It could not have been so easy to transition from the Officers’ Club to the rustic manners of the Rajasthani Gujjars: the Colonel was fond of good food, good music and literature (the only indulgence he still makes is spending Rs 3,000 a month on his library).

He found his community in wretched condition, and decided to do something about it: “The change of lifestyle is not important once you have a sincere dedication to people.” To their service he dedicated his jeep, part of his pension — Rs 15,000 per month — and his army-disciplined workday. He adopted the language and the dress, and before long he was a respected member of the community, a man with no party affiliations, but strong views about the Gujjars’ rights — especially their right to sit at the table of reservation benefits. “Our women are 99 percent illiterate, only 30 percent of men have basic education,” he says. “Abject poverty. Mass illiteracy. No sustenance.”

Crucially, he noticed, the lack of incentive for young people to study: college seats and jobs in the private sector were far beyond their horizon, but government jobs were too competitive. The clear solution, to be captured like an enemy flag, was ST status. Categorised in Rajasthan as OBCs, the Gujjars have competed for education and employment in a pool that, for arcane technical reasons, sometimes has a higher cut-off than the general category. In 1999, the OBC pool became crammed even worse with the inclusion of Jats — relatively wealthy, and 10 percent of the state’s population.

MEANWHILE, A single caste constituted 53 percent of the ST pool, and with this monopoly on seats, progressed socially and spread through the national bureaucracy. “Before independence, the Gujjars and Meenas were two sides of a coin,” Bainsla says, “But they got ST reservation in ’56, and now they are a power to reckon with in this country — so much so that they’ve scared the CM out of hearing us.” Another protestor is bitterly direct: “We have no water. They bathe in Bisleri.”

“My main concern is for the Gujjars to join the national mainstream,” Bainsla says, like his own children, all four of whom went to college, and three into senior government jobs. He points his finger around the crowd, asking each person how far they studied. None has passed Class VIII. “One day, he will be a scientist. He will be a joint secretary. He will be in IPS. I won’t let them fall behind!”

In the early village meetings, they called him a madman. But slowly the momentum was built, and now, he says, “they are hellbent on it.” The Gujjars saw the government’s hedging as proof that the political process was a sham. Their agitation began, Bainsla says, only in desperation. “This is the Charge of the Light Brigade,” he says, presumably with no reference to how that ballad ends. That the agitation erupted into violence is no shame — “my experience is that agitation at a mass scale invariably gets out of hand, especially with the restless youth” — but this year he is pulling hard on the reins to keep the protest from spiralling into more bloodshed.

After fighting in the defence of his country, it is rough treatment to be charged with waging war against it. Bainsla turns pensive, and responds with a verse from Robert Browning: “The flag stuck on a heap of bones, A soldier’s doing! what atones? They scratch his name on the Abbey-stones.” It would be a mistake to take Col Bainsla for a Gandhian. It might be wiser to see him as the final turn off a road that leads to terrible violence. “If they don’t get reservation, they will — every one of them — become Naxalites,” he says, “That is a warning to the government.” This feeling is palpable in the crowd. “What is happening in Chhattisgarh will start happening here soon,” says Sohan from Hindon. After the shootings, there is much talk of martyrdom. “If the government plays General Dyer,” says Seesram Adhana, a farmer, “We will play Khudiram Bose.”

For now they wait; they say they will wait forever, but they don’t hide their desire to return home. “What I want most is to retire and write my memoirs,” the Colonel smiles. But for now he must remain on the field, where blood has been spilled, the sun is scorching hot, and neither his victory nor his peace are close at hand.