To Kill A Mockingbird

The brutal murder of Lalit Mehta shows what lies in store for those who dare to blow the whistle on corruption in government schemes for the poor, reports SHOBHITA NAITHANI

Tragic end Murdered activist Lalit Mehta with his sons Photo: MD Iqbal

ASHRITA TIRKEY woke up to the news of her husband’s death on the morning of May 17. She doesn’t remember what happened afterwards. Later, a colleague of her husband brought her to her in-law’s house, where the mangled remains of murdered activist Lalit Mehta were now being brought in a plastic bag. “He was lying face down. The hair from the back of his head was missing, and he had a lot of hair,” Ashrita recounts. Not convinced that the body was her husband’s, she pleaded for the bag to be untied. “As soon as I touched his toes, I knew it was him,” she says.

It was a strange twist of fate that Ashrita’s first visit to her in-laws in nine years of her marriage was to be as a widow. A Scheduled Caste (SC) Christian from Jharkhand’s Salo village, her marriage to friend and colleague Lalit was never accepted by his family. The 32-yearold mother of two sons, aged four and oneand- half worked as a social science teacher in Cheeru village in Garhwa district of Jharkhand, while her engineer-turned-activist husband was based in Chhatarpur in Palamau district.

Lalit Kumar Mehta was secretary of Vikas Sahyog Kendra (VSK), an NGO involved in the Right to Food campaign and social audit of government schemes for the last 15 years. Recently, he had been assisting Jean Drèze, economist and architect of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) — flagged off by the UPA government in 2005 with a promise of alleviating rural distress – and his eight-member team with the social audit of the scheme in Chainpur and Chhatarpur blocks of Jharkhand’s drought-prone Palamau district. On May 14, a day after the audit began, he had come to the district headquarters Daltonganj to receive Drèze who arrived from Delhi to join his team. They attended a social audit programme in Samariya village in Chainpur and then headed back to Daltonganj. After dropping Drèze in Daltonganj at 7.30 in the evening, Lalit proceeded to Chhatarpur, 52 kilometres away. Nobody heard from him after that.

The next day, May 15 was a ‘Naxal bandhi’ (a state-wide shutdown called by the extremists) and the family assumed that Lalit had stayed back with Drèze. But when the 48-yearold economist arrived in Chhatarpur on 16th afternoon without Lalit, the whirl began, and soon his colleagues started enquiring frantically about Lalit’s whereabouts. They finally came across a small item in a local newspaper about a mutilated body found in Kanda forest outside Daltonganj.

Their worst fears came true when they called the Vishrampur police station, 45 kilometres away from Chhatarpur. The description given by the sub-inspector on the other end of the line was enough for them to conclude that it was indeed their colleague. A beat policeman had stumbled upon Lalit’s body on May 15, his broken belt tightened around his neck. It was sent for post-mortem the same day and then buried the next day because it was “unclaimed.” But when Lalit’s colleagues found it, the body had been partially dug up, the smashed head exposed and parts of the hands eaten by wild animals. They were told they could exhume whatever was left of the body.

The police could, however, find no trace of Lalit’s bike, his wallet with Rs 7,000 and a blank cheque in it, mobile phone and “crucial evidence of NREGS fund misappropriation” which he was carrying with himself. When asked by TEHELKA about the hurried burial (a body can be buried only after it’s unclaimed for 48 hours), Palamau Superintendent of Police Deepak Verma called it “a lapse on the part of the investigating officer.” Verma, however, added that the lapse was not major because the body was decomposing. He also refused to comment on who could be behind the murder and what exactly was the cause of death.

Lalit, who did his civil engineering from Bangalore, began his career with the Sukha Mukti Abhiyan of Paani Chetna Manch in 1992, the year Palamau was facing a severe drought. His design and construction inputs helped the local community build 130 check dams in seven years using government funds. Lalit had also been organising Adivasi groups and running programmes to raise awareness of their fundamental rights. The 37-year-old became a full time social activist in 2001, when the Paani Chetna Manch dissolved, and he and his friends set up VKS. The group, Jawahar, a colleague and a friend of 15 years recalls, would often conduct audits of the government’s social security schemes in the area. This naturally irked well-entrenched local interests who profited from the schemes — contractors, gram sewaks, panchayat sewaks. The group of four activists — Lalit, Jawahar, Manoj and Ashrita — had been repeatedly warned not to meddle, threats which they duly ignored.

THE GROUP got little support from elsewhere. In fact, according to Jawahar, when Lalit went to meet Palamau District Collector Nagendra Singh on May 6, 2008 to collect data for the social audit, Singh suggested that they refrain from conducting the audit in Chhatarpur, citing the presence of “anti-social elements.” When TEHELKA contacted Singh, he denied saying this, “I only requested them to conduct the social audit in other blocks of the district.” Meanwhile, Jawahar asserts that the murder, an attempt to demoralise those involved in the social audit, has failed to intimidate them.

On May 26, over 5,000 villagers are huddled together in the compound of the Chhatarpur High School, some atop trees. An eight-foot tall poster of Lalit is displayed prominently. Watchful local police can be seen everywhere. Everyone in the swelling crowd has travelled far in the heat to be there, to express solidarity with Lalit’s cause and demand answers from government officials associated with NREGS. Annie Raja, a member of the Central Employment Guarantee Council (CEGC), an implementing and monitoring authority, begins by reading out a message from Sonia Gandhi expressing shock and concern over Lalit’s death. Dreze takes the stage, and the jan sunwai (public hearing) ensues. How many have worked for 100 days in the year, mandatory under the NREGS, he asks? Not a single hand goes up. Soon, members of the audience begin to speak up. Sagas of fabricated muster rolls (attendance registers at the NREGS work site); fraudulent signatures and fake job applications follow. The audience claps with gusto when Drèze and his team question red-faced officials on the discrepancies. They have no answers to offer, only promises. Nobody claps. A woman in the crowd mutters: “He’s lying”.

According to government statistics for 2007-2008, Rs 76.21 crore was released for NREGS in Palamau, of which Rs 61.97 crore has been ‘utilised.’ But a source gave TEHELKA an example of what actually happens on the ground. “In 2005, the administration had ordered the construction of a pond in each village. Even though the soil in some villages is not favourable for the construction of ponds and wells, the villagers were forced to dig. The result is that the construction has been stalled and they are lying incomplete.”

The social audit findings were revealing: of the hundred randomly selected workers interviewed from 10 randomly selected villages, all stated that the programme was significant; 76 percent of them saw it as their potential lifeline; 68 percent of them felt it provided food security and 37 percent agreed that it was indeed a unique employment opportunity for women.

The public hearing in Chhatarpur, intended also as a tribute to Lalit, was a clear riposte to those whose interests are threatened by the idea of stocktaking. The results may not have been outstanding but are certainly an indication that efforts like those of Lalit’s are paying off. That’s something for VSK’s ‘meddlesome’ gang to be proud of. Except it came at too great a price. •

WRITER’S E-MAIL
shobhita@tehelka.com