GROUND ZERO PATRIOTS

Raise High the Roof Beams

An adivasi woman takes on India’s largest steel plant. A doctor leads thousands of farmers in their fight for a river. A young urbanite is jailed as she tries to secure rights for forest communities. As India turns 62, TEHELKA profiles those who are fighting to keep its democracy alive

EVEN THE most cynical of generations wonder: why did giants once roam the world, when dwarves now surround us? How is it that those who built our nation found time for more than the task of waking millions, for more than the intricate clockwork of statecraft? When did they sit down long enough to forge new ways of compassion, of courage, of living? To write enormous tracts, translate the ancients? What were they, to use the easy parlance of hallucinogens, on?

It has been 62 years after the giants won us a country and built the political scaffolding to make it kinder, more just. But greed and cruelty are still part of our public lives. When people stand teetering on the edge, we carelessly push. When the path of least resistance runs over the homes, fields and forests of others, we charge on. It would seem like the gods have departed, leaving behind only the vulnerable and the revelers.

But the giants still live on in odd corners. When novelist and sociologist Susan Visvanathan visited the fishworkers of Kerala, a fisherman asked her, “Thakazhy Sivasankara Pillai made millions out of his novel [Chemeen] on the life of fisherpeople. Are you also going to do the same? I wake up at two in the morning and I get nothing.”

Magline and Peter Thayil, two leaders of the fishworkers’ movement are just as resistant to mythologising. Regardless of their Biblical names, the Jesus-invoking sea, the romance of it all, they are people who wake up at two in the morning and get on with their lives’ work. They protect the livelihoods of lakhs of people by ensuring that we and our trawlers don’t eat the oceans out of fish, that no one buys and sells the sea in the fine mesh of arcane contracts.

Elsewhere, others are jailed and assaulted for protecting what ought to belong to the commons, not shredded into toothpicks. A young doctor in Karnataka joins thousands of farmers and the urban poor in a decade-long political struggle. A woman in Assam becomes the first in her village to go to college but cannot forget the fear caused by the soldiers who roam her lands with impunity. A young man in Orissa realises that the dozens of struggles across the state need to come together and he is the one to do it. A young adivasi woman in Jharkhand comes to the same realisation. She once ran a tea-shop and is now a journalist, but like the Bhakti poet Akka Mahadevi, she must wander from village to village awakening her people to the approaching fangs of a steel empire. Another empire poisons a whole city, thousands die, and decades later a man, battles the false memories and absurd lies that seek to hide the stillseeping poison.

The fate that awaits these strange, sleepless beings is not — unlike in the case of the giants who built India — the crowns and sceptres of a grateful nation. We are instead more likely to be enraged. If they must be misguided, we argue, let them do it without discomfiting us, depriving us of the soft light and canned music we are used to. Inevitably we call them traitors for warring against the nation.

Even when we are sympathetic to their tireless work, their ambitions seem against the natural order of things — because the natural order of things are made for us — in the same way that Indians claiming the right to independence must have seemed preposterous to the British.

We have hard work ahead, warned Nehru in the midnight hour. Sure, most of us responded, and went off whistling and thinking of lunch. But luckily, in the place of the giants who are gone, others have sprung, prepared to sleep on railway platforms and footpaths, to have their young bodies broken from lathis, their voices hoarse from shouting — all to preserve democracy, to protect us from ourselves.

This week TEHELKA meets some of these giants from across the nation. They — like Richard Wilbur’s prophet — are “madeyed from stating the obvious” but refuse to blink. And someday in the future someone will ask: did they really exist? Were they as tall as they seem? And we can answer, yes.

NISHA SUSAN

Miracles Among The Fish

MAGLINE PETER, 41, leads a massive movement of fishworkers that is learning to fight everything from climate change to superstition

IMAGING: S THOMAS/TEHELKA

TEN LAKH fishermen and fisherwomen, in 222 coastal villages and 113 inland fishery villages, along Kerala’s 590 km coastline. Chances are Magline Peter has met all of them at some point. Every now and then one of the women will tease Magline and ask her what she is so worked up about. “I am angry because I have to protect my community, my father and mother, my family and friends, my sea, my coast,” says Magline.

Magline is the state convenor of the Theeradesa Mahila Vedi, the women’s wing of the Kerala Swathanthra Malsya Thozhilali Federation (KSMTF or Kerala Independent Fishworkers Federation). The massive community organisation is no windy, exploitative trade union weighed down by acronyms or political parties. Though the federation was once synonymous with the Latin Catholic community, there has been decisive action to make it secular and inclusive of other religions, all the way up from the trenches to the leadership. Magline’s community- based organisation is a live-wire entity that responds quickly and consistently to the challenges faced by fishworkers in an extremely difficult world: greedy trawlers, globalisation, climate change.

Magline became an active community leader after she met her husband Peter Thayil, a fellow activist with the KSMTF who was organising meetings at her village Veliyaveli in 1986, though her mother was already an active member of the union. Today, Magline’s daughter, studying for an MBA, sees herself as a part of this movement. Magline has been key in evolving the strong women’s movement among the fisherpeople.

Traditionally, in south Kerala women used to collect and sell fish caught by their community’s men. Today they must buy fish from big contractors and deal with a market as unpredictable and as shark-filled as the seas. The state did not even recognise them as part of the fishing industry. It took TMV leaders like Magline a long while to change that.

To understand how far TMV had to go one has to hear about a seemingly trivial concession they gained from the state. In the 1980s women fish vendors were not allowed to travel in buses or trains with their baskets. The way to the market meant miles of walking. Work, family, leisure and livelihood suffered. Fisherwomen had been injured when the helpful public pushed them out of buses. TMV organised massive protests that eventually led to increased bus services from villages to markets and even a train bogey on one major route.

At the markets themselves the vendors faced violence, sexual assault and attacks from goondas and politicians. This apart from the assumption that they did not need infrastructure to conduct business. Over the years they have picketed, held rallies, resisted arrest and downed their baskets, and won their livelihood inch by bloodied inch. All this while combating a culture that displays its mixed feelings about its powerful women through superstitions (such as the one that if women sit with untied hair when the men go fishing, there will be huge waves in the sea).

Magline has a humbling ability to switch from the local to the global, from the seemingly small to the massive. She can talk about state-wide representation for women vendors or climate change with equal passion. Magline herself has participated in agitations with Sardar Sarovar project-affected villagers in the Narmada valley, with dalit and tribal people fighting for land rights across India, with people affected by industrial pollution, with the women’s movement.

It seemed natural that eventually her organisation played a key role in founding the World Forum of Fisherpeoples — a necessary formation when their future is affected by a state that thinks it can give away fishing rights to American, Scandinavian and Japanese fishing vessels, dredging the sea for their dinner plates. Or when fishworkers are affected by natural disasters, the WTO or fish diseases.

Everyday, Magline says, she gains courage from the lakhs of women fishworkers and vendors who are financially independent — strong and opinionated women who despite the most violent state action are able to continue doing what they do, while also fighting for their livelihoods, sea and coast.

NITHIN MANAYATH

The Bhopal Express

SATINATH SARANGI, 55, had planned to stay for a week. Decades later, he is still fighting on behalf of those affected by the gas tragedy

IMAGING: SHAILENDRA PANDEY/TEHELKA

HOW DOES a nation come to make swine flu the most talked about disease while 900 people die of TB everyday? Is the number of affected directly proportional to our collective amnesia? But there are always people like Satinath ‘Sathyu’ Sarangi who won’t ever let you forget that 23,000 people died of exposure- related illnesses in Bhopal post the 1984 disaster, and more are dying still, that 1,50,000 survivors are still chronically ill, children are born with growth disorders, TB and cancers are far more prevalent in the gas-affected population.

But collective amnesia is the least of Sathyu’s problems as he, along with his fellow activists and survivors, are forced to ‘haggle with the state’ over the number of affected people, over the compensation amounts to be given, over the levels of land and water pollution that still exist. “One year they say high contamination of groundwater and in a later report they claim no contamination. It’s stupid, but most of your energies go into battling these absurdities.”

Sathyu, had left a Ph.D in metallurgy and was working with Kishore Bharati, an NGO working among adivasis outside Bhopal, when he heard news of the disaster. “I thought I’d be there for a week.” A quarter of a century later, he’s still there — helping in the mobilisation of affected communities, fighting for legal claims, and in providing medical support as part of the Bhopal Group for Information and Action, which he set up in 1986.

He is also the managing trustee of the Sambhavna Clinic which provides free medical care and is instrumental in researching the long-term effects of the gas exposure. But doing medical work with the disenfranchised seems a surefire way to get on the bad side of the Indian State. In 1986, he was arrested for giving sodium thiosulphate injections, which acts as a detoxicant to poisonous gases, particularly methyl isocyanate. In 1996, he was handcuffed outside the court where the compensation hearings were taking place and brutally beaten up by 30 policemen, who broke four sticks on his back. It took a call from the presiding judge to get him released. “I fought for a year and a half to ensure that action be taken. Four officials were reprimanded,” he says with a laugh.

Sathyu, with a gamcha tied firmly on his head, continues to confront the absurd lies that are constantly produced by the DOW Chemicals of the world andvc the colluding State, with the firm truth of the many survivors walking with him.

NITHIN MANAYATH

The Tidy Rebel

ALOK AGARWAL, 43, was destined for the soft life of an IIT boy. Instead, he courted arrests and broken bones to stop the Maheshwar dam

IMAGING: SHAILENDRA PANDEY/TEHELKA

ALOK AGARWAL had started on the straight and narrow at IIT Kharagpur. Deeply inspired by Gandhi and Aurobindo, he began teaching in a nearby village, while also repairing the school building. Alok was clear he did not want to become a pampered NRI. Instead, he travelled in the hinterlands to understand issues of development. The Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) was picking up steam around 1990 when Alok decided to join it in Madhya Pradesh (MP). ‘My parents wanted me to marry, have a family. Their disappointment lasted for years. When they finally visited me, they went back happy’, he says.

As an NBA activist, Alok spearheaded a massive grassroots movement, especially around the Maheshwar Dam, one of the 30 large dams that are part of the Narmada Valley Development Project. Maheshwar had the potential to displace as many as 15,000 families in the Nimad region while submerging 61 villages. Thanks to intense campaigning over years, international investors withdrew. In 1998 the NBA forced the government to set up a task force which recommended a halt to the construction till a participatory review was completed.

These long years Alok travelled from village to village everyday, going without food and sleeping on cramped floors. Jailed and beaten badly several times, Alok was once paraded in Barwani district by the police in an attempt to disgrace him. After 19 years his honorarium of Rs 800 has grown to Rs 3,000. Alok owns nothing except his clothes; even the cell phone he uses belongs to the movement. Says Chittaroopa Palit, another NBA activist, “Alok possesses tremendous energy and joy. Despite the relentless struggle and the exhaustion, he has managed to preserve his focus because of his practice of meditation. He has been keeping work- related diaries for 20 years. Each page reflects the tidy thinker that he is.”

Says Clifton D’Rozario, an engineer who spent six years with the NBA, “At one protest, the police were gunning for activists, beating them up brutally and jailing them. A few of us, including Alok, were on the run from the cops for around ten days. Despite the dangers, Alok stayed calm, and always thought in the interest of the people.” Through years of litigation and protests, the dam has only been partly constructed. Perhaps through Alok and others, it will stay that way.

AMRITA NANDY-JOSHI

The Fugitive Student

BHAGABAN MAJHI, 32, lost his faith in the law’s sincerity of purpose. But he still believes that one day Orissa’s adivasis will be a powerful force

IMAGING: DEEPU/TEHELKA

WHEN BHAGABAN Majhi was in class VIII, he didn’t really look at his textbooks. He was busy reading his teacher’s training manual to learn more about the Constitution of India. He finished class VIII but never went further. He was looking for a different kind of education — one that would show him how he and other adivasis could access the rights promised by the Constitution. Years later, as the leader of the Prakrutik Sampark Surakhya Parishad (PSSP) — a movement fighting against the bauxite mining project in Kashipur, Orissa, that would displace thousands of adivasis with disastrous environmental consequences — he is still learning, he says. A sense of responsibility is what initially drove him towards PSSP. If only adivasis were aware of the laws that guarantee protection from exploitation. If only they knew that the courts can shield them from injustice. That the local politicians and policemen were denying the adivasis their rights. He wanted to share with his people his discovery of the Land Reforms Act, the proper implementation of which could perhaps pave their way out of poverty. A few years later, his naivete dawned on him. Says Bhagaban, “We have to forget what the Constitution promises us. The government serves only capitalists. Fighting as a collective is the only way we can make them even hear our voices. The longer the fight, the more we can expose the government for what it is — a gatekeeper of the rich! We want to try to unite all the adivasi, dalit, peasant and landless peoples' movements in Orissa — present a single front that the government just cannot ignore.”

To PSSP, government schemes that provide rice at Rs 2 per kg or even the much touted rural employment scheme are placebos and sedatives. Why else would the government carelessly demolish adivasis’ villages or dismiss their traditional mode of development while raiding Orissa’s natural resources?

When three people were shot dead by the police in Maikanch village in 2000, PSSP rallies turned out over 7,000 enraged adivasis. The severe state oppression that PSSP has faced — hundreds arrested in 2005 and 2006 besides periodic lathi charge incidents to disperse protest rallies — is evidence enough to them of the extent to which the government will go to not listen. What happens next? “We continue,” he says.

SANJANA

The Pied Piper Of Parks

ROMA, 44, lobbied in favour of the Forest Rights Act against a State impervious to the possibility of a civil war

IMAGING:SHAILENDRA PANDEY/TEHELKA

ROMA HAD just finished a masters degree in social work from a Delhi college. She found herself gripped with the anxieties of a young urban woman. “I was scared my parents would get me married if I stayed in the city,” she says. “I wanted to explore and understand rural India before settling down.” But Roma never married or settled down. Her exploration into the interiors of Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan’s villages and the forests of Uttar Pradesh chang ed her in fundamental ways. She began reading Ambedkar and Bhagat Singh, and understanding “the politics of a forest life.”

Two decades later, Roma, 44, is one of the founders of the National Forum of Forest People and Forest Workers. The forum was instrumental in lobbying for the landmark Forest Rights Act passed in 2006, which recognised the rights of adivasis to their own forests for the first time in India. Initially, the act was only meant for scheduled castes and tribes. “We fought to have it amended to include other forest dwellers who may not be adivasis,” she says. “The adivasis wanted it changed to prevent a civil war.”

In August 2007, Roma organised a mass protest in UP to have the Forest Rights Act implemented. She was in Lucknow for a meeting days later when she heard the police may arrest her. Roma returned to her base in Sonbhadra because “it’s better to be arrested in front of the public.” She was booked under the Forest Act, and under criminal sections of the IPC. Soon, she was labelled a Maoist and booked under the National Security Act. The locals wreaked havoc for the 20 days Roma was in jail. For 20 days, thousands of adivasis from three districts, mostly women, blocked roads, beat up the police, got beaten up, got condemned as Maoists, but refused to budge. The Mayawati government had to revoke the NSA. “I got out only because of the people’s protest,” Roma says. “If there was a BJP government, I would be an unknown Binayak Sen.”

Roma’s journey began as a college graduate working with rural development NGOs. “They were just a delivery service,” she says. “There was no attempt to bring a qualitative change in the lives of people. The moment the project stops, everything stops.” Opposed to social work that “leads from the outside,” Roma searched for ways to immerse herself inside rural communities. She found the opportunity in the Rajari National Park spread across Uttarakhand and UP. There she lived in dense forests with indigenous people who cooked with forest wood and earned their livelihood by making ropes from wild grass. But every time the adivasis took from the forest, forest officials harassed them with false cases of illegally damaging State property. Desperate, the adivasis went out at night, only to be trampled over by wild elephants.

“A man is worth 1.5 paise,” forest officials said when Roma asked for help, “but an elephant is worth 1.5 lakh.” In 1992, Roma spearheaded a local movement against forest department exploitation — Ghar Shetra Mazdoor Sangharsh Samiti. “We declared we are not afraid, and demanded our rights,” Roma says. After the Samiti formed, locals marched into the forest by day, united. The forest officials had to back off. In 1996, the UP government agreed to make official forest depots and passed an order which “allowed” adivasis “to take grass and fuel wood from the forest.” It was levied on five other national parks in UP.

Roma now lives and works in Sonbhadra district, in the Kamo region of UP, rich with minerals, fossil fuels and rock paintings. Producing 10,000 MW of power, Sonbhadra is also called the ‘energy capital’ of India. The 500 villages in the district have seen no benefits. “Their lands were transferred illegally to the forest department and declared forest land,” Roma says, “so there has been no development here.” She spearheaded the formation of a Kamo Shetra Mahila Mazdur Kisan Sangharsh Samiti, and inspired locals to fight the State and the police. Adivasis and farmers united; they reclaimed 20,000 hectares of forest land in the Kamo region. “My biggest achievement is forming groups of people and awakening a collective political consciousness among them,” she says. “They are moving away from Maoist control. Their consciousness is far beyond the Maoists. They’ll do anything to fight for their rights.”

TUSHA MITTAL

The Girl Against The Boot

ANJALI DAIMARY, 45, has waged war to control the excesses of the armed forces in the North-East

IMAGING: UB PHOTOS/TEHELKA

ACTIVIST ANJALI Daimary marvels that it has been 62 years since India achieved independence. The fruits of all those years, however, have entirely bypassed her native village of Adala Khasibari in Assam’s Udalguri district. Though the village is only 130 kms from Guwahati, it still has no electricity or motorable roads.

Indeed, it was only because of the foresight of her father, a priest, that 45-yearold Daimary was able to complete her own studies. Still the only female graduate from her village, she is now pursuing her PhD on changes in Bodo culture.

Deeply interested in the life of the Bodos, she traces the community’s struggles through the 1980s to the present day. As in most conflict situations, the women suffered the most as the two main militant groups, the Bodo Liberation Tigers (BLT) and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB), waged their battles. Bodo women faced the brunt of raids by the police and security forces. Many were tortured, molested and raped.

In 1992, Daimary formed the Bodo Women Justice Forum to bring about awareness of the community’s rights. Though only women are members, they discuss issues pertaining to the entire community. “We used to go from village to village to mobilise people. We urged them to be conscious participants,” she says.

But their task was not easy. The Forum’s General Secretary Gulapi Basumatary was shot dead in December 1996 while attending a village meeting. Daimary herself was arrested under TADA in 1993. A mother of two and the head of the department of Major Indian Languages (MIL) at Barama College, she was finally acquitted in 2005.

In 1996 and 1997, she had for the first time represented the Bodo tribe at the UN Working Group on Indigenous Population (UNWGIP) in Geneva. She is happy that there is now a UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) that discusses human rights issues of indigenous populations.

“When we take up rape cases, the authorities fudge the reports or witnesses turn hostile. Many innocent young men are picked up and killed instead of being tried as per law. At least we have been able to check atrocities,” she says. One day soon, Anjali Daimary plans to bring together all the indigenous peoples of the North-East to fight for their rights.

TERESA REHMAN

Doctor Strange Love

VASU HV, 34, has been working for the rights of the urban poor for a decade and scorns the class bias that thinks of his life as sacrifice

IMAGING: S RADHAKRISHNA/TEHELKA

IT IS difficult to cut through Dr Vasu HV’s diffidence. Eleven years in the public eye have not weakened his resolve to keep himself in the background. The only way to get him to reveal anything about himself is to talk of the movement. The movement in question is the one initiated by the Karnataka Janapara Vedike, an organisation engaged in fighting for the rights of farmers, slum dwellers and unorganised workers. The Vedike now has an established presence in over 10 districts of the state. At its opening convention, Vasu was unanimously elected to the post of state general secretary. It was a testament to the commitment of the activist who, even as a child growing up in a Brahmin household in rural Karnataka, was deeply shocked by caste inequalities.

“Every district committee of the Vedike has the flexibility to decide on the struggles that it will take up. Though we do have centralised programmes, this flexibility allows the organisation to be more responsive to people’s problems,” says Vasu. In Mandya, the district where he is based, the Vedike is engaged in a battle for the rights of slum dwellers. Of the 18 slums in the town, the Vedike’s influence extends to 12 that have a population of over 10,000 people. The bargaining power that such a presence yields over the state administration is unprecedented.

In April 2009, exasperated by the state’s inaction in providing slum dwellers with housing, the Vedike took over government land and began construction work there.

“In less than two hours we had erected temporary shelters on the land that was earmarked for us, despite an ongoing lawsuit. We wanted to tell the government that we were fed up of waiting for them,” explains Vasu. Despite heavy bandobast, the police did nothing to stop the activists – there were far too many to stop.

Vasu, who took to activism nine years ago after becoming involved in a campaign against the killer reproductive drug quincrinine, doesn’t mull too much on the difficulties of his chosen way of life. “There is a class bias to mapping sacrifice. Coming from a middle class background [Vasu is a doctor from a premier medical college in Bengaluru], I attract more sympathy as someone who has chosen this life. The same sympathy isn’t extended to an activist who has grown up in a slum. Life is hardly easier for him. He has sacrificed personal ambitions as much as I have,” he says with characteristic self-effacement.

SANJANA

The Farmer Of Freedom

LAHA GOPALAN, 58, has been leading adivasis and dalit agricultural labourers in Kerala to stake claim to land that is theirs

IMAGING: S K MOHAN/TEHELKA

AKERALa Electricity Board employee was transferred in 1990 to a remote corner of the state for leading a protest against its ‘100 Percent Literacy’ campaign, which had ignored key adivasi and dalit areas. Laha Gopalan had led 200 adivasis to protest their absence from the state’s agenda.

Sixteen years later, the recently retired Gopalan once again stepped up to confront the state about its neglect of dalits and adivasis and the “unconstitutional treatment of the country’s citizens”. His organisation, Sadhu Jana Samyukta Vimochana Vedi (SJSVV), spearheaded the encroachment of RPG subsidiary Harrison Malayalam’s Chengara rubber estate, where the lease had expired. Thousands of adivasi and dalit farm labourers set up camp in makeshift huts on the estate. Their key demand — that they be given the one to five acres of land that had been promised to each family by the AK Anthony-led Congress government. Historically, Kerala’s first Communist government’s land reforms had entitled tenants to 1/20th of an acre – barely enough space for a family to sleep in. The reforms, however, excluded cash crops, thus enabling companies like RPG and Tata to hold onto hundreds of acres while lower caste farm labourers continued to work on them.

Gopalan’s current role involves far greater risks than job transfers. In the years since the protestors forcibly occupied estate land, the 5,000 strong group has been at the receiving end of much violence. In a brazen incident, four young men were beaten by the estate’s goons. Then, the police charged two of them with theft and put them behind bars for 14 days without bail. Gopalan has nine police cases against him for crimes like cutting a rubber tree. All the cases were registered by estate ‘officials’. The one time he was arrested, protestors forced the police to release him within the hour. Ask him about personal losses and he says, “I’ve always been stubborn. There have been several incidents but they don’t count, considering how great the injustice being fought is”.

Gopalan has inspired a population to fight for what is theirs. “We don’t have a MLA, lawyer or anyone influential supporting us. Few in the movement have even passed class X. To raise consciousness among those who’ve been treated like slaves, is enough to consider the movement a success,” he says.

TEHELKA BUREAU

Vendor Of Tea And Truth

DAYAMANI BARLA, 44, is Jharkhand’s first adivasi journalist. She fights India’s largest steel plant with a mass movement and a tireless stride

IMAGING: RAJESH KUMAR SEN/TEHELKA

GROWING UP in the Arhara village in Jharkhand, Dayamani Barla, 44, could have been just one of the faceless thousands displaced by India’s largest steel plant. Today, she leads the mass movement against it. She could have been another adivasi with a crumbling house and a buried story. Instead, she became a storyteller, the “voice of Jharkhand,” the first tribal journalist from the state, the founder of Jan Hak Patrika. “We presented the point of view of adivasis, dalits, women,” she says. “They believed we’ll stand up for them.” A rural reporting award from P Sainath, and a Rs 25,000 bank loan sustained the paper for over two years. By then she’d convinced established local media like Prabhat Khabar to give space to adivasi and dalit issues.

“We’ll shoot so many bullets, people won’t recognise your dead body” – that was the threat Barla received in March 2008. “I don’t know whether the threat came from the company or the State,” she says, “since both work together.” By then, Barla had already been part of several local people’s movements — against dams on the Koel and Kari rivers, against delimitation that would reduce the number of seats for scheduled tribes, against corrupt NREGA dalals. The death threats would not deter her from the latest fight.

In 2005, Barla discovered maps in a Block Officer’s cabin marking 38 villages with one lakh families to be displaced by Arcelor Mittal’s 12 million tonne steel plant. It stirred her long journey across four districts of Jharkhand, through dense forests and rivers, alerting village after village to the impending doom. “Are you willing to give up your land?” Barla asked unaware villagers. Everyone said no. The mobilising began; she taught them the word ‘virodh’ and showed them how to.

Soon the local village meetings grew into the Adivasi Mulvasi Astitva Raksha Manch, uniting thousands of adivasis and farmers across Jharkhand. More than 15,000 of them followed Barla in street protests every week in March 2008. “Jaan denge, zamin nahin denge,” they chanted. A few months later, Arcelor Mittal told the Jharkhand government: “We can go ahead with the project whenever we like, but we’re not doing so because of the andolan.” Such victories gave the movement new impetus. The slogan changed: “Jaan bhi nahi denge, zamin bhi nahi denge.”

Barla’s own revolution began as a class III student in a local missionary school. The rice, dal and mustard fields her parents cultivated were snatched by “businessmen from another village”. Her parents had inked their thumbs onto paper that sold off their land. Within months, her family split. Her mother and brother moved to Ranchi to work as domestic help, her father left home to work as farm labour. She stayed in Arhara, worked from sunrise, separated chaff from wheat to “buy dinner and pencils.”

It is this early struggle that helped Barla see the “maha vinash” being unleashed in the name of development. “By uprooting our ancestral lands, they also tear apart our entire social fabric,” she says. “It destroys the language, traditions, culture, identity, financial structures of an entire community. It wipes out generations to come.”

In the years that followed, Barla moved to Ranchi, worked as domestic help, washed dishes for the police, ate their leftovers, stayed in a shed with buffaloes and coolies, earned her BCom degree, learnt to type in English and Hindi, worked as a typist for one rupee an hour and funded her MCom. By then it was 1997; she joined a local NGO as an office assistant. “There I saw the real face of NGOS. They collect money in the name of children and women, but don’t spend it on them.” Disillusioned with the idea of NGOS, she quit her job. Simultaneously, she learned that dams on the Koel and Kari rivers could submerge her village. She returned to Arhara, joined an already brewing people’s movement, and hasn’t looked back.

Today, Barla runs a teashop on Club road in Ranchi. Unknown figures have appeared on several occasions to attack it, but failed. “The masses are with us, they can’t touch me,” she says. When she’s away, her husband, previously a paan vendor, manages the shop alone. “The biggest challenge if you want to work for society,” she says, “is to find a way to get your daily meals.”

TUSHA MITTAL

The Grain Elevator

AKHIL GOGOI, 34, uses the Right to Information Act and non-violence to unearth corruption in Assam’s rural development schemes

IMAGING: UB PHOTOS/TEHELKA

SIMPLICITY IS difficult. Nobody knows that better than 34- year-old Akhil Gogoi, whose Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS) spearheads a landless peasants’ movement in Assam. The organisation has been waging war against corruption within Assam’s panchayat system, rural development schemes and the Public Distribution System (PDS).

Gogoi’s weapon is simple but potent. He uses non-violent agitation and now, the Right to Information Act, 2005. He used the RTI to decipher how about 95 percent of the rice intended to be sold under the PDS found its way to the black market. He has also revealed how corruption has crept into the Indira Awas Yojana and the Sampoorna Gramin Rozgar Yojana. All this involved a lot of research. Operating in three districts of the state, his group, the People’s Interest Research Group, carried out a comprehensive study on the PDS scheme. The study, which revealed major irregularities in the existing PDS, led to the dissolution of 11 cooperative societies and a government review of the distribution system.

The unmasking of the scam has made him many enemies. The PDS mafia and local politicians filed a case accusing him of militant leanings. For nearly two years, he remained underground. Even today, he cannot spend too much time with his three-year-old. “I’ve convinced my wife that I am wedded to the cause and she understands,” he says.

Gogoi eventually managed to get corrupt officials arrested. For this, he was honoured with the second Manjunath Shanmugam Integrity Award instituted in the memory of the Indian Oil manager killed by the petrol mafia in November 2005. “I believe awards make a person arrogant. But somehow, I could discover a bond in the honest cause of Manjunath,” he says. Among his early successes was the 2002 campaign to rehabilitate 5 lakh people from 42 villages being evicted from the forests of Golaghat. The movement forced the government to stop the eviction drive and provide a written assurance to settle the displaced forest dwellers. Inspired by that success, the KMSS was born on July 20, 2005. His latest struggle is for the full implementation of NREGA in Assam where there is no gram sabha or social audit and nobody seems to get 100 days wage. “There is no decentralisation of power. We are undertaking gherao programmes in every district. The community has to assert its rights over its resources,” he says.

TERESA REHMAN