Anand Teltumbde
.............................................................................
Although I was a participant in the land struggle on
24 January 2011, I thank Rajesh Solanki and Valjibhai Patel of the Council for
Social Justice, Ahmedabad for providing the information I needed to write this
piece. -writer
...........................................................................................................................................
Anand Teltumbde (tanandraj@gmail.com) is a writer and civil rights
activist with the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, Mumbai.
It was heartening to witness dalits in Saurashtra,
deprived of the use of land that was de jure theirs, marching to take
possession of it. One was reminded of an event in Mahad on 20 March 1927 when
the delegates to the Bahishkrit Conference had marched under the leadership of
their newfound leader B R Ambedkar to the Chavadar Tank to assert their civil
rights to use its water. Nobody noticed little vibrations on the literal
margins of vibrant Gujarat on 24 January 2011 but potentially they could cause
significant tremors across the country. In a nondescript village of Joradiary
in Vav taluka of Banaskantha district in north Gujarat, practically on the
borders of Rajasthan and Pakistan, a procession of 200 odd dalits accompanied
by beats of drums and slogans of “long live Ambedkar” marched into a farm under
illegal control of a Rabari to restore its possession to a dalit. The Ahmedabad
based Council for Social Justice (CSJ), which led this struggle to its culmination,
was justifiably apprehensive of the beneficiaries daring their upper caste
tormentors in taking this bold step and had therefore planned to mobilise
dalits from all villages in the taluka at Vav for a public meeting before
taking the victory march. Indeed, the beneficiary dalit family, the de jure
owner of the farm for the last 28 years, literally trembled to do a little
ritual, to mark the taking of its de facto possession. More such takeovers
followed until evening to embolden people to take possession of their own
lands, being illegally cultivated by the upper castes. In the Vav taluka
itself, 35 dalit families benefited from the ownership of over 150 acres.
Unknown even to dalits, it was a landmark event
that could verily be likened to the one that took place in Mahad on 20 March
1927 when the delegates to the Bahishkrit Conference there had marched under
the leadership of their newfound leader B R Ambedkar to the Chavadar Tank and
asserted their civil rights to use its water. Caste Residue of Land ReformsAt
the time of transfer of power in 1947, landownership was virtually concentrated
in the hands of a few landlords, who were the erstwhile feudal lords. The ethos
of the freedom struggle led the new rulers to announce policies like abolition
of Zamindari and redistribution of surplus land to the tillers. It had a
salutary impact in calming and confusing radical peasant movements that
demanded land reforms. The glorious Telangana struggle, for instance, was
called off by the communists precisely because of these policy announcements, pushing
them onto the parliamentary path that, they mistakenly thought, would reach
their cherished goal of revolution. Land reforms did take place but in a
calibrated and truncated manner. Some amount of land was taken from the upper
caste feudal lords and distributed among the middle caste tenants. No one
fully comprehended the far-reaching consequences of this innocuous development,
which would change the basic complexion of rural India. The capitalist
strategy of green revolution immediately following it led to the enrichment of
these middle castes, who leveraged the economic gain to establish their
hegemony over most spheres of national life.
Speaking of Gujarat, U N Dhebar, the chief minister
of the then Saurashtra state, had enacted the Saurashtra Land Reforms Act,
1952, giving occupancy rights to 55,000 tenant cultivators over 12 lakh acres
of land, out of 29 lakh acres held by girasdars, spread over 1,726
villages, the balance being left for their personal cultivation. Girasdars were
mainly upper caste kshatriyas, known as darbars, literally meaning rulers.
Tenant cultivators were mainly Patels by caste, who became the owners of this
land. The Patels enriched themselves by undertaking massive cash crop cultivation
like groundnut, cotton, cumin and later graduating to setting up cotton ginning,
oil mills, and other industries. This has been the evolution of the Saurashtra
Patel lobby, euphemistically known as telia rajas (oil kings), who came
to occupy the dominant position in the politics of Gujarat. With their social
capital and state backing, they went on acquiring huge tracts of agricultural
lands all over the state, most notably in the tribal belt of south Gujarat.
Laws were suitably amended to facilitate this acquisition. There were two of the
most notable changes in the law. One was the taking away of the eight km limit
for an agriculturist to own agricultural land away from his residence, thereby
allowing absentee landlordism. The second was changing the order of priorities
from scheduled tribes (ST), scheduled castes (SC) and Other Backward Classes
(OBC) to original landlords and then others for the right to cultivate
government surplus land.
Through
another Act, i.e., the Estate Acquisition Act, the government acquired
“uncultivable” and cultivable wasteland, gochar land (village grassland
for cattle grazing) and other assets by compensating the girasdars. This huge
land that came in the possession of the state became the theatre of the land
grab struggle in the early 1960s by dalit landless peasants and agricultural
labourers, under the leadership of dalit textile workers of Ahmedabad. In the
words of Somchandbhai Makwana, an influential leader of that movement, an
estimated 2 lakh acres of land was grabbed by dalits and OBCs, which still
remains in their possession, albeit without regularisation by the government.
In many
cases, dalit and OBC peasants and/or their cooperatives, tilling lands under
the government’s ek-sali (oneyear renewable tenure) scheme for several
decades, were evicted and the land was reverted back to the “original” upper
caste landlords. Gandhinagar, the capital of Gujarat, has been a meek witness
over the last three years to many dalit families (mostly from Saurashtra)
offering satyagraha on the footpath near the assembly against this intrigue.
The amendments to the Acts referred to above emboldened the upper castes and
the state machinery to violently evict dalits from the land they had cultivated
for decades. In a macabre incident on 27 November 1999 in Pankhan village in
Saurashtra, a mob of 800 upper caste men had attacked dalits with swords,
spears, pipes and fire arms and seriously injured 60 men and women, effectively
evicting them from 125 acres of land.A Strange Struggle for LandIn 1997, santh
(title) orders were given for a total of 150 acres to 40 dalits of Bharad
village in Dhrangadhra taluka of Surendranagar district. Two of these 40,
Devjibhai and Kanabhai (a blind agricultural labourer) asked the upper caste
Patel to vacate the land allotted to them. Upper caste landlords responded with
violence but were met with serious resistance. Violent group clashes ensued and
in one such confrontation six persons suffered serious injuries. Dalits
endured severe social boycott by the upper castes. Devjibhai was apprehended
and imprisoned under the Prevention of AntiSocial Activities Act (PASA) for
daring to enter the land although he was its de jure owner. It was at this
stage that the CSJ stepped in, creatively combining legal and agitation strategies
and got Devjibhai released. It organised an “Ambedkar Rath” through 28
villages over seven days to mobilise dalit support, which culminated in a rally
of over 10,000 landless dalits on 6 December 1999, the death anniversary of
Ambedkar. The struggle encompassed all 12,438 acres of prime agricultural land
declared surplus vide the Agriculture Land Ceiling Act, for which 2,398 dalit
families and 50 tribal families were given the santh, but not actual
possession. The land, apart from being very fertile, was potentially valuable
because Surendranagar district was to be the biggest beneficiary of the Narmada
irrigation scheme.
A parallel
struggle took place in another village, Kaundh, where a young textile mill
worker Dungarshibhai of Ahmedabad gave up his job to take up cudgels on behalf
of his people in the village. In defiance of one of the biggest tyrant darbars
in the district, who owned nearly 3,000 acres of land, he drove the tractor on
the land given to his family in santh but which was still in possession of the
darbar. As the entire group of dalits stood behind him, the darbar allowed
Dungarshibhai to cultivate but took away the crop. CSJ filed a criminal
complaint and put three darbars behind bars. Dungarshibhai today is revered as
an unchallenged dalit leader in Surendranagar district.
These
struggles were strange as they were waged by the de jure owners of land for its
possession from the illegal holders. While the government eagerly publicised
distribution of lands to the SC/ST beneficiaries, it intentionally or
otherwise ignored their physical handing over. The process for handing over
possession involved the village talathi preparing the records of rights
and the “farmers’ book” along with a rough map of the plot. After receiving
these documents from the collector’s office, the District Inspector of Land
Records (DILR) had to send surveyors to prepare the final map, physically mark
it out and hand over its possession to the beneficiary in the presence of the
collector’s representative. This procedure was not carried out in most cases.
The beneficiaries were also deprived of Rs 5,000 per acre due to them as per
rules. The officers responsible could be punished as per a government
notification of 1989 but no action was taken. In case of the SC/ST beneficiaries,
the Scheduled
Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 (the Atrocities
Act) could also be invoked.
The
struggle, led by the CSJ, set the state machinery into action, enabling the
dalits in Vav taluka to take possession of their lands. But alas, this
impressive struggle failed to arouse the enthusiasm of the reservationobsessed
middle class dalits, thus revealing the ugly fault line of the “emerging
classes” among dalits. Anti-Dalit Attitude of the StateAlthough, like any other
dalit episode, this may also be a pan Indian phenomenon, nevertheless Gujarat
strangely emerges as a “rogue state” as far as recent revelations visàvis
dalits are concerned. A CSJ study of 400 judgments delivered by the special courts
in 16 districts of Gujarat since 1 April 1995 revealed a shocking pattern
behind the collapse of cases filed under the Atrocities Act: utterly negligent
police investigation at both the higher and lower levels and a distinctly
hostile role played by the public prosecutors. In over 95% of the cases,
acquittals had resulted due to technical lapses by the investigation and
prosecution, and in the remaining 5%, court directives were flouted by the government.
The government’s casual attitude was underscored by the statement of its chief
minister in the assembly when he stated, contrary to the Rule, that the cases
under the Atrocities Act was to be investigated by an officer not above the
rank of deputy superintendent of police.
One wonders
whether this plight of dalits at the hands of the Gujarat government is because
of its ideological adherence to Hindutva or because of its neoliberal vibrancy.
As it appears, perhaps it is the result of both these mutually reinforcing
factors, a kind of vile resonance.
(Courtesy: Economic & Political Weekly, April 2, 2011 vol. xlvi no 14)
No comments:
Post a Comment