The passive activist

Published in the Hindustan Times Edit Page on December 28, 2004

There are men and there are Men. My friend Jyotirmoy Mondol most certainly falls under the latter category. Mondol, a non-descript, 40-something bank clerk, stays in Kolkata’s down-market Kasba area and has a weakness for rum and Atul Prasad songs. Separated from wife and daughter, he lives alone in a one-room rented accommodation and has hardly any visitors. Those who get to meet him regularly----mostly neighbours and colleagues---say he is stingy, arrogant and unsociable.
So what makes him special? Well, Mondol is an activist. Not your regular khadi-endorsing jholawala though. He has spent the better part of his last 10 years----taking leave (often unpaid) from office---to work for the uplife of the Orao community of Purulia, home to habitual offenders, crow-eaters and other denotified tribes.
But ask Mondol about it and he will recoil. Press him some more and he will get offended. “Activism has become a dirty word. A rather lucrative career proposition now,” he once told me. “I go to Purulia for very selfish reasons. It’s a sort of detoxification drive for me.”
But I know that Mondol’s visits have been more than that. He had once saved an Orao woman from being branded a witch. The plot was a predictable one. A year after marriage, Surajmani Mandi’s husband had died an untimely death. Greedy relatives, wanting to usurp her property, had hired the services of an ojha (exorcist).
Mandi was promptly branded a witch and asked to leave the village. Mondol was there when all this was happening. Realising that there was no time to start any movement, he had bribed the village headman. Mandi’s problems were solved, at least for the time being. “But what did you gain from it,” I had asked. “I kind of fancied the woman, you know,” Mondol had winked.
There are other Mondol stories. Bigger achievements that should have earned him some recognition had Mondol been somewhat less self-abnegating. When we first became friends, I thought Mondol was a Tarinikhuro replicate (Tarinikhuro is that great teller of tales created by Satyajit Ray.)
I didn’t know whether to believe him. But then Mondol did something which, much against his wish, got him a single column space in the inside page of a Kolkata daily. He started a school for Purulia’s tribal children.
I called up Mondol a few days back. “What’s the plan for New Year Eve?” He sounded excited. “The school’s doing well. They are staging a play, all by themselves. What better way to spend the New Year than being there?”
Hundreds of kilometers away from that ‘great event’, this 31st night, in some south Delhi pub, I’ll drink to that.

Death and the Dalit

Published in the Edit Page of The Pioneer on Sept 19, 2003

Boy met girl and fell in love. They decided to be together for the rest of their lives. Only they weren’t allowed to. Because the boy was a Dalit, the girl a Rajput. Because the girl’s family thought it is more ‘honourable’ to keep her from eloping with a lower caste than to let her be. Because ‘honour killings’ are still very much a reality in this country. Because you can kill a couple in broad daylight in front of an entire village and nobody would intervene. Because all the hogwash about multiculturalism, secularism and tolerance notwithstanding, caste is still a curse in our society.
On September 12, Chander and Sajni, residents of Bhopur village in Bulandshahr, Uttar Pradesh, were lynched to death by a mob. The couple had fled from their village in the district and come to Delhi to begin life afresh after Sajni was forcibly married off. Their happiness was short-lived, though. Two days later, a busload of villagers reached Delhi in search of them. After finding the lovers, the mob dragged them out of their house and took them back to the village. They were tortured throughout the journey back to Bhopur. Beaten with sticks and rods, the couple was half dead even before they reached the village. Whenever they collapsed, they were forced to stand and again hit on the legs. On reaching the village, Chander and Sajni were paraded before being beaten to death. Their bodies were then peppered with gunshots and finally burnt on piles of cowdung. Another ‘honour’ killing was accomplished.
This is not the only instance of atrocities on Dalits for committing the ‘unpardonable sin’ of marrying upper castes in recent history. Now too long ago, four Dalits of a family in Hardoi, UP, were killed for the same reason. Briraj, a young Dalit, had eloped with Poonam, who happened to be the daughter of an upper caste Rajput police sub-inspector. Hence the outrage.
‘Honour killings’ take place quite frequently in the states of UP, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan. And when they cannot lay their hands on the male members of the ‘errant’ Dalit lover, the upper caste revenge-seekers pounce on the women. There have been many instances when the female relatives of some Dalit boy, who had eloped or married an upper caste, were dragged out of their homes, stripped and paraded naked in front of the entire village and then gangraped.
Most such incidents don’t even make it to the pages of mainline dailies these days. Even if they do, they are pushed to some obscure corner of an inside page. Chander’s and Sajni’s killings created a bit of a flutter as they were dragged out of their home in Delhi, taken back to their native village and then murdered.
What is most shocking here is the pronounced bias exhibited by our law enforcers. In most case, the victims are tortured before being killed. The torture takes place over the period of several hours, sometimes even throughout the day, in front of the entire village. And even when the matter is related to local police chowkees, no action is taken. The officials posted there live up to their reputation of turning up only after the crime has taken place. The reason: In most cases belonging to the upper castes themselves, law enforcers display their silent approval by letting such atrocities take place. Reports by Amnesty International suggest there have been cases where the authorities were party to the crime.
In a country where caste oppression remains a reality even in the 21st century, and the socially oppressed have no one to turn to but law-enforcers, such partiality should not go unpunished.

Where’s the faith?

Published in the Hindustan Times Edit Page on March 2, 2005

Is Delhi more cosmopolitan and less communal than, say, Ahmedabad? My friend Irshad says no. Now Irshad’s been in Delhi much longer than I have. Almost sever years now, he says. And in these seven years ----- by Irshad’s own admission ---- the city’s been good to him. An economic migrant from Kolkata like me, Irshad has moved up Delhi’s corporate ladder rather swiftly. And it shows. A new car, a rather specious, rented apartment in posh south Delhi, the latest gizmos. And a stunner for a girlfriend (though Irshad insists that has got nothing to do with his doing well professionally). Life was a breeze till a fateful Saturday night last month.
It had been a particularly tiring day for Irshad. With a splitting headache, he decided against a late night and hit the bed early. At around 1 a.m., he was woken up by a loudspeaker honking away to full glory. Looking out, he saw a congregation at a makeshift pandal. There was, he realised, a jagran. His girlfriend, who had also woken up by the commotion outside, insisted that he go out and tell someone to tell off the loudspeaker. “The noise is way beyond permissible limit,” she said. Irshad hesitated. “See, if you don’t protest, they will go on like this forever,” she rebuked. So Irshad went out and approached the nearest guy in the crowd. “Could you please lower the volume?” he was curtly told that it would not be possible. “Call the cops,” she said, when he came back. “But?” “But nothing! This is blatant flouting of the laws. We have a right to protest.”
So Irshad protested. He dialed 100 and lodged a complaint. The policemen came and shut the loudspeaker off. But what followed was something Irshad had not bargained for. What was a religious gathering at a neighbourhood jagran morphed into a stone-pelting mob outside Irshad’s home. Stones abd brickbats apart, choicest expletives were hurled at him for disrupting a ‘holy’ ceremony. It had been a mistake to allow someone of his religion to rent an apartment in the locality, they said.
Not very nice things were told about his live-in too. Bad blood, somebody commented, was spreading bad culture. This continued for well over an hour. Call the cops again, she pleaded. This time, Irshad said no.
A while back, Irshad was offered a transfer by his company to Ahmedabad in a senior position. He had declined the offer then. “That city just gives me an uneasy feeling, you know. It’s not easy to forget what happened there in 2002. Delhi’s much safer that way,” he had told me. Last week, he asked his company for the Ahmedabad transfer.

Portrait of the author as an activist

Published in Today (India Today group) on August 3, 2004

The activist with a known cause is a predictable and pretentious species. But the fiction writer as a chance activist digging out a long-buried past? Deconstructing a series of events that led to one of the grossest human rights violations in the history of independent India? Sounds engaging? Well, that’s what Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide is.
Ghosh, though, is not an Arundhati Roy, voicing protest against Big People subjugating Little People. He is a keen historian and anthropologist recounting, without any philosophizing whatsoever, through the private journals of his character Nirmal, a schoolteacher and a dreamy communist, the dispossession of the already dispossessed. Something that was quickly executed and quietly forgotten. Maybe because the perpetrator of the ‘crime’ was the State itself. Maybe because the victims were lower-caste Hindus (namashudras), refugees from Bangladesh who had taken refuge in Morichjhapi, located in the archipelago of islands called the Sunderbans, where their voices could be easily drowned in ‘the hungry tide’. Ghosh offers no answers.
But in the novel, the voices of the doomed come back to haunt: “The people….joined together their voices and began to shout, in unison, ‘Amra kara? Bastuhara. Who are we? We are the dispossessed…. Morichjhapi chharbona. We’ll not leave Morichjhapi, do what you may?”
The Hungry Tide is also about journeys undertaken. Not just spatial and temporal, but journeys within, like in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Journeys undertaken by Riya, a Bengali cetologist from America, to study the behaviour of rare dolphins. It is also the journey of Kanai, a Delhi-based translator, who come to visit his aunt in Lusibari in the Sunderbans. And of Nirmal, Kanai’s uncle, long dead, who was a witness to all the atrocities that took place in the name of preserving ecology in the island. The Hungry Tide is about how their lives get entwined, to be changed forever. Vintage Ghosh at his best. Read it.

Casteless, Classless, Truthless

Published in the Hindustan Times Edit Page on February 15, 2005

In the nearly thirty years of Left Front rule, amid promises of classless, casteless equality, the plight of Dalits in West Bengal continues to be one of suffering and shame

Most of those familiar with Kolkata ----and the bhadralok ethos it celebrates ----will tell you that in this city, atrocities based on caste bias are but stray incidents. Any display of caste bias is generally scoffed at and 28 years of Left rule have, among other things, done away with the twin evils of class and caste. People’s Democracy, the CPI(M) publication, informs with unfailing regularity of the communists’ success in providing succor in Bengal to the socially marginalised.
Don’t fall for that. On the surface, yes, it may be different in Bengal. There is no Ranvir Sena to maim, rape, kill and burn the Dalit populace. Dark-skinned cows are not rejected because they may belong to lower castes, or white-skinned ones venerated as Aryan symbols. Caste politics hasn’t reared its ugly head to the extent it has in some other states, notably in the BIMARU ones.
The atrocities and inequalities in the rule of the Left Front are different. Urban Bengal has always had a tradition of ‘unorthodoxy’. So caste discrimination does not always assume epidemic proportions. But that has not put a stop to the caste crimes here. It’s another matter that they mostly go unreported. Truth be told, the government of the proletariat has been guilty not only of criminal negligence to the Dalit cause, but of atrocities against them as well.
Flashback to the late Seventies: an about-to-retire head of the Sanskrit department of a reputed university in Kolkata reacted strongly against an application for a lecturer’s post in his department. Reason: the applicant was a namashudra (a scheduled caste). Surely a shudra can’t be allowed to teach Sanskrit in a university, the professor fumed. Reservation for SC/STs and OBCs was still a distant dream. The candidate a first-class degree holder had applied purely on the basis of merit. The professor, a Left ideologue, garnered tacit political support to scrap the application. No reason was cited for the refusal. All that the applicant got to know was that ‘a more deserving candidate’ has been selected.
The Morichjhapi carnage in 1979, for instance, is a classic example of the Left Front’s caste bias. The incident that forms the backdrop of Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide saw the forcible eviction of around 10,000 settlers (mostly lower-caste Hindu refugees from East Pakistan, now Bangladesh) from Morichjhapi, an island on the south of Kumarimari in Suderbans. Around 6,000 huts were set on fire, plainclothes policemen opened fire in which many hapless refugees were killed. The Left Front government was then in power.
But what was it that prompted the Left to displace a people who had started new lives in an uninhabited island? The official explanation was that Morichjhapi was a reserved forest area. Reports state that Janata Dal MPs, who visited the region in 1979, said that there never was any reserved forest in that region. What then was the real cause of the carnage?
According to journalist Niranjan Haldar, who extensively reported and researched the carnage, the refusal of the Udbastu Unnayansil Samity, an association of refugees, to merge with the CPI(M) led to their eviction. Moreover (and this is the version of the inhabitants of Kumarimari), the inhabitants of Morichjhapi were all namashudras. Would things have been different if they belonged to the upper castes?
In Novemver 2004, students in a primary school in Birbhanpur village in West Bengal’s Bankura district refused to accept mid-day meals. Reason: the cook was a baghdi woman, an untouchable. With op-ed hacks from Kolkata newsrooms crying ‘Disgrace’, politburo member Biman Bose issued a statement” The matter has to be resolved through detailed discussions.” When a similar incident took place in Purulia district’s Dumuradi village around the same time, a quick solution was offered by the village education committee: hire another cook, an upper caste this time.
More recently, the Howrah Municipality Corporation evicted several hundred Dalit families, mostly from the Balmiki community, from Belilius Park, Howrah. These families are mostly engaged as safai karmacharis (sanitation workers) with the corporation. Citing environmental degradation, and without providing any alternative, the government razed their houses and it was reported that the police even took away their belongings.
After the mid-day meal incident last year, Anandabazar Patrika ran a series on the plight of Dalits in Bengal villages (panchayats in most of these are under direct Left control). The findings are alarming. In village after village, the survey finds that Dalit families are marginalized; Dalit children are made to occupy separate seats in schools and are denied access to libraries and other facilities.
So while comrades Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury prodly declares in Delhi, “Where ever the Red flag flies, we will destroy untouchability”, the dalits live a life of shame and suffering in West Bengal’s villages.

Japan’s Dalits

An old article I dug out of the archives today. They have Dalits in Japan too. What are Dalits after all? Ones who are made to clean up society’s shit. And Japan is no different from BIMARU Bihar.

Plight and struggle of Japan’s Burakus

Buraku discrimination traces its roots to Japan's feudal era about 400 years ago. In those days, discriminated-against people were assigned jobs that others abhorred, such as disposing of dead cattle, producing leather, and being low-ranking security guards.
The modernization revolution in 1868 and the Emancipation Edict in 1871 were supposed to have put that oppressive system to an end. But it only gave birth to a new class system with the Emperor at the top and the Buraku people at the bottom.
A new constitution with provisions banning any form of ethnic discrimination was later enforced in May 1947. However, discrimination against the Burakus has persisted.
Today, there are about three million Burakus spread in 6,000 districts all over Japan, according to the Buraku Liberation League and the Buraku Liberation and Human Rights Research Institute.
The conditions of the Burakus have improved, to a certain extent, largely due to the efforts of groups such as the Buraku Liberation League. In August 1965, for instance, the group lobbied for the passage by the Cabinet Dowa Policy Council of a proposal urging the Japanese government to tackle the plight of the Burakus. In July 1969, the Law on Special Measures was enacted for the purpose of improving the conditions of Buraku such as housing.
But the Burakus continue to be discriminated in many aspects of social life, including marriage and employment. Even the Internet has become an instrument for Buraku bashing. Studies have also indicated that the standard of living, education and employment for the Burakus still fall below the national average.
Below is an initial list of measures that human rights advocates believe will help alleviate the plight of Burakus:
1. Promote education and awareness against Buraku discrimination.
2. Enact legislation prohibiting Buraku discrimination.
3. Establish an independent national human rights institution that will document human rights violations against the Burakus, monitor compliance of state and non-state actors with national legislation and international instruments criminalizing all forms of discrimination against Burakus, and facilitate redress for the victims of Buraku discrimination.
4. Prepare measures to effectively resolve current Buraku problems before the existing Special Measures Law expire in March 2002.
Below are recent positive developments regarding the elimination of Buraku discrimination:
The Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), in its final observation on the First and Second periodical government of Japan for 2001, has stated that Buraku discrimination falls under discrimination based on descent in the first provision of the International Covenant onthe Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). It also said that the Japanese government has the obligation to solve Buraku discrimination.
In August 2000, the Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights passed a resolution recognising that discrimination based on work and descent exists in Japan, South Asia and West Africa. It noted that these are forms of discrimination prohibited by international human rights laws and called on all concerned governments to take effective measures to address them.
The Buraku issue was, however, sidelined during the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (WCAR) held in Durban, South Africa in September this year. It remains to be seen if the WCAR will recognize Buraku discrimination in its final documents.

More information about Buraku discrimination may be obtained by contacting these organisations:

Buraku Liberation League (BLL)3-5-11 Roppongi,Minato-kuTokyo, Japan 106-0032Phone: +81-3-3586-7007, Fax: +81-3-3585-8966Website: http://www.bll.gr.jp/E-mail: honbu@bll.gr.jp

Buraku Liberation and Human Rights Research Institute (BLHRRI)1-6-12 Kuboyoshi,Naniwa-kuOsaka City, Japan 556-0028Tel: +81-6-6568-0905, Fax: +81-6-6568-0714Website: http://blhrri.org/E-mail: webmaster@blhrri.org

Written by Kazuhiro Kawamoto and Kenzo Tomonaga, director of the Buraku Liberation and Human Rights Research Institute (BLHRRI).