[sacw] sacw dispatch #2 (23 Sept.99)

[Harsh Kapoor]

<fontfamily><param>Times</param>South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch

23 September 1999

------------------------------------------

#1. SAHMAT Statement on Attck on Theatre group in Lucknow

#2. NBA update 

#3. Lowest Castes in India, Reaching For Power, Shake Up The System

------------------------------------------

#1.

SAHMAT

8, Vithalbhai Patel House, Rafi Marg, New Delhi-110001

Tel-3711276 / 3351424 Fax-3355845

e-mail-sahmat@n...

PRESS STATEMENT

STREET THEATRE GROUP ATTACKED BY BJP IN LUCKNOW

23.9.99

In an event remniscent of the attack on theatre activist Safdar Hashmi
10

years ago, the street theatre group Sahmat Rangmanch organised by the
Trust

constituted in his memory (SAHMAT) was attacked by the BJP MLC Ajit
Singh,

in Lucknow on the evening of September 22.

SAHMAT in its campaign against divisive, communal and fundamentalist
forces

of the Sangh Parivar had organised a week-long programme in Lucknow

commencing on September 20 with the inauguration of an exhibition
titled “

Harvest of Hatred” depicting dark times under the saffron brigade. The

street play “ Teen Terah ka Chakkar” was being performed as a part of
this

programme and was evoking a very positive public and media response.

Panicked at its reception, the BJP in an organised move attacked the

13-member group at Bans Mandi Chowk when the group was returning from

Raniganj. The Raniganj show was cancelled because it coincided with a

meeting of the Chief Minister. The vehicle in which the artists were

travelling was intercepted by a Tata Safari and its driver and
occupants

were dragged out, abused and beaten up seriously injuring three of
them.

Academics and artists in Lucknow have organised a protest condemning
the

saffron brigade for the attack. They have called upon the artist
community

and democratic movement and citizens to raise their voice against this

barbaric but characterstic behaviour of the Sangh Parivar.

SAHMAT and Lucknow based artists and scholars have said in a statement
that

this incident in Mr. Vajpayee’s constituency exposes the hollow and
bogus

claims of the liberal image of Mr. Vajpayee . SAHMAT has also
expressed its

resolve to continue with its programme. SAHMAT has also sought an

appointment with the President to apprise him of the situation. A
delegation

of scholars and artists will be visiting Lucknow to join in the protest
on

September 24.

(sent by ram rehman for SAHMAT)

_________________________

#2.

Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 02:33:18 -0400 (EDT)

From: Venu Madhav Govindu <<venu@c...>

Subject: Narmada Update, 23-9-99 11am IST

Dear friends,

I had sent to you a press note yesterday so did not send an update.

Here is the latest :

The indefinite dharna is on at Dhadgaon as hundreds of village people
from

the Narmada valley and surrounding area have gathered there. Medha and
all

300 people arrested and released had joined the Dharna. The demand of
the

people is that the dharna will go on till higher officials of the

Maharashtra Government come and have a discussion with the people and

answer their queries. 

The levels of water:

Date/time Dam site Rajghat Hoshangabad

22.9.99

6.00pm 98.61 mts 126.300 295.550

23.9.99

8.00am 98.34 125.590 292.75(6.am)

This shows that the water levels are decreasing at all places. At

Jalsindhi people are no longer in water since yesterday afternoon.

The court has still not given the date of the next hearing. Though it
may

seem that the emergency had passed, the pressure should be on as the

damage to property, fields and houses is huge. People are on

indefinite dharna at Dhadgaon - with no official response. The

respective state governments should be held responsible for the damage

caused and pressure applied so that they should stop the dam from
going

on.

Letters to the editor, articles, etc should go as there is it seems
not

good press coverage of the issue.

Individuals and organisations should keep writing to the President and

respective chief ministers. It will be significant if eminent people

are contacted and issue a press statement against this submergence and

the grave situation that arose or can also write to the President and

the chief ministers. Public demonstrations should go on wherever

possible particularly where there has been no action so far.

Huge task remains to be done - surveys of the damage caused in the

valley, relief to those families severely affected, etc.

We will keep you informed.

Sukumar & Nandini.

Baroda. 11 am

NB: Just when we finished this update, we got the got the following

information:-

About 350 to 400 people who were on a peaceful dharna including Medha

Patkar have been arrested under section 144, section 188 of Bombay

Police Act. The police came and very badly pulled the people,

dragged women by hair and sarees. Medha too was dragged upto the
police

jeep. They are now being produced before the Dhadgaon Magistrate where

people are demanding immediate and unconditional release. Police has

declared Section 144 in Dhadgaon.

_________________________

#3.

New York Times

September 23, 1999

THE LOWEST CASTES IN INDIA, REACHING FOR POWER, SHAKE UP THE SYSTEM

By CELIA W. DUGGER

AMALPUR, India -- In this poor, muddy village in the heart of the
world's largest democracy, Binda Prasad, a burly man whose mustache
twirls up in a flourish, tells a story about himself -- a story of
triumph, humiliation and fighting back.

As hundreds of millions of Indians vote in national elections this
month, his parable of village life helps explain why people like him,
from the most despised castes, are voting in greater numbers, gaining
new influence and turning political calculations upside down as they
redefine the very meaning of the centuries-old caste system.

His story goes like this:

Four years ago, Prasad, a landless laborer, became the first of his
caste to be elected village chief under a new constitutional amendment
that guarantees a portion of such positions to people from the lowest
rungs of the caste hierarchy. On India's Independence Day, as hundreds
of villagers gathered to watch him unfurl the national flag, he sat in
a place of honor, at last an equal of the upper-caste men who had
always governed.

But at that very moment, he recalled bitterly, a man from the dominant,
landed upper caste grabbed him by the neck, threw him from his chair,
beat and kicked him and demanded to know how he dared sit before his
betters on a chair, rather than on the ground. The villagers looked on
but did nothing to stop the man.

Shamed and frightened, Prasad fled. But he did not go home and give up.
When the police failed to make a quick arrest, he said, he went to the
local leaders of the Majority Society Party, which is grounded on the
votes of humble, low-caste men and women like himself, and they pressed
the local authorities to jail the culprit.

"The party's leaders visit this area, listen to the poor people and do
anything they can to help us," he said. "When we are subjected to caste
atrocities, they console us, get the complaint registered and make sure
action is taken."

In the 1990's, most voters from the lowest castes here in India's most
populous state, Uttar Pradesh, have given their loyalty to the Majority
Society Party, which has also built a strong following in several other
northern Indian states.

The growing political power and independence of the lowest castes,
generally referred to as "scheduled castes" because of their
enumeration in the Constitution for special benefits, is being felt not
just in northern India, but across the country.

They are voting in greater proportions than ever before, greater even
than the upper castes, according to voter surveys conducted in 1996 and
1998 by the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi.

"Democracy is leading to greater social equality for people who had
been excluded from political power for the first three or four decades
of Indian independence," said Yogendra Yadav, a political scientist who
supervised the surveys.

The founders of independent India dreamed half a century ago of a
casteless society, but caste has proved a resilient and dynamic force.
Paradoxically, this hierarchical, hereditary system that has oppressed
the lower orders of society has also become an organizing principal
that the downtrodden themselves have seized on to forge their own
political identity and to seek electoral power.

Like blacks in the United States, many in the lowest castes have
spurned the old names given to them -- as ritually impure untouchables
who cannot even drink from the same well as upper castes, or as
Harijans, or Children of God, as they were called by the independence
leader Mohandas K. Gandhi. Instead, they have adopted the blunt term
Dalit, which means oppressed or ground-down in Hindi.

In Uttar Pradesh, where Dalits make up a fifth of the population, they
have largely deserted the Congress Party, which was dominated by an
upper caste, an English-speaking elite that ruled India for most of its
52 years of independence, but failed to share real power with the
lowest castes it depended on for votes.

Now, instead of stamping the Congress Party symbol of a raised hand,
most chose the elephant, symbol of the Bahujan Samaj Party, Hindi for
Majority Society Party.

"I voted for the Hand many years ago," said Puran Kahar, an illiterate
man in a loincloth who still performs his lowly caste job of carrying
water for the upper castes here in the village. "But they didn't listen
to us, so we don't vote for them anymore."

The Majority Society Party was founded in 1984 and its leaders have
emerged from the still small section of Dalits who have gone to
universities or held Government jobs because of constitutionally
mandated affirmative action requirements.

"The whole party was born out of bureaucrats," said D. L. Sheth, a
sociologist.

The greatest successes of the party have been in Uttar Pradesh,
population 160 million, where its vote tallies have grown from 10
percent in 1989 to 20 percent last year, with substantial support from
middle castes.

The party's leaders have baldly sought political power, rather than
building a movement based on an agenda of specific social and economic
reforms. They believe that only by gaining power will Dalits be treated
with dignity and win their share of patronage and development
resources, say scholars who have studied the party.

Mayawati, a sharp-tongued, aggressive leader of the party, has relished
talking back to upper castes, a heady reversal of roles for people who
long kept silent out of fear. On a recent television talk show, a
member of the audience asked how she could justify her lavish way of
life in the name of the scheduled castes.

"Why is this pinching your stomach?" she scathingly replied, suggesting
the questioner was an upper-caste man who couldn't digest the idea of a
Dalit succeeding.

In Uttar Pradesh, the party has parlayed alliances with other parties
into brief spells when it ran the state. In 1995 and again in 1997, Ms.
Mayawati -- a former schoolteacher who like many Dalit women has only
one name -- became the first, and as yet, only Dalit woman ever to
serve as Chief Minister of an Indian state.

In the two periods in which she ruled for a total of 10 months, she is
widely credited -- or blamed -- for turning the state machinery to the
benefit of Dalits, requiring that state jobs be set aside for them,
insisting that land promised to the landless be handed over, and
brusquely and summarily suspending bureaucrats who were laggards in
carrying out her orders.

This April, the party's five members of Parliament toppled the national
coalition Government led by the Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata
Party, which lost by a single vote.

At a recent rally in Jansath, in western Uttar Pradesh, Ms. Mayawati
gleefully recalled for the thousands who had gathered in a
monsoon-swamped field how she had tricked the B.J.P. into thinking her
party would abstain on the confidence vote, then cast the deciding
negative votes on the floor -- getting revenge on a party that she
believed had betrayed her own in the dog-eat-dog world of Uttar Pradesh
politics.

She also laid out the party's unashamedly caste-based strategy for
winning power. While keeping the party leadership firmly in Dalit
hands, it has recruited candidates who are Muslims or from the middle
and upper castes to run under the party's banner in most of the 85
parliamentary seats in the state.

The calculus is simple: the party's minority base among Dalits is not
enough to win most elections, but with the support of even one more
community it has a chance.

"For all those laws in the Constitution to be implemented," she said,
"we have to have representation in Parliament."

Along the bumpy, bone-rattling road that runs south from Lucknow, the
capital of Uttar Pradesh, into one of the poorest, most backward parts
of India, the color blue and the elephant symbol of the Majority
Society Party are everywhere visible.

Blue elephants are painted on the whitewashed sides of huts. Blue
plastic flags festoon small shops. In one village, a homemade stucco
statue of the hero of the scheduled castes, B. R. Ambedkar, stood erect
and well tended in a small shrine in a weedy field, his suit and
horn-rimmed glasses painted the party's trademark blue. In another
village, a small crowd gathered around a man with a megaphone who
exhorted them to "Stamp the elephant!"

In Uttar Pradesh, the party's organization has penetrated deep into the
villages where most Indians still live.

The party workers who cover the village of Jamalpur operate out of
Banda, a bustling provincial town whose streets are clogged with cows
and scooters.

The roads and electrical system are typically decrepit in a state
notorious all over India for how badly it has been governed.

One recent evening, just after the entire town went black in one of its
regular power failures, the party's offices were found up a narrow
concrete flight of stairs. Half a dozen young men sat on the floor in a
room with no furniture, huddled over voter lists illuminated only by
two small candles.

Most had first become involved in party work during their student days.
"The party stands for equality, brotherhood and social change," said
Harish Kumar, 32, who is himself a Dalit and secretary of the party's
local division.

That evening, they pulled out the ledger where they had numbered and
recorded in small, neat script each time a person came to them for help
and what they had done.

No. 19 was a request for assistance in applying for a hand pump. No. 27
was a complaint made by a laborer who had not been paid for his work in
the fields. No. 36 was a complaint from a Dalit man who said he had
been beaten by upper-caste Brahmans. No. 59 was a complaint that
upper-caste Thakurs had tried to rape a Dalit woman.

The party's workers seek to spread its message from village to village.
It is a hard, unglamorous job.

The village of Jamalpur, about six miles north of Banda, has a
population of 5,000 and is fairly easy to reach, but the road stops at
its edge. On a recent afternoon, after hours of torrential rains, the
village pathways were a swamp of slimy muck marked by the deep ruts of
oxcarts. Every cow wore socks of brown mud.

The thatched hut of Prasad, the village chief, was a half-hour hike
into Jamalpur. Sitting on his wooden cot outside his front door, he
reminisced about his schoolboy days, when upper-caste teachers made him
sit at the back of the room because he was from a scheduled caste, and
the times, years ago, when the upper castes kept his kind from voting
by refusing to give them time off from the fields to go to the polls.

Things are better now, he said. The Government takes their grievances
more seriously and the scheduled castes have also begun to stand up for
themselves.

Still, the memory of his own disgrace on Independence Day 1995 rankles.
Prasad is a farm worker who earns just a dollar a day, but what he
wants from politics, more than an end to his poverty, is an end to the
indignities.

"We can always work to fill our stomachs," he said. "But the
humiliations hurt the most."

_______________________________________________

South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch is an informal, 

independent & non-profit citizens wire service run by 

South Asia Citizens Web 

http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex

</fontfamily>