SACW | 28 Jul 2004

[sacw]

South Asia Citizens Wire    |  28 July,  2004
via:  www.sacw.net

[1]   Pakistan - India: Dialogue & discordant notes (M B Naqvi)
[2]   Sri Lanka: New Killings Threaten Ceasefire
[3]   India: Convention for withdrawal of TADA cases (New Delhi, 6 August 2004)
[4]   India: Reservations for Muslims: Quotas are 
not the answer (Dipankar Gupta)
[5]   Rare Gandhi-style protest in India (Scott Baldauf)
[6]   India: Of human bondage  (Harsh Mander)

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

[1]


The News International
July 28, 2004

DIALOGUE & DISCORDANT NOTES
by M B Naqvi

Pakistan-India dialogue has barely begun and 
discordant notes have already been struck. 
Implying that undue delay in solving the Kashmir 
problem might be intentional, President Pervez 
Musharraf told Indian Foreign Minister Natwar 
Singh that the Kashmir issue needs to be resolved 
within a "reasonable" timeframe. Mr Natwar 
Singh's reply came the next day, when he said 
that "India-Pakistan dialogue is not a 100 metres 
race; talks cannot be rushed".

Pakistan President has been showing signs of 
dissatisfaction with the pace of this dialogue 
for sometime. Hitherto, only Foreign Secretaries 
meeting has taken place in New Delhi. Six other 
meetings at experts level will soon be held. But 
the substantive give and take session will begin 
in early September, when the two Foreign 
Ministers will meet in Delhi - perhaps final 
conclusions may be expected subsequently at the 
summit level. Meantime politics has moved on. 
Indians are pressing ahead with their Strategic 
Partnership with the US and Israel and are 
working to modernise their armed forces, 
upgrading their equipment.

Now these developments ring alarm bells in 
Pakistan's security establishment. Pakistan 
thinks that India is strengthening its 
conventional deterrent to a stage where Pakistan 
cannot match or counter it. President Musharraf 
has asserted on several occasions that Pakistan 
will anyhow maintain a balance of power - in both 
conventional armaments and nuclear weapons, 
including missiles to carry them. Indeed he went 
further: he would enhance Pakistan's security to 
a point beyond what was earlier fixed as the 
minimum required.

Now both these activities constitute arms race. 
It is always justified by inimical propaganda 
against the adversary power. Which is what a cold 
war is, and Pakistan and India have run it for 
over half a century, though its continuance is an 
anomaly. Current dialogue was intended to reverse 
the trend. Or was it? Let's ask the question what 
kinds of relations are aimed at in this dialogue? 
In terms of January 06, 2004 statement after the 
meeting between President Musharraf and Indian 
Prime Minister AB Vajpayee, the purpose is 
normalisation of relations.

What is not clear is the definition of 
normalisation: which state of relationship 
between the two is to be taken as normal; it has 
taken twists and turns. Do the Indians want 
Pakistan to be a friend and a partner? They need 
to clarify for the benefit of at least the 
Indians. As far as Pakistanis are concerned, 
there is some evidence that all Pakistan 
officials wanted way back in January 04 was to go 
back to the relationship as it was on December 
13, 2001. It is an open question as to which 
stage of Indo-Pak relationship the two want to go 
back to.

There was the initial period when there were no 
visas required for inter-state travel. By early 
1950, visas had been introduced but travel was 
free enough until 1965 war. After it, the two 
bureaucracies armed themselves with tremendous 
powers, tightening up the visa regimes. It 
remained so until after the 1971 war. The Shimla 
Accord began normalisation efforts and talks 
sporadically continued through any number of high 
military tensions (1986, 1990, 1995, June 1999 
and above all January 2002) until December 2001 
attack on Indian Parliament. Normalisation 
objective, however, continues to elude.

Which kind of relationship is aimed in this new 
dialogue? No one is sure. It seemed initially 
that the new Indian government wanted to 
accomplish what it had not succeeded in 30 years 
of desultory negotiations under the Shimla 
agreement. Pakistan appeared to disfavour 
proceedings under the Feb 1999 Lahore process. 
Natwar Singh solved the problem by calling the 
Shimla and Lahore documents as a continuity India 
is seeking good relations with free trade, 
economic cooperation, cultural exchanges and 
regional integration. Pakistan appears to remain 
uncertain about its preferred nature of 
relationship with India.

A few general remarks are in order. The kind of 
policies that prevented any normal good 
neighbourly relationship with India for 32 years 
after 1971 were predicated on some assumptions: 
Pakistan needed time to militarily prepare itself 
to face India again. To reinforce the rejuvenated 
Army, Bhutto had started a crash programme for 
acquiring nuclear capability. India had already 
embarked on a big military build up programme in 
the 1960s - after the 1962 war with China. 
Pakistan regarded that as a challenge to its own 
security and expanded and re-equipped Pak Army. 
Thirteen years after the 1971 defeat Pakistan 
could boast of a nuclear capability and in 1986 
it could warn India of a nuclear riposte. That 
determination to keep up with India militarily 
gelled with a policy of minimal contacts with 
India, the closest neighbour.

Well, post 1971 decisions have to be reassessed 
after Kargil operations. They have not made 
Pakistan safe. They have made it more insecure. 
The 2002 Crisis has shown that whatever the 
generals on both sides may say, it is now madness 
to go to war for both India and Pakistan; it 
carries totally unacceptable risks. Period. True, 
Pakistan is capable of taking out at least half a 
dozen Indian towns. In return, India can send 
Pakistan to the Stone Age. Who gains what? Thus 
no go for both. Nuclear dimensions of the next 
war are insistently relevant because one side is 
so vulnerable in conventional armaments that it 
cannot but have recourse to nuclear weapons at a 
fairly early stage. So the bases of pre-2002 
stand offish policies have disappeared.

Pakistan's negotiating position is weak. If the 
1970s, 80s and 90s assumptions are adhered to, 
talks would collapse before long. India cannot 
accede to Pakistan's wishes after 56 years of 
cold and hot wars, especially when, for the first 
time, it showed that the Invincible Shield of 
nukes is not enough for Pakistan to win a war in 
2002. Possession has again proved to be nine 
points of law as far as Kashmir is concerned. 
President Musharraf has clearly dropped the 
condition that India should agree to a Kashmir 
plebiscite by the UN. Indeed, he went further: he 
gave India a veto on all solutions of Kashmir 
problem that did not suit it. In other words, he 
wants a Kashmir solution that India can live 
with. Would such a solution promote Pakistan's 
interests? Not that there is any agreement in the 
country regarding what are now Pakistan's precise 
interests in Kashmir. The outside world, too, 
seems to have accepted Indian claims on Kashmir.

This may shock many Pakistanis. The earlier 
stances were based on the logic of 1947 
settlement. But after Pakistan went to war twice 
and later vainly stoked the fires of Islamic 
insurgency in Kashmir. What were the results? 
Change the constitutional status of Kashmir 
Valley requires defeating India's armed forces 
first. This is a situation that has stared 
Pakistan since 1999, when Pakistan was forced to 
unilaterally vacate the Kargil heights. Since the 
Kashmir issue remains, Pakistan has to find new 
objectives and new means. Military action is 
wholly inappropriate now. What will be 
appropriate is what can Pakistan diplomacy make 
India do in and about Kashmir Valley.

All new thinking will need Pakistan befriending 
India by going well beyond simple normalisation. 
Pakistan needs to normalise for its own economic 
and cultural benefit. Since all old policy 
assumptions have proved to be unrealisable, it is 
about time to think what will work. Indians are 
unlikely to woo Pakistan; they would rather let 
it stew in its own juice in relative isolation. 
It is for Pakistan to chalk out a plan of action 
that will primarily benefit Pakistan and should 
not harm Kashmiris. India being the closest 
neighbour with a thousand and one commonalities - 
and problems and a chequered history - Pakistan 
can no longer ignore it or live the way it has 
done until now.

There are a few commonsense guidelines: If a war 
is out of question, cold war policies become 
stupid, for they were predicated on going to war 
if it becomes inevitable. A new kind of 
relationship with India is called for, distinct 
from what was obtained between 1972 and 2004. 
Kashmir will have to go on a backburner until new 
opportunities arise. The new policy orientation 
cannot but be the opposite of what sustained 
post-Shimla attitudes. In other words, instead of 
running a balance of power with India, let there 
be a new peaceful and peaceable race to promote 
mutual enrichment.

The goal of negotiations with India should be to 
create maximum wealth in a bilateral cooperation 
that will enrich both. This will need friendship 
and a close working relationship. Reversing the 
history of 57 years will require hard work. How 
to start working for friendship suddenly after 
such spectacular examples of mutual hatred in 
2002? But if there is will there is a way. Given 
the twin conclusions that normalisation concept 
is too imprecise and it by itself does not 
connote anything noble, Pakistan has to go beyond 
it to seek maximum friendship. Now, friendship 
itself can have many stages. Which kind of 
friendship does it need and why?

Short answers are: the nature of friendship, when 
one is moving away from the arms race and cold 
war, has to be one that promotes economic 
cooperation and cultural exchanges. The aim 
should be to effect radical reconciliation 
between the peoples of India and Pakistan, 
extendable to all South Asians - the way the 
French and Germans have done. If India and 
Pakistan can borrow detailed proposals on CBMs 
from the US, why can't they borrow from the 
French-German Treaty of 1963 that succeeded so 
brilliantly? South Asia needs such an approach. 
Let Pakistan graduate from futile militarism to 
peaceable economic and cultural enrichment.


_____


[2]

Human Rights Watch

SRI LANKA: NEW KILLINGS THREATEN CEASEFIRE

(New York, July 28, 2004) -- A spate of killings between factions of the
separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) threatens Sri Lanka’s
ceasefire, Human Rights Watch warned today. [...].

URL : www.hrw.org/english/docs/2004/07/27/slanka9153.htm

_____


[3]


Dear friend,
Enclosed is an appeal demanding the withdrawal of 
tada cases, which is becoming a convenient weapon 
for crushing dissent in the country. If you would 
like to endorse this appeal and if your name is 
not already in this appeal, please send me a mail 
with your name and address so that I can add it.
A convention demanding the same addressed by 
human rights activists, journalists, lawyers, 
writers, artists and leaders of left parties is 
being organised on
6 August 2004,
4.00p.m.- 8.00p.m.at Speaker's Hall,
Constitutional Club, Rafi Marg, Delhi.
We invite you to join the convention and express 
your solidarity in the struggle against black 
laws and the culture of muzzling political 
dissent and democratic aspirations of people with 
the use of draconian laws.
Regards
Radhika Menon
Forum for Democratic Initiative (FDI)
radhikamen at rediffmail.com
9868038981

THE APPEAL
To
The Prime Minister of India

(Copies to Union Home Minister, Union Law Minister, Chief Minister of Bihar)
Sir,
It is with great concern that we note that nine 
years after TADA was allowed to lapse the state 
is still using it to crush political dissent and 
democratic protest. It is shocking that this 
draconian law is still in use while most 
political parties have agreed that its successor, 
POTA, should be repealed. We invite your 
attention to two cases, where this becomes 
evident.
In the case of the Bhadasi village of Arwal 
Police Station (Bihar) those charged under TADA 
during the trial, conducted in August 2003 by the 
sessions court of Jehanabad, includes Shah Chand, 
Dr Jagdish Yadav, Churaman Bhagat and Arun 
Bharati. They are well known activists of Arwal, 
who have struggled against social inequalities by 
leading mass protests against police 
highhandedness and feudal terror of the 
landlords. The other accused (and now imprisoned) 
are poor landless peasantry, including two 
persons, who were children, aged 13 and 14 years 
when charged under TADA in 1988. Shah Chand, the 
main accused in the case has been an elected 
Mukhiya of Bhadasi village since 1978 and has 
been awarded by the district administration for 
outstanding developmental work. He is also a 
leader of the Inquilabi Muslim Conference and was 
appointed a member of the Jehanabad-Arwal wakf 
board in 2002. He has also contested the assembly 
elections from Jehanabad in 2001as a CPIML 
candidate. Today, all these persons, who have 
been involved in legal social and democratic 
struggles, are being called as terrorists after 
having been tried under TADA.
The case clearly indicates how the government 
continues to use “lapsed” laws as weapons for 
political victimisation. In July 2003, overriding 
the overwhelming sentiment expressed by Bihar 
Assembly, the government refused to intervene in 
the TADA case, in the face of pressure from the 
patrons of the dreaded upper caste private army 
Ranveer Sena and the 14 persons were subsequently 
sentenced to life imprisonment.
We would also like to point out that several 
cases filed under TADA have been selectively 
withdrawn across the country including many in 
Jehanabad and Arwal. While the beneficiaries of 
this selective withdrawal in Jehanabad includes 
Ramadhar Singh, the dreaded leader of ‘Sawarn 
Liberation Front’, which massacred 16 dalit and 
agrarian labourers in Sawanbigha and Barsimha, 
the only cases of TADA in Jehanabad today are 
those against ML activists and the rural poor.
In the judgment given by the TADA sessions court 
in the Bhadasi case, it is not stated that the 
defendants planned to terrorise people or overawe 
the state, yet it condemns them as terrorists 
only because they were alleged to have clashed 
with the police. Even these allegations are 
unsubstantiated during prosecution. The 
‘terrorist links’ of the accused have been based 
on the seizure of easily available Marxist 
literature and documents of Bihar Pradesh Kisan 
Sabha and IPF, an organization which had 
representatives both in the Bihar Assembly and 
Lok Sabha. This judgment of the session’s court 
was upheld by the Supreme Court in April 2004. 
The danger to political expression within the 
country is obvious.
Apprehensions about political victimisation 
generated by the judgment on the Arwal case are 
becoming true in the Mehandia thana case no 1/90, 
where 17 agrarian labourers are being tried under 
TADA, by the same Jehanabad court. The case has 
its origins in a wage strike of agricultural 
labourers in Belsar panchayat of Kaler block in 
1989, when they complained to the labour 
inspector against the panchayat mukhia, Vijay 
Narain Sharma. The mukhia, who is with the 
Ranveer Sena, implicated the labourers on 
concocted charges of making an attempt on his 
life! The labourers were booked under TADA, and 
today 9 years after TADA has lapsed, they are 
being tried under a law that seeks to portray 
agricultural labourers as terrorists.

We find that laws like POTA and TADA erase the 
vital difference between democratic protest and 
terrorism and necessarily demand to be repealed. 
As persons concerned about human rights 
violations using lapsed draconian laws and 
condemnation of democratic rights by politically 
motivated selective withdrawals; we feel that 
without withdrawal of POTA and TADA charges those 
booked under it will continue to be subjects of 
political victimisation.
Hence we demand that
•     The parliament repeals POTA
•     The union government repeals TADA-POTA with 
retrospect effect to ensure that all cases under 
these Acts stand withdrawn.
•     The union government ensures unconditional 
and immediate release of all social and political 
activists detained under POTA and TADA.
•     The Bihar government withdraws the cases 
filed under TADA and ensures the release of the 
14 persons sentenced to life imprisonment, in the 
Bhadasi case of Arwal.


Signatories/-
Aditi Ganguly, Achin Vanaik, Alok Agarwal, 
Amitadyuti Kumar, Anand Patwardhan, Anand Swaroop 
Verma, Anil Chamaria, Arundhati Roy, Bela Bhatia, 
Chittaroopa Palit, Dipankar Bhattacharya, Dunu 
Roy, Gautam Navlakha, Indira Jaisingh, Jean 
Dreze, John Dayal,  Kamal Mitra Chenoy, Kavaljit, 
Justice Rajinder Sachar, Latha Jishnu, Mukundan 
C. Menon,  Nitya Ramakrishnan, Pankaj Bisht, 
Pankaj Butalia, Pankaj Singh, Prashant Bhushan, 
Prof Anil Sadgopal, Prof Dinesh Mohan, Prof. 
Ramanujam, Rakesh Katarey, Rameshwar Prasad, 
Sandeep Pandey, Sanjay Kak, Savita Singh, 
Siddharth Varadarjan, Sumit Chakravaorty, Tripta 
Wahi, Uma Chakravorty, Yogendra Yadav

_____


[4]

Economic Times
July 26, 2004

Do Muslims need reservations?
QUOTAS ARE NOT THE ANSWER

Dipankar Gupta

The question of granting reservations to 
minorities was deliberated upon at length, in the 
Constituent Assembly, and ultimately rejected.

The ground being that reservations for religious 
communities carried the danger of engendering 
divisive forces within the country that would 
undermine the essence of citizenship.

Scheduled Castes and Tribes were granted 
reservations because the former suffered from 
generations of discrimination against them and 
the latter because they had to be integrated into 
the mainstream of the Indian economy.

Even the Mandal Commission allows for 
reservations among certain Muslim backward 
castes, but not for the community as a whole. 
This is because it is impossible to sustain the 
argument that in general the Muslims in India 
constitute a deprived category.

There are affluent Muslims in every province of 
India, most notably in Gujarat and Kerala. 
Indeed, many Ansari carpet weavers of east Uttar 
Pradesh have also done quite well in recent years 
by taking advantage of international markets.
There is however a stubborn, and nationally 
embarrassing, fact that might tempt people to 
consider reservations for Muslims. It cannot be 
denied that the number of Muslims in top 
positions both in the public and private sector 
is way below their numerical proportion in the 
country as a whole.

Additionally, rural Muslims find it difficult to 
send their children to government schools for 
fear of being discriminated against by teachers 
and other students.

This often compels them to see Madrasas as a viable option.

Yet the answer to such issues is not reservations 
but creating greater trust among Muslims, both 
rich and poor. Incidents like Gujarat 2002 
certainly do a lot of damage.

Besides punishing the guilty in riots, it is 
necessary to set up adequate schools and also 
have watchdog committees that will oversee 
appointments in the public sector.

The Minority Commission should be given more 
teeth in this respect to ensure a secure civic 
life for Muslims. It is necessary to integrate 
Muslims and other religious minorities by 
realising the promise of citizenship and not by 
encouraging them to lead insulated and isolated 
lives.

(The author is the Professor, School of Social Sciences, JNU)



______


[5]

The Christian Science Monitor
July 27, 2004

RARE GANDHI-STYLE PROTEST IN INDIA
A recent hunger strike by longtime activist Medha 
Patkar secured official promises to help those 
displaced by a dam.
By Scott Baldauf | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

BOMBAY - Medha Patkar is not the last living 
Gandhian, but she is certainly part of a dying 
breed.

The Gandhian-style nonviolent resistance methods 
that gave this country its independence have been 
trumped by the politics of influence, where money 
or threats or a combination of the two brings 
results. Holding a hunger strike or a sit-in is 
about as fashionable as a Swadeshi loincloth.

LAST GANDHIAN? Medha Patkar's nonviolent movement 
has spearheaded anti-dam activism.
SOMA PAUL

That, at least, is the conventional wisdom. But 
Medha Patkar and her scrappy band of 
environmentalists, villagers, and poets who are 
protesting India's largest ongoing dam project 
have never been conventional.

"When I came to the Narmada valley, one felt that 
something must be done," says Ms. Patkar, sitting 
in her tiny two-room apartment that doubles as 
her office in Bombay (Mumbai). "The initial 
estimates were that only 7,000 families would be 
affected by the rising waters, but they hadn't 
done proper surveys. Now there are more than 
43,000 families. Those people are just thrown 
away."

If one is looking at physical results, then 
Patkar's movement, the Narmada Bechao Andolon, is 
an outright failure. Despite 19 years of Gandhian 
sit-ins, hunger strikes, road blockades, and even 
refusals to budge from villages that are about to 
be flooded, the Narmada Sardar Sarovar dam 
project is nearly completed, pushed by big money, 
big industry, four state governments, and for a 
while, the World Bank. Yet the impact of Patkar's 
nonviolence in the Narmada valley has been so 
great that future big-dam projects will surely 
have to adjust their methods to secure local 
support.

"Nonviolence is our shield," says Parvin 
Jehangir, spokeswoman for the Andolon in Bombay. 
"The state tries to make you violent, they will 
harass you, put false charges on you. But once 
you use violence, the police are trained to 
return violence."

For beneficiaries, there is much to love about 
the Narmada project. The effort, which includes 
30 large dams and 300 smaller ones, would divert 
water to two states that are perpetually short of 
it - Gujarat and Rajasthan - and send 
hydroelectric power to two states the are 
increasingly home to industrial growth - 
Maharashstra and Madhya Pradesh. Skeptics 
question the expense of irrigating Gujarat's 
desert, which has never supported agriculture. 
One dam in Madhya Pradesh will submerge more land 
than it will irrigate.

Most opposed to the dams are the people who live 
in the project's flood zone - 136 miles long, and 
three to six miles wide on each side of the 
river. Narmada valley residents are among India's 
most disenfranchised citizens. Many are adivasis, 
members of tribal societies that predate the 
advent of Hinduism. There was no attempt by the 
government to win their approval, and for them, 
the dam amounts to theft of their land.

'That was my land'

In the village of Jalsindhi, Gulab Singh wades to 
his knees in the Narmada River and points to a 
spot deep under water.

"That was my land," says Mr. Singh, one of the 
estimated 100,000 tribals who will be displaced 
by the Narmada project. "My house was there."

Jalsindhi village has been disappearing over the 
last decade, as officials slowly increased the 
height of the Sardar Sarovar Dam. Earlier this 
year, they raised the height from 330 feet to 360 
feet. When the monsoon comes, the basin will 
reach its highest point yet, and Jalsindhi will 
cease to exist.

On July 14, Patkar ended a two-day hunger strike 
that forced the Maharashtra government to agree 
to increase the number of displaced adivasi 
families eligible for new homes. Neighboring 
states have been less generous.

Officials say everyone displaced by the Narmada 
project will get new land, a home, a community 
with power, water, schools, and hospitals. It's a 
small price to pay, the government says, for the 
greater good - electricity and water for a 
country where shortages are a constant source of 
misery.

Yet Patkar says the government underestimates the 
number of displaced people because it never did a 
proper survey.

While not a tribal herself, Patkar says she has 
become so tied up with their plight that she now 
wakes up with nightmares of villages being 
submerged.

Are Gandhian tactics up to the task?

Patkar's commitment to the valley started nearly 
20 years ago. Traveling village by village, she 
and other organizers taught tribals how to resist 
state policies without weapons. These supporters, 
in turn, became one of the best organized and 
most coherent networks in recent Indian history.

Through pressure and hunger strikes, the Andolon 
forced delays by courts and governors. Their 
biggest victory came in 1993 when the World Bank 
canceled support for the project. The bank had 
funded the dam in 1985 with a $450 million loan 
but withdrew, citing a lack of environmental 
studies and faulty resettlement plans.

Yet the dam project itself keeps rolling along, 
leading even some Patkar supporters to say that 
Gandhian style methods don't work. Arundhati Roy, 
the Booker Prize-winning author of "The God of 
Small Things," recently told an Indian news 
magazine that nonviolence on the Narmada had been 
"an outright failure."

Dipankar Gupta, a sociologist at Jawaharlal Nehru 
University, says that Gandhianism has fallen out 
of favor in modern India.

"You can use Gandhianism as a corrective of 
something that has gone wrong, but as a way of 
life, you can't do it," says Mr. Gupta. "It's a 
backward Utopia. Gandhi believed that Indians 
could have lived without the desire for progress. 
But if that is true, then we wouldn't have come 
this far ... in terms of material development."

"We are not that kind of environmentalist that 
says don't touch a tree," says Patkar. "We are 
saying, use the resources by taking the people 
who are affected by the dam into the planning 
process."

Many of the angry villagers have been willing to 
plant themselves for up to 28 hours inside homes 
as the chilly Narmada waters rose up to their 
necks. Thus far, none have been swept away, but 
many have resisted vigorously when police dragged 
them to safety. Others have lost their lives, 
however, wading into the quicksand-like mud that 
collects on the banks. Still others have refused 
to eat for up to 26 days, keeping each other's 
spirits up by praying and singing Hindi film 
songs.

It was that group spirit that kept people going, 
says Patkar, with a laugh. When you see what is 
at stake, "you don't feel like living in this 
world without [achieving these goals]. You're so 
committed to getting that thing that it comes 
naturally."

Patkar insists that the Andolon must avoid 
becoming just a one-issue movement. "People tell 
us, look just stick to rehabilitation, that is 
something that people understand," says Patkar. 
But "we have to ask all the issues. The 
top-to-bottom approach to development is 
undemocratic."

* Dan Morrison contributed to this report from Jalsindhi.


______


[6]

Hindustan Times, July 26, 2004

Of human bondage
DEMOCRACY WALL | Harsh Mander

Unnoticed by most of the country, in the murky 
shadows behind the prosperity of Punjab's 
celebrated agricultural miracle, is a largely 
untold story of dispossession, debt bondage and 
untouchability. Like tens of others in his 
village Kakrala of Patiala district, Raju Singh 
has been a siri - bonded labourer - for 25 years. 
When he was only a child, he was sold into 
bondage to a landlord of his village by his 
father in exchange for two bags of grain.

Since then, all his life, he has toiled 
unremittingly the whole year for his entire 
waking hours, in return for food and a mere Rs 
200-400 paid to him every two months. Beyond this 
amount, his cash needs from time to time were 
further added to his loan. An usurious interest 
rate of Rs 3-5 per month was imposed for the past 
quarter century. His wages were never actually 
paid to him. Instead, they were notionally 
adjusted against his ever-mounting credit.

His present landlord bought him after paying Rs 
50,000 to clear his accumulated debts to his 
previous employer. This rose further to Rs 80,000 
after six years of bondage to the landlord. He 
attached and sold Raju's only buffalo to clear a 
small part of the loan. Raju Singh knows that in 
his lifetime he can never be free.

Of the 500 households in Kakrala, 200 are Dalit 
Sikhs, with a sprinkling of Muslims. None of them 
owns land apart from their homesteads. Reckless 
mechanisation in agriculture threatens the 
livelihoods of these landless workers.

This village alone has five or six combined 
harvesters, and each harvester erodes an 
estimated 24,000 person days of work. Migrant 
workers are also inducted seasonally from the 
agriculturally stagnant Hindi cow belt to further 
depress agricultural wages, as they compete for 
the same shrinking work opportunities.

Women are hit especially hard by farm 
mechanisation. Earlier there was work in sowing 
and weeding, and they were able to gather green 
fodder. Today, not only is there no wage 
employment, but they also have to buy green 
fodder, making it difficult for them to rear 
cattle. There is consequently reduced nutrition 
for them and their children at home. 
Incidentally, we found that in defiance of 
Supreme Court orders, the schools did not serve 
mid-day meals.

Modern agricultural technologies continuously 
imperil the health and safety of the farm 
workers. The most hazardous is the spraying of 
poisonous pesticides. The manual spreading of 
chemical fertilisers also leads to severe 
infections. Every season, it is not unusual for 
some workers to lose their fingers and arms, 
amputated while operating fodder cutters.

Other perilous duties leading to fatalities 
include repair work in deep tube wells and 
placing hooks on the main electricity lines to 
steal electricity for irrigation. No compensation 
is paid by the landlord for injury or death 
during farm work.

Many Dalit and Muslim landless agricultural 
workers survive only by debt bondage, which is 
invisible, unacknowledged by authorities, but 
shamefully rampant in rural Punjab. In times of 
need, loans are available only from the landlord, 
not from banks, the money-lender or the local 
trader, because they have no assets to pledge as 
collateral. The landlord in exchange takes a 
child as a bonded worker (pali) or an adult 
bonded labourer (siri).

Bondage continues usually for many years, 
sometimes even a lifetime. A peculiar local 
custom is for landlords to exchange bonded 
labourers and sell them off to other landlords 
and settle the accounts between themselves. The 
bonded labourer does not see any money exchanged 
in these transactions.

Landlords in Punjab are known to encourage 
substance abuse among their workers. Not only 
does this make them compliant and enables them to 
work continuously without sleeping for several 
days in the peak season; it also binds the 
workers to particular landlords who appease their 
addictions.

More than in any other state of India, 
agricultural workers in Punjab are overwhelmingly 
Dalit. They live in segregated segments of the 
village and are barred from the upper caste 
cremation grounds and drinking water sources. 
They are seated separately in the village 
gurdwara, and are not permitted to distribute 
langar. Bonded workers even today are fed in 
vessels that they carry from their homes, and 
they wash these in places where the animals are 
housed.

For years, it seemed that India lived no longer 
in its villages. Instead, it shone only in its 
cities. Even the terminal despair that drove 
farmers to suicide was not enough to cure the 
wanton amnesia of the State about rural India. It 
took a resounding electoral defeat to achieve 
this.

It is welcome, therefore, that the new government 
is stirred by its duties to the countryside. And 
yet, when it pledges a 'new deal' to the farmer, 
the underlying assumption is that there is indeed 
a homogeneous farming community with shared, 
common economic interests. Nothing can be further 
from the truth.

It is entirely appropriate for the government to 
pledge to correct the vast imbalances between 
public expenditure in rural and urban India. But 
in doing so, it must remember that its primary 
duty is to the large mass of dispossessed 
peasantry and agricultural workers, to secure 
their livelihoods, rights and dignity, and to 
illuminate their lives with justice, freedom and 
hope.



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Buzz on the perils of fundamentalist politics, on 
matters of peace and democratisation in South 
Asia. SACW is an independent & non-profit 
citizens wire service run since 1998 by South 
Asia Citizens Web: www.sacw.net/
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