[Reader-list] 'Emlployment Guarantee-A Reportage'

[anusha rizvi]

The following is a diary of the 'Rozgar Yatra 2004' by one of the participants.

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HAR HAATH KO KAAM DO- A Reportage.


Lucknow-28 June, Tuesday.

10-30: At the Gandhi Bhawan Sangrahalay in Central Lucknow, two attendants sit around a table in a depleted and dilapidated hall. The furniture of an old world library is intact, the literature is missing. Except for Hindi newspapers, all that its shelves contain are old copies of obscure Hindi magazines, many of them propaganda pamphlets of Nagri Pracharni Sabha, with one of them adorning Manmohan’s face, placed prominently, perhaps recently. The only two visitors present this morning are from an organization called Usha, run by a Magsaysay Award winner. They are here to receive the Rozgar AdhikarYatra of the People’s Action for Employment Guarantee on behalf of their organization, Usha which is the local host for this last leg, through the Awadh heartland, of the Rozgar Yatra. 

!.45
Waiting for the start of the Press Conference and the Jan Sabha, I wait it out in the auditorium, a surprisingly proper one for a dilapidated and out of funds Gandhi Bhawan. Even a ‘People’s’ Action for employment guarantee function needs an auditorium, lights, mikes, sound systems and volunteers as well as a crowd, the addressee public, for it to become successful. The arrangements in progress seem to be a combination of a cultural function and a political rally. Sudarshan and his team of volunteers have been busy these past few days in putting up banners and posters in the city for the event these few days. Right now they are decorating the hall and its environs with those same banners, checking sound levels and laying bolsters and mattresses on the stage. 

There are 200 or so villagers waiting in the hall with me, they have been brought here by Usha from the areas, particularly Atrauli block, where it works. We are being entertained by bad recordings of SRK songs and, a surprise item, the title song from a film called Hadsa from the early eighties. There are banners of the local organizations hosting the event: Mushar Vikas Pahal Samiti, Nichlol, Maharajganj, Ashray Adhikar Manch, Allahabad, Gyan Vigyan Samiti, Lucknow. Each must protect and advertise its turf, zealously. There are villagers in the meeting but the Jan Sabha, the Public Meeting, is marked by a complete absence of the putative public jan. 

As we wait for the ‘events’ to start I drift off to the canteen downstairs which would not be a misfit if transported wholesale to JNU or D School. A group sitting in front of me is taking notes while a young girl fluently critiques media’s approach to complex social issues. (Is the media changing or strengthening the conservative mindset, say by highlighting the Karva Chauth festival, is one of the queries under discussion). Some villagers lounge around on the tables outside. Across the road, the sprawling, stately and magnificent ruins of the Lucknow Residency indifferently watch the proceedings. 

3.40 pm-

Back to the Reading Room of the Gandhi Sangrahalaya, I have missed the Press Conference. Cameras on stands, all wound up, reporters with rolled up mikes and cellphones. Next to me a bearded man with flowing gray hair and a beard reads aloud in English, from a Hindi Newspaper, before jotting notes in a handbook. Each page of the notepad is scribbles at the top with a signature, ‘S Chaudhry Greatest God One in World.’ His shirt is torn at the right armpit but like the Press Conference, he is oblivious to that tear too and goes on with his English recitation and note-taking from a Hindi paper.

4.35 pm. The function has begun in the hall. Pawan Pande from JNU introduces us to the purposes of the Yatra after giving us the Lal Salam. His delivery and rhetoric are inseparable from political speak of other parties, other leaders. How can a revolutionary ideal be presented in an oratorical style that is so markedly establishment-like? Needed therefore, a new revolutionary rhetoric.

4.45 pm. Sandip Pande talks about the Right to Information campaign in his area, about how works at the village level are given away to contractors or commercial firms in complete violation of the norms. He mentions the case of faulty BPL rolls, where in the Mohammedpur block they included the names of a local journalist from Dainik Jagran and of a teacher at the local Inter College. Anybody with a phawra should be given work, regardless of BPL registration. It is as VP Singh had pointed out at the start of the rally, what is the need to restrict this Act to the poor? Which wealthy man is going to lift stones all day just to get a minimum wage-62 Rs in UP and even that is not paid in full anywhere. 

5.15 pm I drift off for a Cigarette and spot Prakash Karat, who appears in a small white Maruti car with Suhasini Ali. There is no security, nor any other attendants. Since he has limited time he is immediately pressed into speaking. 

His short and technical speech is followed by Ambika Chaudhy of the SP, the State Revenue Minister who is far more cogent and knowledgeable than I would have ever expected an SP politician to be. He talks about how in Uttar Pradesh the average holding is 0.9 acre which means that a marginal farmer is hardly better than a landless labourer therefore an EGA, of whatever nature, would be wholly inadequate to deal with unemployment as a wider issue. He raises interesting questions about the implementation of government schemes, quoting Rajiv Gandhi to say that only 15 out of a 100 paisa that is sanctioned by the State actually gets spent at the ground level, the rest being pocketed by middlemen. His views remind me, of all the people, of Tavlin Singh who makes a similar point every two weeks in her columns. 

Meanwhile, Jaan sits still on the stage, assiduously taking notes.

5.55 Suhasini Ali follows Ambica Chaudhry. She speaks with a faltering and urbane accent but with great fluency and passion, bindaas one might say. She talks about the Parliamentary standing committee on the Employment Guarantee Bill, which is chaired by Kalyan Singh. Talks about how he was very responsive when they approached him but says the politicians change colours when in Parliament from what they were in standing committees. What in the eyes of the State is defined as work, she asks? Digging a ditch 3 feet by 3 feet by 1 foot is called one day’s work. But the problem is that our qalamghissu babus (the penpushing clerks-loud laughter and cheers), forget that this will generate 3000 kilos of earth. Who is going to dispose of that mud, obviously the womenfolk of these labourers. There is no accounting for this unpaid labour. The villagers cheer loudly, she is the only one to catch their imagination. 

As Suhasini and Prakash leave the hall, half of it runs after them. How many times would a party worker see the chairman so close and upfront, unattended, free to be poached for this or that favour. Akhilesh Pratap Singh, the UP Secretary of CPI-ML speaks in their wake, unaffected by the depleted audience. He takes potshots at Prakash, at the Congress Party (for ‘92, for Telengana, for Hyderabad Police Action) and asserts that he has supported the Yatra despite his many objections. 

6.20 pm. Jaan’s turn to speak. His fluency in Hindi is impressive. He talks about how an EGA was the first item on the UPA agenda, how the government has reneged from that commitment by discarding the bill prepared by the National Advisory Council, from which he has lately resigned, and creating one of its own which wholly dilutes the original purpose. In an ironic turn of phrase he describes, for it does not guarantee employment for women, he describes it as a ‘naamardon ka bill.’ The Food for Work Programmes that are to be implemented till the Act comes into force lacks vitality, he says, because the guidelines are not properly followed. Muster Rolls, recording the number of labour-days, workers and wages paid to them, are not available at all except for Rajasthan where the Right to Information campaign led by Aruna Roy and MKSS has shown some positive results. He speaks simply and well and thus escapes the ‘bhashan-shoshan’ that several Yatris later confessed to be suffering from.

JUNE 29th, 9 am SANDILA

We miss the bus next morning and therefore get to ride with Rajiv Pande and Jaan Daraaz and Rajiv’s wife Arundhati, a veteran of the Narmada movement, for the forty-five minute ride to Sandila, a Qasba near Lucknow which has historically been famous for its Laddus. Nazir AKbarabadi even wrote a poem on it, if I remember correctly. Remarking at his heavy load of files I elicit from Rajeev the confession that he is nothing but a glorified social clerk. 

10.30 am
We join the entourage at a small hall at Sandila, built by the Advocates’ Committee of Sandila, adjoining the local Kachahri. They are our local hosts and distribute Chai and Samosas to all, members of the Yatra are garlanded and we sing to them, more us, revolutionary songs. Who speaks to whom, and for what? Just outside the hall a poor family, all of it, is perched on a small charpai under the shade of a mango tree. These poor do not come into the meeting and are not addressed either. 

We troop out to do a public meeting at the street side. Very appropriately, the building which forms a backdrop is a Theka of Desi Sharab, a distinctly red brick colonial structure with the words Bonded Warehouse 1909 emblazoned on the top. As we shout slogans demanding work for every hand a blackened labourer washes himself on the handpump nearby. 

A ready market crowd, petitioners to the Kachahri and other odd visitors to the Qasba form a sizeable crowd for the street play and song prepared by the MKSS people. One man tells another, aao miyan sun to lo, kam se kam gaanv jake batahiyo ki kachahri mein kya sun ke aae ho
baat to khair jaaiz hai.”

An enterprising boy comes round, selling guthkas. I drift off in search of a bottled water, surprisingly it is available here. It is as Shambhu says to the poor people in the play, he plays a minister, who are demanding water. Water causes a lot of diseases he says, therefore we have cut off water supply and are going to build factories for bottled water for everyone. It is frightening that even Sandila now has bottled water. 

A local notable, Mohammed Rais, the Chairman of the Nagar Palika hurriedly draws up his new Maruti car and goes up to address the crowd, saying he is all for employment. A villager from Mohammadabad is invited onstage by Rajiv who talks about his struggle in getting hold of papers from his local officials. He looks rural, speaks in the local colloquial and talks passionately and aggressively about the collusion between Gram Pradhans, local officials and politicians. His feisty peroration greatly embarrasses Rais Ahmed, still hovering on the stage. He can’t take it for too long and on the pretext of receiving a call goes off stage leaving Mohan to his fulminations. Hearing Mohan speak, a middle aged woman comes forward to ask me, since I am taking notes I must be official, what it is all about. She turns out to be in hearty agreement with Mohan and says she herself has not been paid by her Pradhan for work she did under the Anganwadi scheme. As part of the Mid-day meal scheme instituted by the Government, she was asked to cook at 500 Rs a month. ‘Saal bhar khana banwain primary ke liye aur paisa na dihin,’ the Pradhan still owes her 2000 Rs. I ask her whether the students got to eat the meals she cooked-mostly khichdi-and it is still a pleasant surprise to learn that somewhere in the Mid-day meal scheme was being implemented, in whatever form. The children were being fed one meal by schools. We have nothing to offer her except to urge her that it is her right. Obviously she knows that.

Yatris are selling badges which are inscribed with a slogan. ‘Har haath ko kaam do, kaam ka poora daam do.’ The Yatra is not being sponsored or funded by anyone. As it travels through North India, through ten states over fifty days, sales of badges, pamphlets and simple donations-of 1 or 2 Rs even-provide the cost of diesel. The food and accommodation is arranged by any of the 125 NGOs, the local hosts, who have come forward to support this Yatra. It is a unique endeavour and somewhat Gandhian in spirit, at least in trying to stay self-funded like this. Even in the poor, marginalized and voiceless Sandila five people end up buying badges. 

Information comes in that a clerk in the adjoining collectory had asked someone present for a bribe of 25 Rs to release a form. Instantly, the atmosphere turns electric. Shouting ‘Aawaaz do hum ek hain-duniya ke mazdoor ek ho,’ we march into the nearby Tehsil, with a gleeful and excited crowd following us, to impart immediate justice to the clerk who had demanded money to issue a caste certificate.  For some of us this jamboree of instant justice becomes an insurrection against the State. Zulm agar mitaana hai to zulmi se takraana hoga shouts Ramcharan Rawat alias Vinoba ji, a bearded colourful Yatri from Gaya, Bihar, who turns out to be a great self-propagandist as we travel on. Here though he comes up with a wonderful, risqué slogan-

chor padadhikari ka hathkanda
gaand mein danda, chaubees ghanta

The maalbabu, Mushir babu, is caught and dragged into the compound by two people. The local people make assenting and triumphant noises, even our party is visibly excited. A lone cop assures his superiors on the cellphone, ‘nahin sir kuchh nahin hua,’ as ever the Indian State seems paranoid about crowds. 

12 pm-

As the bus leaves, Shambhu briefs us about what happened to the corrupt babu. The SDM has promised to shift him, that only means that a new babu will get his money and the transferred one will partake of the former’s share. Rajiv briefs us about the struggle his organization waged to get information records from three Panchayats, a movement that has now spread to 30 Gram Panchayats. 

1.45 pm Hardoi, Headquarters.

We pass through the main Hardoi road in the form of a juloos through rows upon rows of roadside stalls of the self-employed that define this country’s street life. Cycle-repair wallahs, meter-repairmen, banana sellers, chat and panwallahs and several stalls selling application forms for petty government jobs. We distribute to them pamphlets about Employment guarantee including one to a chap standing outside an employment forms stall, advertising a CRPF post 2685 and a ‘Dakiya hetu Inter Pass’ form. 

Pledging, desh ki janta bhooki hai, yeh azadi jhooti hai we arrive at yet another Gandhi Hall where we are welcomed by the District Traders’ Association. The first speaker welcomes us by singing, with enviable self-absroption, Gandhi’s favourite bhajan. 
The Yatries, all on stage, are then garlanded by various local notables. Jaan Daraaz is ‘especially’ welcomed, in Hindi and English. ‘I welcome you most,’ and compared to Mother Teresa. As always the play is a great success and breaks the ice between the audience and the stage. People seem eager, enthusiastic and they include many villagers, local babus, businessmen association members and several who have trooped in for lack of anything better to do, the permanent condition of mofussil India. 

3.10 pm The DM has arrived. Rajiv talks to the people about the Rozgar yatra, about the Right to Information campaign and the ongoing food for work program, reminding them again that they have the dubious privilege of living in one of the poorest 150 districts in the country and that the government has sanctioned 42 crore Rs for the food for work programe for their district. Two young men, with shaven heads both, get up to leave after an intent attendance of over an hour. When I smile a goodbye to one of them, he apologetically explains that he has to leave now because his cycle downstairs is ‘unattended.’

Jaan is ushered off the stage to do an interview with a cameraman, a digital video camera, a mike is produced. Like everywhere else his command of Hindi arouses great astonishment in Hardoi too. 

Rajiv shares with the audience the experience of the Jagruk Nagrik Samiti of Bikaner, which Shambhu had related to us in the bus in the morning, about how they picket government offices once a month, prepare a list of corrupt babus and a detailed account log of which babu has taken how much bribe and for what and then force them to return it. Rajiv tells us about his experience of chakbandi, ceiling, in one village where the Lekhpal/patwari was forced to return a bribe of 1200 Rs on the spot by the DM, when confronted with the truth. But this had only happened after malpractices in the way the chakbandi was being conducted had led one man to commit suicide and after 12 others had issued a similar threat. 

There are lusty cheers when Rajiv suggests that just as MLAs and Ministers are paid for being the peoples’ representatives, the public voting them into office should also be paid. He has calculated that averaging the salaries and the reps each voter should be paid 1500 Rs for each vote. Lovely notes for votes idea.

Shazia, an MSW student from Bombay speaks forcefully about the true meaning of independence, every stomach should be filled, and with dignity. She chides the crowd for not containing a single woman, ‘kya is kshetra mein kisi aurat ko rozgar nahin chahiye.’  She also blows up the organizers for their discrimination in the way they received the woman. ‘One of our women would like to garland any two women members of the Yatra.’

DM Abishek Singh talks about procedural complexities in the way of the State trying to directly reach the workers in the villages. A villager labourer, when given the task to build a road, cannot take mud from adjoining fields, for instance, for lack of local clout. How then would he complete the works, even if the State deploys him to it? The dabang (the word has reached local usage from TV stations, it now denotes a social class rather than a personal characteristic) mafia therefore appropriates the funds and control the works and output. Half the minimum salary of 58 Rs is paid to the worker in cash and half in grain, what is the worker to do with the grain, convert it into flour and market it? He apologises that he has to leave early and goes off to personally attend to a call centre of complaints. He and another DM in the nearby region, both friends of Rajiv’s from his IIT days, have instituted public kiosks where for a payment of 5 or ten Rs anybody can demand a copy of any government document or lodge a complaint, it is called the Lokvani and today is the DM’s day to attend to calls. In a predominantly rural, illiterate area, where ten Rs go a long way, how would this e-governance cut any chords, I wonder.

After his departure Pravin, a history undergrad at Ramjas University and a member of the Yatra talks about gross irregularities and malpractices in the ongoing Food for Work program that he went to inspect at Sarguja district in Chhattisgarh. 

A group of dhoti-clad farmers approach me-thanks to my notetaking no doubt- to say that they are from the Bhartiya Kisan Union, of Mahendra Singh Tikait fame, and have ‘liked’ this program and now want to know what they can do. We take them outside and it quickly becomes a crowd. People cluck in sympathy and agreement at what we are trying to do. Ramsevak Yadav, from Husainpur Diwani says he can easily mobilize a hundred two hundred people, lying idle since the BKU movement became embroiled in state politics but what are they going to do after that. I tell them they should wait to meet Jaan, after the meeting and go off to tell him about that. But after the meeting he is assailed by the local press, the BKU men remain unenlightened about what they should do. 

As the song and speeches go on A distributes pamphlets to the crowds, heavily in demand. An obviously rural person approaches her to ask if the Arundhati with us is the same Rai who has written her book. He is referring, of course, to Arundhati Roy. 

Four hundred Rs are collected as donations and some 25 badges are sold. (The highest collection for badges in any one meeting was Rs 3000 collected from a place near Narmada, Gujarat, attesting to the success of the Narmada movement in politicizing the masses there.)

6 pm. 

For my first night stay with arrive at a Sarvodaya Ashram, established in the wake of Vinoba Bhave’s Sarvodaya/Bhoodan movement, in SIkandarpur near Tariyavan in Hardoi. We are welcomed by all the children and the staff, commandeered here during the holidays for their momentary connection with a ‘national’ movement. After sharbat and snacks we sit in a circle, the students on the dari in the centre, and introduce ourselves one by one, all of us. The Ashram is devoted to Dalit girls, is a residential girls’ school and the girls who have been displayed to us are ones who have never been to a school but are now being given special training, a bridge course, to enable them to join in straight in Class Third. 

Later, in the evening, as we sit around the fine, airy compound of the school. I get to know some of the Yatris that evening. Mohan, a fellow activist from the village, asks Shambhu ‘why they cannot do a similar thing in Rajasthan.’ Mohan is a sixty year old, gangly tall man with bent knees, who is active with the MKSS of which Shambhu is one of the founders. While having dinner in a large hall, where the staff serve us various courses from pails and afterwards we all wash our plates and glasses, Shambhu tells me how the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangthan came to be founded. 

He grew up in a village in Rajasamand district in Rajasthan before landing at the Nehru Yuva Kendra at Lucknow, a social work institute where he was to receive his training and work as a social volunteer in his village. He became fascinated there with a puppeteer named Nathani and spent all his time trying to learn puppetry and puppet-making from the latter. When he returned to his village he started using puppets to do his Chetna Jagriti, Consciousness Awakening. It was a government sponsored propaganda program that exhorts people to remain clean, to produce more, to have a small family etc. But his superiors were greatly impressed with this puppettering that seemed to catch the imagination of the crowds. 

He shifted a little later to Tilonia, to work with Bunker Roy, one of India’s pioneering and celebrated social workers. While he was doing great work with the puppets he felt stifled in Tilonia’s ‘Communication department’ where they went and performed their shows and returned in the evenings, like other Artists elsewhere. But he had not set out to be an Artist. 

Around the same time Bunker’s wife, a highly respected Civil Servant, resigned her job to do full time social work and Shambhu came into contact with her. They went off to Jhabua to observe an outfit there and the way they were doing social work. As it happened, at the same time, another young man, having completed his higher education in the US and from a well off family was restlessly wandering around the whole of India, observing various people’s movements. He harangued Shambhu about the Chetna Jagriti work he was doing and the effeteness of his messages. The trio then returned once again to Jhabua and came back to form the Mazdoor Sangthan, because organization and numbers controlled the key to exerting any pressures on the state. But mazdoor, the classic Marxist proletariat, was a missing item in rural and largely unindustrialized Rajasthan, so Kisan, marginal or subsistence farmers had to be included and thus the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangthan, one of India’s most vibrant and well-known volunteer outfits was born. The baptism of fire for the young group was a year long struggle to regain the commons from the local Jagirdars. It would not be registered, a mandatory requirement if foreign funding is sought, would not seek any funding from anywhere, would run entirely on donations and would only pay minimum wage to its employees, including the founders who are still drawing minimum wage, ten years on. Everywhere it is his puppets and the street play they put on that forms an instant connection with the audience. In a nice attempt at self-mockery Shambhu and his group(troupe?) have also composed a song satirizing the working of NGOs. It goes,

NGO o NGO
O ji o, NGO
Tum jiyo aur hum jiyo


I return from a cigarette break to sit with Naseem, who is only one of three people to have remained with the Yatra for all of its fifty days. First he was only to go till Bhopal, then he was serviced to go upto Indore, then commanded for three more days till Ranchi and now he is still here. He is from Chittorgarh and works with a local organization called Krati and his friend from his hometown, Meraj works with another NGO called Prayas. Naseem worked with several Muslim organizations in Delhi and Bombay before returning to his city. He spent six years at Batla House in Okhla, N Delhi, exactly around the same time as I was coming of age in the same area and where my academic success and religious atheism was explained by a member of the same organization Naseem was working with, as due to a Zionist lobby working for me. 

As we talk, we are interrupted by shouts and screams from the hall nearby where we are to sleep. Naseem is disgusted at the fact that the Yatris do not seem to have any sense of consideration or courtesy towards their hosts, that this Ashram should not be desecrated by our boorish behaviour. It is a general criticism he has of the Yatra which he has oftentimes conveyed to Jaan too. He is also dissatisfied with the management of the Yatra, despite the enthusiastic response they have received in several places we remain very unclear about our larger aims and guidelines, he maintains. We have no answers to farmers’ demands for strategy and further action or for integrating their priorities with the larger aims of the Yatra. Then there were too many speakers and too few listeners. 

Meraj and Naseem divide the fellow-travellers into several distinct groupings. There are the Dilliwallahs, including the two first year girls from LSR, the JNUwallahs whom he divides into two groups. The dominant one is the Dhaba Kranti crowd, a group who like all dominant Marxist groups everywhere feel convinced that their chattering and sloganeering is the revolution itself. I agree. I have myself encountered many such smug revolutionaries, confident in knowing that they form the local hegemony that all opposition or criticism can be dismissed, disregarded or at some places, browbeaten. 
Cocooned by protected and subsidized walls of India’s premiere University for Social Sciences, the comrades are ever ready to spring a revolution at the slightest pretext, thus the Dhaba Kranti sobriquet. 

One day before we joined there was a heated argument within the group over the behaviour of the Dhaba-kranti crowd. There were differences about how far should partisan and party slogans associated with the Communist party, be used at what was an all-party or non-party initiative. 

“Inquilab Zindabad” has ever been a call for the poor and the dispossessed, if someone is claiming to do pro-poor work then I don’t know how they can object to this slogan,’ asks Baitul, nicknamed Baitul Dalit, a traveler from Benaras. He is not the member of any party, he severed his ties with CPI-ML after he disagreed with their tactics. Maale, the term he uses for ML, he says is ready to use violence to eliminate spies-poor landless labourers mostly- in their internecine battle with another radical group, People’s War Group but refrain from eliminating Shahabuddin, a local potentate and warlord who is said to have killed Chandrashekhar, a legendary past President of JNU who was brutally murdered in Siwan some years ago. 

His politicization, a word he himself uses, happened in and around Benaras, dominated by landholding Brahmins whom he fought to install women Dalit Presidents in several Colleges in the region. Then Pawan he says, then a student at Allahabad and now a leading revolutionary from JNU who is a star speaker at our Yatra, came to Benaras and lectured Baitul’s group in Marxism. His father was a Jan-Sanghi, he says, that is why he has perhaps drifted into this extreme reversal. He now works independently, trying to organize Rickshaw pullers into a union. “I consider Jaan to be a soft capitalist, like the World Social Forum,’ says Baitul. They have no larger ‘political aim or methodology,’ just a readiness to act as middlemen and get the State to deliver more or better. He then asks me about what I do and is dismayed to learn that I am not really ‘political.’ We discuss Marx and Gandhi as it begins to rain, and he advises me to read Marx, as opposed to merely ‘touching’ him. Gandhi was a great leader, says Baitul, there were people who were willing to worship him but he restricted his social transformation merely to emotional appeals for people to change themselves. I can’t entirely disagree, it is a cogent critique of Gandhi. 

30th June-The bus is ready to leave after a hearty breakfast of ghughni and halwa for Lakhimpur Kheri. I share Prasad with a small framed bearded Bengali called Sumantro. He wants to get into TV journalism and has therefore been bombarding a leading TV news entrepreneur with letters about how he can do more with caste. The CPI-ML, currently India’s most radical Communist party he thinks is dominated wholly by Bhumihars. The AISA, its student wing is, in his opinion a wholly Bhumihar-Brahmin-Kayastha party. There is some truth to his statements for at JNU, revolutionary politics often boils down to regional-caste vote-banks like at other places in the country. The Muslims from Arabic-Persian-Urdu departments form one bloc, the Biharis another and they are further sub-divided into caste groupings, and alliances within them can help you win or lose elections. 

Before we leave the children are paraded once again. I am weary of this ritual but then something happens that, for the first time on the trip moves me profoundly. The students, with a little prompting, lustily join us in singing-

Yeh faisle ka waqt hai utho
Yeh jaagne ka waqt hai utho

These girls, from some of the most backward and disadvantaged backgrounds in the country, their teachers, hardened by the need to promote oneself even in social work and all present there share for one day, for some moments, a struggle that is wider, bigger and more widespread than anything there lives might know. Perhaps their lives would be forever touched and affected by this moment of spontaneous camaraderie between us outsiders and these marginals. The thrill of sharing something wider as they join in songs of criticism and protest that are national and international, old and new will perhaps mark these children at their school and may be one or two of them, for their life. 

But before we can leave the lady in charge of the school says to the Music teacher, on cue as it were, aap bhi kuchh suna deejiye na. The music master, with a peaked cap, a silk kurta, a chandan tika and a malleable face is a character straight out of an Austin novel, he would have wrought enormous havoc on Liz and Darcy in a small drawing room. He plays on his flute, with great gusto, the tune of Ae Watan, the famous Nationalist song. And afterward, an indication that he had obviously come very prepared, dug out another small flute from inside his Kurta and plays it with his nostrils. His dreams of artistic glory, frustrated in this small town, get a wider audience for a day-may be one of us will return, sing his praises and then he may get a commission and a breakthrough to real fame and success which his talent(more the spirit) certainly entitles him to. 


30th June, 2.30 pm.

We pass by schools and memorials dedicated to one Amar Shahid Naseerudin and to Zahoor Ali as we enter Lakhimpur Kheri city. I have never heard of those people, were they of the Great 1942 rebellion against the British, or soldiers slain in wars with Pakistan? Either way, they were a suppressed aspect of Lakhimpur’s claim to fame, as were the Sikh migrants who had appropriated large swathes of the terai region spanning several districts where they had now aggregated huge, mechanized farms complete with harvester machines. These gigantic commercial farms had allowed a congregation of labour and CPI-ML, which had been very active in this region had built up a sizeable following. 

We were received at the main Chauraha of Lakhimpur by twenty odd activists from ML, some of them bearded and skull-capped, and 3 digital cameras. As we presented Lal Salams to out comrades from Lakhimpur, all joined in in a juloos and as ever, we ‘marched’ down to the Tehsil/Kacahri, the ubiquitous symbol of power and authority for several centuries now. 

Jaan asks me if I would like to speak, I do not particularly want to given that there usually are too many speakers from our side and too little participation from our listeners. The usual speeches and songs over, the CPI-ML contingent regroups on the stage and launches their slogans and speeches. 

CPI-ML is facing rough music from the administration in these parts. The Goonda Act and the Gangster Act, both passed by Mayawati and much condemned by the SP then, are invoked to arrest and detain activists of the party. Brij Bihari Singh, the party’s Secretary for the district is supposedly underground but appears to make the speech. As does its young and rising star, aptly called, Kranti Kunwar Singh.

2.30 pm. We are taken for lunch, afterwards, to Comrade Kranti Kunwar’s house. A well to do house for a Comrade, may be it his upper caste ancestry that secures it. Reminds me of what Sumantro said about the insidious interpenetration of caste and politics of protest. 

Kranti, a state Committee member of the CPI-ML, tells me that over a lakh and a half hectares of agicultural land in this region is controlled by the Sikh landlords and the All-India Khetihar Mazdoor Sabha was formed to organize the workers on these farmlands, many of whom were Dalits. They gherao block tehsils, stop harvester machines and the focal point of their activities is the smooth and proper functioning of the Food for Work Program. One worker called Milap Singh had died of starvation. There are some 25000 members in that body and they have been courting arrests to protest against the complete absence of Public Distribution System in the region and also to protest against a scam, of nearly one hundred crore Rs, in the food procurement area. When faced with draconian repression they launched an agitation to remove the SP which proved successful after 11 grueling months. 

6 pm. We reach Sitapur Kachahri, which adjoins a Raja Todar Mal Park, perhaps the only one in this country dedicated to the memory of the best finance minister this country has ever had. Before that, on the outskirts, there was a short welcome by the Sitapur bar Association. We get off, enjoy the refreshments and before leaving raise a few slogans. Why they should be interested in a Yozgar Yatra is not something I can rationalize, because Bar Associations are usually in the hotbed of mainstream politicking. We are very much on the fringe. As we leave a few of our hosts want to know what this is all about. This reminds me of the patron-client network, made famous by the Cambridge School in its analysis of Nationalist politics in the colonial era. From top to bottom one forms associations on the basis of mutual interest, between clients and patrons, sub-clients and lower brokers in a chain of favours and perks that flows up and down. 

In the Tehsil some 150-200 people are waiting for us, many of them women. They are from adjoining villages, from Khanpur and Sanghna and have been here for two or three days at a stretch, brought here on the assurance that they are going to get their poor cards. We in the Yatra are not much interested in why they are here and who has brought them here. When after the meeting, A tries to point their plight and the misapprehension that has brought them here, Jaan says speak to Rajiv, Arundhati says they are not ours, they are ML’s people, and so the people get duped again, for the right cause may be. If not the poor card at least they get to hear speeches about the poor. Perhaps we are not alone in not caring for the audience who turn up, or more correctly, are ‘arranged’ for our meetings, as they are for all political meetings in the country everywhere. Nobody just goes, or visits a public meeting just like that. Perhaps Gandhi and Nehru also did not care for how their meetings or audiences were arranged. 

After a short stint at the Tehsil we all troop into a hall, a Nehru hall this time (inaugurated by state CM in 1963). There are welcome banners from the Chemist and Druggist Association, UP, the Sitapur Traders and Manufacturers Assoc and one Child Herald Social Welfare Association. What are the former two doing by welcoming us? 

The hall is too small so people are urged to go into the gallery upstairs, a woman with a blind child leads him up. The hall is quickly filled up by poor, emaciated, tired, elderly women and men holding aloft flags of a revolution that inheres in never arriving. 

As part of the Act Shambhu invites a young boy to talk to his puppet jokhim chacha. Manish is traumatized and when Shambhu leans the puppet to be kissed, begins to flail at him, to the great amusement of the crowd. Jaan once again reminds the gathering that even if the Employment Guarantee Act is passed we would have to be doubly vigilant in overseeing its implementation.

People buy the information pamphlets, as if that would somehow empower them, something they can show to the powers that be as a token of participation and for exchange for some government dole. Shambhu’s street play, satirizing the troika of police, politician and bureaucrat who siphon off all the money in the name of schemes, as ever, greatly amuses the DM and his cohorts who have put in an appearance here, courtesy Rajiv again. But because of his presence, and because the public here has been brought by a dedicated peoples’ group, the meeting quickly turns into a kind of Lok Adalat. People are keen to express their opinion about whether, in the food for work program, they want payment in grain or cash. The CDO speaks, explaining the proportion of cash and kind payments. He says the grain they get to disburse-khali pet bhare godam, anyay hai, apradh hai is one of our favourite slogans-comes via so many agencies and through such hurdles (they have to pay a trade tax, a mandi tax) that it is difficult to prevent peculation. There are 1329 Gram Panchayats and 19 Blocks in Sitapur.

It turns out that the card the local people are seeking is a worker’s card that the local DM has decided to introduce for all workers under the Food for Work Program. But only those already holding Red Ration cards are entitled for these workers cards and obviously only those with some reach or money will be able to get even that Ration card. The CDO directs the crowd to direct their dharnas and marches at the block level, against the SDM so that their protest remains specific and targeted. 

While the speeches proceed apace, most Yatris troop across for Chai, Cig and other breaks. By simply bringing their Yatra here they have perhaps done their job. The DM proposes a radical solution for governance, have elected District Magistrates, while a girl as part of her evening routine, carries out two buckets of water from the municipal tap in the compound. Seven eight women surround A demanding their cards and wanting to know how they will get back, nobody else from the Yatra is bothered. 

The meeting gets over and now the tired villagers can return home. The collections from here amount to 1414 Rs. 

We are taken for dinner to the Brahmputra Hotel. We reach there to find the compound overladen with Samajwadi Party cars, MLAs and a former MP we had encountered at Lucknow. Our dinner is being organised by the Samajwadi Party, due to Rajiv’s connections and therefore perhaps there are rumours that he may soon be joining SP, in exchange for a ticket to the Rajya Sabha. There is general dissatisfaction tempered by the memory of the visit to Sonebhadra district where the Yatra found itself walking into the local BJP headquarters for a meal. The discontent blows over into a bickering when Rajiv comes to bid goodbye to the group. The JNU team takes him to task for the way he conducted the earlier meeting at Sitapur Tehsil where he allowed a greater say to the DM and officials than to members of our party or to the villagers. He is accused of appeasing the administration, they are rightly perturbed about the villagers not geeting a chance to speak (but don’t seem concerned at the manner and for the reason they were brought there in the first place.) Rajiv says that the meeting was being held in his area and he has the prerogative to decide how to conduct it and further that the meeting brought together the outlawed ML leaders and the DM in one place and that is an achievement. That he is also working for the benefit of the poor and that he has to stay and work in that area and the DM, because of his prior acquaintance, often does things for them at a personal level. That is a curious defense, is the DM’s job not to govern, and if Rajiv’s work boils down to personal acquaintance then what is the great achievement of his work. 

The Yatra is to end at Delhi the next day and there is an open meeting there but there is already a dispute about whether the BJP should be invited and what treatment should be meted out to them. Pawan says he would like to boycott the session should they attend because they, the JNU kranti, do not want to give any legitimacy to that pariah outfit. This for a party which, as A points out, has just ruled the State for six years, what further legitimacy could it need?

At the Ashram terrace in SItapur where we are put up for the night, an impromptu Mehfil is organized on the sprawling terrace after the mandatory power cut. Pawan, Shazia, Waseem, Shekhar, Dhanram and a few more recite and sing Urdu poetry from a wide variety of poets. I am amazed to find Shazia, the firebrand campaigner from Bombay, render some Classical Marsiyas from the canon. It turns out that her entire family are orthodox Shias and she has had to learn these difficult dirges and tunes as a compulsory obligation for the Muharram mehfils that her house hosts. I am impressed with Pawan’s knowledge of not just the well known poets but also of Parvin Shakir and Afzal Ahmed Syed, the latter an avant garde contemporary poet who is not very well known even among Urdu circles. This is another of the Left’s achievement, Urdu poetry and language are highly cherished in this milieu. We sleep afterwards on the terrace itself. I am doing so after more than a decade. I had remembered the breeze and the openness but not the mosquitos who proceed to demolish me throughout the night for that lapse. 

July 1st, 10.30 am.

Shahjahanpur. Lunch at Bartawa, at the Binoba Sewa Ashram. SP’s pointman Raghav, who has been with us since Lucknow, is present here too to arrange lunch for us. They work in collaboration with this Ashram which looks quite well-endowed, going by the number of buildings it has. They supposedly run around 1100 Self-help groups in the region including a mobile bank and numerous Health Workers. They have a good rapport with the district administration, says Raghav, and get World Bank funding, fumes a JNUite, forgetting perhaps that even the West Bengal government gets that funding. 

It needs to be pointed out that Rajiv and his organization are not obliged to host us or to look after us, the Yatra is after all the Yatris baby. But someone counters that by saying that the Yatra has been organized by 125 NGOs, one of which is Usha so he is very much a party to its organization. The Ashram wants to organize in its own Gandhi hall cannot yet take off for lack of an assembly so we head off to the local chowk to do an impromptu street corner meeting. 

We march there and shout slogans in support of Comrade Ashfaqullah Khan who was from Shahjahanpur and one of the stalwarts of the Kakori Robbery that became an immediate precursor to Bhagat Singh’s actions. His legend lives on in the Comrady circles where he is an icon and people react emotionally to him. For the wider public assembled here, or elsewhere, he is nothing more than a long forgotten symbol of an Independence Struggle, the lore of which has become as ancient and mythified as the golden world of Ancient India. 

6.15 pm. On the last leg of our journey we reach Ansari Inter College Muradabad, after traveling through a winding narrow road of a Muslim mohallah. It is more typically Muslim than the Muslim places I am used to, with half the population running beards and wearing caps. We are welcomed here by the Pital Mazdoor Karkhana Sangh (because Muradabad has a thriving brass-works industry), Northern Railwaymens Union Youth Wing and the Gyan Vigyan Samiti. 

On the board outside, while Meraj fills the bus cooler with water-always him, always diligent-and Naseem goes out to look for kebabs, I find an amazing notice, an advert for training for-

1.	To be a journalist or writer
2.	To be Models, girls or boys
3.	To play a role in TV or cinema
4.	To investigate corruption and crimes
5.	Developing an ideal personality through cinema, debates and comp.

A seminar on the above topics contact-Yusuf Stationers. What a seminar, only NGOs seem to be missing. 

We are joined at Muradabad by a Professor from JNU, another inspiration behind the Yatra. We stop to have chai two hours away from Delhi and the Dhaba Kranti crowd complains to him about Rajeev and his behaviour at the Sitapur rally. Promptly the Professor calls up a contact to inform her about what he is hearing about (the corruption) of ‘old friends.’ By now the story is that Rajeev did not let out boys speak and instead cosied up to the administration. 

The driver Narendra and his two minions, Jaggi and Jassu have been with the bus since day one, while they have not been politicized they have yet developed a soft spot for the young men traveling with them and there is close intimacy between them and the other Yatris. And in truth, regardless of irritable ritualism, they are all lovely people. 

I get talking to Dhanram, a thin, bony and tall man of fifty odd years with sunken cheeks who always wears a cap and smokes Navy Cut cigarettes, a brand we share so we draw on each other often. So when did your politicization happen, I ask him. His flabbergasting reply is, ‘abhi kahan hua hai. Abhi kisi se deeksha kahan liya hai.’ He has been in the business of revolution for over thirty years. He is from a well-to do family in Jamshedpur, his father was an Engineer with TISCO and he graduated from a good school there before he became a Naxalite in 1974, just like that. Along with a group of friends he hijacked a bus and took it around the state with two police pilot cars shadowing them. There was also some violence, he calls it Action. But while they were angry at things as they were and wanted to do something, they were always very unclear and confused about their motives. While he has remained with the Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini, a formidable and famous Naxalite group, he turned Socialist after coming into contact with Jai Prakash Narain. He is the lone ‘socialist’ in the group and knows the ‘who is who’ of the Naxalite/revolutionary world, people like Vinod Mishra and Charu Babu, first hand. 

2nd JULY-Constitution Club, New Delhi. Open Forum.

We arrive late, the big speakers, V P Singh, Narayanan, Karat, have come and gone. After lunch Swami Agnivesh addresses the gathering, he is a charismatic and fluent speaker and articulates something that I have been asking myself for a long time. Instead of threatening to leave the government over BHEL why does the Left not issue an ultimatum to the Govt over the EGA. Why not? I try to raise a slogan from the audience but nobody takes up the cue. 

The yatris are all feeling hungover from the trip. We are feeling empty, disconnected and washed over by a sense of anti-climax. May be Jaan should take out another Yatra. 


ROZGAR YATRA- A DIARY. 

A Rozgar Adhikar Yatra was taken out through ten States of Northern India between the 15th may and 1st July. It traveled through some of the poorest districts and villages in this region publicizing the inadequacies of the existing Employment Guarantee Bill and the need to have a comprehensive Act as the greatest anti-Poverty measure this country could have. 

It was an independent initiative but supported by over 125 organisations all across the country. Jean Dreze, of the Delhi School of Economics ( a collaborator of Amartya Sen and a former member of the National Advisory Council), Aruna Roy the Magsaysay winner and founder of MKSS of Rajasthan and a few others conceived the Yatra as a way of mounting pressure on the government to shore up the Employment Bill it had conceived. 

The Yatris comprised a rotatory and motley group. Students from JNU and DU, NGO reps from Rajasthan, Bihar, Jharkhand and Lucknow, Party activists from CPM and ML, academics, reporters and local residents. Most of us were under 35. It was not funded by anyone and the diesel cost came from the donations we received after performing our plays and songs and from the sale of publicity material like pamphlets, badges and booklets. We were put up and looked after, the meals were always frugal and accommodation basic minimum, by local organizations and activists along the way. 

While it could have improved itself in many ways, most notably by curbing hackneyed slogans and party political positions, the Yatra was a wonderful idea. We had nothing to offer the masses except speeches. The masses however, gave us a lot. Humility for one and admiration at the way they cope and fight and resist injustice and oppression everyday of their lives. 




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