Times of India : Ahmedabad: Friday,
August 26, 2016.
A major plank
of young Jignesh Mevani, widely projected as the new Dalit icon of Gujarat, is
that the state government should provide five acres of land to each Dalit
family, and it should part of the solution to rehabilitate those doing the
despicable job of manually scavenging of dead cattle. The view apparently stems
from the understanding that agriculture is a respectable profession, and can
certainly provide a good livelihood option. Mevani has threatened, in case five
acres land is not offered by September 15, he would launch a “rail roko”
agitation.
Trained as a
lawyer under late Mukul Sinha, a well-known Gujarat High Court advocate who
shot into prominence for his tough counter-questions to those who appeared
before the Nanavati-Shah Commission of inquiry into Gujarat riots, Mevani’s
“passion” for land is not new. It existed five years ago, too, when I first met
him in the Times of India office in Gandhinagar. He had told me how most of the
land, which had been rendered surplus under the Gujarat Agricultural Land
Ceiling Act, 1960, hadn’t been “handed over” to the Dalits.
A couple of
months back, talking in the same strain, Mevani, a hardcore city dweller, told
me on the sidelines of a land rights meet, that a Gujarat government affidavit
before the High Court had claimed, it wasn’t “physically possible” for the
state revenue department officials to survey the land that hadn’t been handed
over to the Dalits. “I would like to meet the state revenue secretary in
Gandhinagar to find out why is the state government so indifferent”, he seemed
to plead.
I don’t know
if he could meet the top official, but, clearly, he wasn’t speaking in the air.
I knew: Based on a information (RTI) plea, he had found out last year how there
was an “extremely tardy” progress in the allocation of surplus land to the
landless. Records with him showed the Gujarat government, in all, had
“acquired” 1,63,808 acres of land. Of this, he estimated, quoting official
sources, nearly 70,000 acres was “under dispute” with the revenue tribunal or
in courts, yet there were 15,519 acres on which “there is no dispute”; yet this
land hasn’t been handed over to the landless.
Be that as it
may, a major question that has for long puzzled me is, how could land become a
panacea for Dalits’ and other other
marginalized communities’ ills? Wasn’t there much truth in Niti Aayog
vice-chairman Arvind Panagariya’s view that the share of agriculture in the GDP
is just about 15 per cent, while half of the workforce is dependent on it? This
contradiction, he believes, is a major reason why the rural people are poorer
than the other half, employed in industry and services. And this, he thinks, is
the main reason why, in the longer run, “the potential of agriculture to bring
prosperity to a vast population remains limited.
I approached
Prof Ghanshyam Shah, a well-known social scientist, who has been studying the
marginalized communities of Gujarat for several decades, to know if land could
be a solution of the Dalit problem. Pointing towards the demographic shift of
Dalits in Gujarat, Prof Shah told me, “The urge for land is mainly Dalits in
rural areas mainly of the Saurashtra region, and not entire Gujarat”, he told
me, adding, “Nearly all of them are either landless workers or marginal
farmers.”
Elucidating,
he said, “I was looking at the data. They suggest that the proportion of Dalits
living in rural areas in Saurashtra remains high compared to the state average.
However, it just the opposite in the rest of Gujarat. In fact, a a higher than
the overall proportion of Dalits lives urban areas of the rest of Gujarat.”
“The urban
Dalits face a different set of problems than rural Dalits. Even the proportion
of atrocities on Dalits is pretty high in the Saurashtra region and other rural
areas”, he said, adding, “A peep into the data of atrocities against Dalits
showed this quite clearly.” Indeed, the
districts and areas which have been declared “sensitive” from the Dalit
atrocities angle are mainly rural Ahmedabad (Rural), Vadodara (Rural), Rajkot
(rural),and nearly most of the
Saurashtra region and Kutch.
Interestingly,
it is not just the agitators who view agriculture and allied sectors are the
panacea for the marginalized communities. The view is equally strong among
traditional economists. They do agree, for instance, that agriculture
contributes less than 20 per cent of the Gujarat economy, down from 50 per cent
during 1970s; yet they insist that agriculture is the “backbone of the economy”
because because more than half of the
working population is dependent on agricultural activities for their
livelihood! Hence the “solution”: Priority should be given to agriculture in
order to reduce poverty and malnutrition and for inclusive growth.
This is just
contrary to what the available surveys suggest. One of them is by the Centre
for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi, which finds that, given an
employment opportunity, 61 per cent of India’s farmers would like to “shift” to
cities, with 50 per cent of farmers said they are “ready to quit farming” if
such a possibility arises.
Conducted in
2013-14 in 274 villages spread over 137 districts of 18 Indian states,
including Gujarat, and based on interview with 8,220 individuals, 20 per cent
of whom are Dalits, the survey report says, “When farmers were asked whether
they want their children to settle in the city, as many as 60 per cent said
they want their children to settle in the city. Another 14 per cent do not want
their children to settle in the city, whereas 19 per cent said they will prefer
their children’s choice on this matter.”
Pointing out
that better education was cited as a major reason why farmers want their
children to settle in cities, followed by better facilities, and employment
opportunities, the study says, “When
asked whether they would like to see their children engaging in farming, only
18 per cent responded positively, 36 per cent said they do not want their
children to continue farming as their occupation, and 37 per cent said they
will prefer their children’s choice.”
The study
underlines, “The sentiment that their children should not continue farming is
strongest among landless and small farmers (39 per cent) and weakest among
large farmers (28 per cent)” a big proportion of whom are Dalits. The study
adds, in a separate interview with youths from farmer households, “60 per cent
said that they would prefer to do some other jobs, whereas only 20 per cent
said they would continue farming.”
Ironically,
it is no other than BR Ambedkar in whose name most Dalit leaders (including
Mevani) are never tired of swearing for any and every issue who exhorted Dalits
to flee villages and move to cities in order to escape caste shackle. Ambedkar
wrote, “What is a village but a sink of
localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism?”
Intelligent
Dalit intellectuals are found to have taken a cue from Ambedkar on the land
issue. They say, land cannot be the panacea for Dalits’ fight against
“oppression”. Senior Dalit intellectual Ratan Lal of the Delhi University, says
land can at best be only be a “small part in the overall fight”, insisting, the
main focus should be right to equal participation in public life, government
and private sector. He says, Ambedkar termed villages “feudal bastions.”