The Hindu: New Delhi:
Sunday, 31 May 2015.
Aruna Roy and
Nikhil Dey speak about the MKSS experience and their campaign for
citizen-centric accountability.
The Mazdoor
Kisan Shakti Sangathan was founded in Bhim on May 1, 1990 with the aim of
organising people at the grassroots. By addressing issues of minimum wage and
land and reading out official records, thereby exposing the enormous corruption
in the system, it mobilised peasants and workers in rural Rajasthan. A dharna
held in Beawar in 1996 demanding access to government records culminated in a
nation-wide movement that led to the enactment of the historic Right to
Information Act a decade later. In this interview, Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey,
two founder-members of the MKSS, talk about what the MKSS is all about and 25
years of the movement. Excerpts from an interview:
Which are
the main campaigns the MKSS is NOW involved with?
The MKSS has
come to understand that even the enactment of landmark legislations like the
RTI and MGNREGA is only half the battle won. In India, implementation remains a
huge challenge. That is why we are focusing on generic citizen-centric
accountability frameworks like a grievance redress law, and social audits.
However, we have come to realise our marginalisation would be complete without
the democratic space to organise, mobilise, and express dissent. Ironically,
groups like ours are struggling to protect our constitutional democracy at a
time the ruling establishment is using “growth” as an excuse to undermine
plurality, free speech, and people’s basic rights.
What is the
contribution of peasants and workers to the MKSS' campaigns?
From the
conception of ideas to the shaping of policy and legislation, peasants and
workers clearly have the greater sustainability and commitment required to make
landmark concepts like the RTI or employment guarantee credible. It is their
time and effort for days and years on the street, and in the field that shaped
the contours of these movements, and have deepened our concepts of development
and democracy.
Have
government schemes introduced in the last one year been useful in addressing
problems at the grassroots?
The social
sector initiatives of the last year have been symbolic and devoid of
imagination. There has been a significant weakening of the rights-based
entitlements in monetary and administrative terms. The attempt to replace
universal health and pension entitlements with contributory schemes is going to
be a non-starter. Unorganised sector, workers with their multiple
vulnerabilities (of income, employment, and organisation) cannot make regular
contributions, and they do not have the power to negotiate their claims. The
only potentially meaningful initiative is the Jan Dhan Yojana for financial
inclusion. However, it has so far largely created inactive accounts as people
do not have the money to operate them. We still need to put financial inclusion
into a rights based framework that gives the poor real access to money and
credit.
With no
Planning Commission, what are the avenues available for civil society
organisations to engage with the government?
There are
orders of the Government of India (Law Ministry) making it compulsory to have a
pre-legislative consultative process for any law or subordinate legislation.
(http://lawmin.nic.in/ld/plcp.pdf). This requirement is not being followed for
new laws or amendments. Nor does action match the rhetoric that the NEETI Aayog
has replaced the Planning Commission so that policy can be planned bottom up.
Courts and public protests are the two ways left of putting ones point of view
across.
The
promulgation of ordinances has been an undemocratic use of an emergency
measure. It has got worse with this government repeatedly re-promulgating
extremely unpopular ordinances. The Rajasthan ordinance on minimum
qualifications for panchayat elections was so timed that even the courts could
not review its constitutionality before the electoral process began. Finally,
people will have to relentlessly struggle to open up democratic decision making
to public participation, and protect democratic spaces for even the weakest
communities.
How can
the RTI be effectively used?
Every single
RTI threatens the concentration of power in a small or big way. When you get
the information out, it is the first success. There are cases in which the
information that is brought out would have to be made part of a larger
political campaign. For instance, one single application was not enough to
campaign against Bt. brinjal. When campaigns use the RTI, then its
applicability extends far beyond accessing that information. It is information
in the context of a big issue. In some cases, individuals find it difficult to
extract information. That is why RTI groups support each other and help out
people who have come into conflict with vested interests.
How
effective is Jantar Mantar as a platform for protest? How is a movement
sustained?
Jantar Mantar
is a vital space for protest. It must be protected because people in distress
from all over the country come to Delhi to try to have their voice heard by
policy makers. But, Jantar Mantar is only a small part of our overall work, and
it is not the only place where people mobilise.
People’s
movements have primarily been engaged with marginalised communities in
villages, and in slums reaching out to people, talking to them on the streets,
on worksites, in their homes. The reason why Jantar Mantar dominates people’s
mind space is because that’s the only time decision makers in Delhi acknowledge
us. Groups are active on the ground, with efforts of sangharsh, seva, and
nirman, but the government rarely responds as it should.
This is why
the MKSS story of 25 years is important. Even when you are pushed back, you
find ways and means to sustain your struggle among the people, keep the
discourse going, and amplify the voices of the marginalized. The MKSS
experience also shows that while social media can strengthen a movement, it
cannot be the movement.
How can
the middle class take up issues it feels strongly about?
The middle
class needs to leave its comfort zone, and go out to experience the condition
of the less fortunate, in a compassionate way. One problem with the middle
class is that it has a strong sense of entitlement primarily for itself. It
gets angry when its own interests are hurt. If the middle class had to lead one
day like the poor, it would realise that it’s not about “me”; that there are
people facing far more drastic conditions. Its perception would change.
A lot of good
people have shown that when they come face to face with certain issues, they
make an effort, and get passionately involved. The alliance between sensitive
middle class and working class people is of great value in helping highlight
issues of justice and equality in our hierarchical and stratified society.
“They gave
us the RTI”
The mass
movement for demanding the RTI Act traces its origin to a small village. In
1996, the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), a grassroots organisation
based in rural Rajasthan, was in its third year of holding Jun Sunwais, a form
of public hearing pioneered by the organisation, in which government records
read out in front of villagers served as a powerful mode for strengthening
citizen monitoring, and empowerment.
“This was the
first time villagers were familiarised with the scale of corruption that was
exposed in fake employment rolls having names of workers long dead and in
fudged bills on public works,” says Lal Singh, a local farmer who has been with
the organisation for nearly three decades.
With no law
in place that allowed access to government records, attempts at procuring them
typically met with resistance from the officials. “It was the resistance
displayed by the officials that showed to us the power of the right to
information,” says Vijay Nagaraj who joined the organization on his inclination
to engage in a social movement.
Until 1996,
the organisation had been reluctant to involve the middle class in its
campaigns. Nagaraj was the third person after the founders of the MKSS Nikhil
Dey and Aruna Roy, to join the organisation.
This approach
stemmed from the experience of Roy and Dey in the late 1980s when they
initially came to Devdungri. Workers and peasants were at first wary of their
intent. “By adopting a rural lifestyle in a mud home in Devdungri, Aruna,
Nikhil and I were able to associate and engage with the poor more closely,”
says Shanker Singh another founder-member who helped identify the Bhim area as
the site to start their grassroots' work.
The MKSS had
decided at the outset it would never work on a defined project or predetermined
agenda. “Rather, by getting a grasp of a specific problem in the village, we analysed
the issue in the larger context of how it is plaguing the system as a whole,
and then channelised it into a movement for bringing in a policy change,” says
Singh.
In an initial
campaign that focussed on minimum wage for work, the organisation realised its
fight would have no meaning unless it understood the significance of living on
a minimum wage. The decision to give MKSS members a minimum wage, same as the
statutory minimum wage paid to a worker was taken on this principle.
The villagers
did not limit their commitment to the MKSS by participating in its protests. As
stakeholders in an organisation that had no funding, they donated grains, oil,
vegetables for the members’ day-to-day living. “Ranjeet, a schoolboy who worked
in the evenings at a medical store, gave us Rs.2 from his daily earning of
Rs.8, during the Beawar dharna,” says Lal Singh. He went on to become one of
the earliest RTI applicants in the country when the RTI was notified on the
October 13, 2005.
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