Image: bhindibazaar.asia

On Friday, 24 years after the Mumbai bomb blasts of 1993, a special court convicted Abu Salem, Mustafa Dossa, Firoz Khan, Tahir Merchant and Riyaz Siddiqui for the serial explosions that killed 257 people. Another accused man, Abdul Qayyum, was acquitted of all charges.

Immediately after the blasts, the state government set up a special court under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act to hold trials in the blast cases. So far, the TADA court has convicted 106 people for their involvement in carrying out the bomb blasts. Yakub Memon, one of the convicts, was hanged in July 2015.

The 12 blasts rippled down the spine of Mumbai on the afternoon of March 12, 1993. Orchestrated by underworld don Dawood Ibrahim, the blasts were an act of revenge against the communal riots that swept through Mumbai in December 1992 and January 1993 after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992. At least 900 people were killed in the riots and more than 2,000 were injured – the majority of them Muslims.

However, the state government’s response to the communal riots was significantly different.
 

The Srikrishna Commission dilemma

After the riots of December 1992 and January 1993, the state government set up a Commission of Inquiry under Justice BN Srikrishna. The Commission spent more than five years investigating the events of the riots, and published a comprehensive report that proved damning for the Shiv Sena, the nativist party that was elected to the Maharashtra government in 1995.

The Srikrishna Commission report indicted Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray, other party leaders as well as the party mouthpiece Saamna for playing a major role in inciting communal passions and triggering Hindu attacks on Muslims during the riots. It described Thakeray’s role as that of a “veteran General” who “commanded his loyal Shiv Sainiks to retaliate by organised attacks against Muslims”.

But even after conducting exhaustive investigations – much like a court of law – the Srikrishna Commission did not have the power convict any of the alleged perpetrators named in its report. Under the Commissions of Inquiry Act, an inquiry cannot be considered a court of law. Unsurprisingly, state governments appoint such commissions whenever they have no will to actually bring justice to crimes.

By constituting it as a commission of inquiry, the state government restricted the Commission’s powers to merely making recommendations for prosecution. Its recommendations were then taken up by the police for further investigation.

The recommendations in the Srikrishna Commission report were rejected outright by the Shiv Sena government, and over the years, successive state governments too did not act upon the recommendations.
 

The fallout

So far, only three people have been convicted for their involvement in the riots, all on relatively minor charges like hate speech and inciting violence. No one has been convicted for the serious charges of murder, rape or arson, not even the many assailants named in the Commission’s report based on witness testimonies. In the majority of cases, the police simply chose to close the investigations.

Over the years, several of the police personnel indicted in the report for their complicity in the violence went on to get promotions.

One of the three convicts was former Shiv Sena MP Madhukar Sarpotdar, who was found guilty in 2008 of carrying weapons during the riots. Sarpotdar died in 2010 without ever serving his jail sentence, and today, he has a park in suburban Mumbai named after him.

Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray, whose recorded speeches from 1992 openly incited violence against Muslims, was arrested briefly, but the court eventually dismissed the charges against him by saying the statute of limitations had expired. When Thackeray died in 2012, he was given a state funeral.

This article was first published on Scroll.in

 

On January 24, a group of advocates organised a small protest meet in Mumbai to highlight how lawyers and activists across India are being targeted for confronting government-sanctioned atrocities.

One state is of particular concern in this regard.

According to a fact-finding report released by the non-profit forum Indian Association of People’s Lawyers, activists and lawyers in Chhattisgarh have consistently been attacked by the state government and the police under the pretext of tackling the region’s Naxalite problem by trying to paint them as sympathisers of the radical group.

These are lawyers and activists who have been instrumental in exposing the rampant fake encounters, kidnappings, sexual assaults and forced surrenders of supposed Naxalites in the state. A recent example is the attack on activist Bela Bhatia on January 23, when a group of men barged into the academic’s home in Chhatisgarh’s Parpa village and ordered her to leave the village in 24 hours, else they would burn her house down.

The report was released at the protest meet on January 24, marked annually since 2010 as the Day of the Endangered Lawyer. It contains details of an investigation conducted by a team of 12 advocates in Chhattisgarh’s Bilaspur district on March 26 and 27.

The team comprised lawyers from Maharashtra, Telangana and Chandigarh, including Surendra Gadling, Mahrukh Adenwala, Monica Sakhrani and M Venkanna. The lawyers conducted detailed interviews with lawyers and social activists working in Chhattisgarh.
 

Targeting JagLAG

According to the report, the government of the mineral-rich state of Chhattisgarh, especially in the highly militarised Bastar region, is trying to “terrorise” dissenters. The report also speaks of the growing prominence of right-wing Hindu fundamentalist groups in the state, who have been targeting Adivasis, Dalits and Christians.

The fact-finding investigation was prompted by media reports of the harassment of lawyers from the Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group, a non-profit that was set up by a group of advocates in 2013 to provide free legal services to Adivasis in the Bastar region, who often had no one to help them if they were accused in criminal cases. Lawyers from JagLAG – as the group is colloquially called – soon realised that there were large-scale police atrocities taking place in Bastar, including fake encounters of Adivasis dubbed as Naxalites. Their interventions in these cases led to growing hostility with the local police.

Among the first to openly target JagLAG lawyers was Bastar’s inspector general of police, SRP Kalluri, who, in a press conference in April 2015, claimed that strict action would be taken against NGOs providing legal aid to Maoists. Under Kalluri, the local police began spreading rumours about JagLAG being a group of “bogus” lawyers involved in “suspicious activities”.

According to the fact-finding report, the propaganda against JagLAG resulted in the Bastar District Bar Association filing a complaint against the group, questioning its lawyers’ credentials. JagLAG’s advocates were registered with the bar council in Delhi and not the one in Chhattisgarh. Taking advantage of this, the Bastar District Bar Association passed a resolution in October 2015 disallowing lawyers not enrolled in the state from practicing. While members of the Bar Association followed and intimidated JagLAG lawyer Shalini Gera on a number of occasions, several judges too did not allow her to present her cases or submit applications.

JagLAG challenged the restrictions on its lawyers and it was November 2015 by the time the state’s Bar Council allowed Gera and her colleagues to practice again. Gera eventually registered with the Chhattisgarh State Bar Council. But since then, she and other JagLAG lawyers have been targeted in numerous other ways.
 

Samajik Ekta Manch

According to the fact-finding report, the Chhattisgarh state and police have also co-opted non-state organisations to target supposed Naxal sympathisers. These organisations, like the Samajik Ekta Manch and the Mahila Ekta Manch, have been used by the police in Bastar as instruments to target lawyers and human rights activists working to expose state-backed atrocities against Adivasis.

The Bastar District Bar Association has been using the platform of the Samajik Ekta Manch to abuse JagLAG. The Manch was also a sponsor of a seminar on the “Naxal Problem” conducted by Kalluri in January last year, according to the report. In February, members of the Samajik Ekta Manch demanded action against JagLAG and attacked the home of Scroll.in contributor Malini Subramaniam, after she wrote a number of reports on police atrocities.

The police, says the fact-finding report, has been complicit in the harassment of lawyers, journalists and activists like Bhatia, who has received multiple threats since October 2015, when she helped Adivasi women file a case against security personnel who had allegedly raped them. The intimidation tactics have included detaining and interrogating Shalini Gera’s landlord and Subramaniam’s domestic help.
 

Painted as Naxalites

While the harassment of the Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group has attracted some degree of national media attention, the fact-finding report highlights attacks on Chhattisgarh’s lawyers dating all the way back to the 1990s.

Advocate Satendrakumar Chaubey, for instance, was branded as a “Naxal lawyer” in 1998 after he chose to defend villagers accused of attacking a police station in Ambikapur. In 1999, he was arrested and jailed for three months on charges of possessing “Naxal material”, although the lawyer claims the “material” in question was actually his clients’ case papers seized during a raid on his house. Eighteen years later, Chaubey’s case is still pending in the National Investigative Agency court in Bilaspur, while visitors have stopped coming to his home.

Another lawyer, Rekha Praganiya, was arrested in March 2012 from her home in Chhattisgarh’s Durg district and charged with sedition for her alleged involvement with Naxal activity. According to the fact-finding report, in Praganiya’s case too, the police dubbed her client’s case papers as incriminating evidence of her alleged Naxal activities. She spent more than a year in prison, during which the police allegedly projected her to the media as a dreaded Maoist. Praganiya was finally acquitted in June 2013, but has been ostracised by other lawyers since then.
 

Caste and communal lines

The report also lists a range of atrocities towards Christians, Muslims and Dalits in Chhattisgarh, perpetrated with virtual impunity by Hindu right-wing groups like the Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad. These incidents include vandalising churches, assaulting priests and accusing members of the minority communities of being Naxalites. While Christian groups are usually accused of forcibly converting Adivasis, Muslim and Dalit groups are often accused of cow slaughter.

In April 2015, for instance, two Dalits cobblers, Anil Mochi and Sankar Ratre, were jailed after members of the extremist group Hindu Dharam Sena saw them skinning a dead cow on the railway tracks. Even though railway officials had themselves called the two Dalits to remove the electrocuted cow from the tracks, the Hindu Dharam Sena filed a “cow slaughter” complaint against Mochi and Ratre. While the Dalits were jailed for 40 days, the fact-finding report alleges that their lawyer faced intimidation from the deputy collector to stop fighting the case.

Dalit lawyers, like advocate Shobharam Gilhare, also alleged caste-based discrimination by the Bar Association. Gilhare said that when he was establishing practice in 2013, working out of the bar room, his work table was confiscated without explanation by the Association. He also claimed that other Dalit lawyers were made to work as domestic servants at the homes of other lawyers in the Bar before they could practice.

Courtesy: Scroll.in

Sabrangindia has a copy of the entire report titled "Attacks on Lawyers in Chhattisgarh" that may be read here.

Image credit:  Aarefa Johari

Uday Makwana is barely 12 years old, but he has already experienced a form of discrimination that many Indians like to believe no longer exists. Makwana, a Dalit from Kamlapur village in Gujarat’s Rajkot district, has been beaten in school by boys from the higher Koli caste for the crime of touching them.

“In my old school, even if we brushed against the Kolis, they would beat us,” said Makwana. “And they would not let us enter their temple. We were three Dalit boys in that school, and we were given a separate bench to sit.”

Life has been better for the boy in the past two years but only because his parents moved him to a different school – Navsarjan Vidyalaya – almost 150 km away from home.

Located on a quiet four-acre campus near Rayka village in rural Ahmedabad district, Navsarjan Vidyalaya was set up in 2005 as a private residential school for Dalit and Adivasi children from Class five to Class eight. There are two other Navsarjan Vidyalayas in Gujarat – in Surendranagar and Patan districts – all founded and funded by the state’s largest Dalit rights non-profit organisation, the Navsarjan Trust. Together, the three schools house 102 boys and girls from Gujarat’s most marginalised caste groups, who often have hair-raising personal stories of caste discrimination to share.

“Our school is actually open to all, and a few upper-caste students have come before, but they see us mainly as a Harijan school,” said Jigneshbhai Makwana, a teacher at the Rayka school and a staff member of Navsarjan Trust. “Here we teach students all the regular subjects but also about the philosophies of [social reformers] Ambedkar and Phule.”

Jigneshbhai Makwana has spent the past 11 years living and working at Navsarjan Vidyalaya, touring remote villages during the holidays to convince victims of caste-based atrocities to send their children to the school. But this June, when the new academic year begins, he is unsure if he – or any of the students and teachers – will have a school to return to.

Last month, the Union government, without explanation, deemed the Navsarjan Trust’s activities as “undesirable” and cancelled its license to receive foreign funding. The move resulted in the sudden unemployment of almost all of Navsarjan’s 92 employees, while the trust’s activities in more than 3,000 villages face an uncertain future.

In order to legally receive funding from foreign donors or agencies, non-profit organisations are required to get a license under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act. Founded in 1989, as Gujarat’s oldest Dalit rights trust, Navsarjan has consistently survived on foreign funding, and its license to receive foreign funding was renewed as recently as August 3, 2016.

But on December 15 last year, the Union Home Ministry issued an order in “public interest”, cancelling Navsarjan’s registration under the Act on the grounds that the trust was involved in “undesirable activities aimed to affect prejudicially harmony between religious, racial, social, linguistic, regional groups, castes or communities”.
 

‘Undesirable activities’

Navsarjan founder and managing trustee Martin Macwan. (Photo credit: Aarefa Johari).

While the government order did not offer any further explanation or cite examples of the trust’s so-called prejudicial activities, founder and managing trustee Martin Macwan believes that the crackdown is connected to Navsarjan’s prominent role in the widespread Dalit uprising in Gujarat since July 11, 2016, when four Dalit tanners from Una were stripped and assaulted by cow vigilantes.

The Union Home Ministry’s decision came within months of the government similarly cancelling the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act licenses of two other prominent non-governmental organisations: Social activist Teesta Setalvad’s Sabrang Trust, which has been litigating on behalf of the victims of the 2002 Gujarat communal riots, and Lawyer’s Collective, whose founder Indira Jaising represented Setalvad in the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act case against Sabrang.

In December, along with Navsarjan, the government also cancelled foreign funding licenses for other so-called “undesirable” non-profit groups, including Anhad, the Marwar Muslim Education and Welfare Society, the Rural Development Research Centre and the Institute of Public Health.
 

80 employees laid off

For Macwan, the sudden government crackdown meant having to take a sudden, drastic step himself. A week after the Home Ministry’s order, Macwan and the trust’s board laid off 80 of Navsarjan’s staff members, paying them their salaries up till March 31 so that they have time to look for employment.

Even though Navsarjan plans to challenge its foreign funds license cancellation in the Gujarat High Court next week, Macwan believes it would have been too much of a gamble to retain his staff and continue work as usual.

“More than 80% of our expenses, including salaries of all staff, have been dependent on foreign funding, so how will we pay them without more funds coming in?” asked Macwan.

Of Navsarjan’s annual expenses of Rs 2.75 crores, at least Rs 1.8 crore is directed towards salaries. “The only employees we have retained for now are the staff of the three Navsarjan schools,” said Macwan. “But once this academic year ends, we don’t know if we will be able to keep the schools open. The children may have to be shifted to other schools.”

The trust’s decision to let go of its employees has also led to a degree of turmoil within Navsarjan, with staff members as distraught over the loss of their long-held jobs as they are over the fate of the work they have been doing with Dalits across Gujarat.

“The news of this job loss has come like an earthquake, and the staff is very insecure right now,” said Preeti Vaghela, 46, a regional coordinator at Navsarjan and a resident of Dholka, a small town in rural Ahmedabad. “I do understand that funding salaries is going to be a problem for the NGO, but how can they expect us to just stop our work now? What if there is an atrocity towards a Dalit somewhere – should we not help them?”

A single mother to a 15-year-old boy, Vaghela has been with the trust for more than 20 years, travelling daily into the hinterlands of four different districts to help Dalits in need.

Preeti Vaghela, a Navsarjan regional coordinator, during a field visit in Bautha village. (Photo credit: Aarefa Johari).
 

‘Non-cooperation with casteism’

Since 1995, Navsarjan has been working to highlight the ubiquity of manual scavenging in Gujarat and continues to demand basic rights for sanitation workers even today. It was also one of the first organisations to conduct an exhaustive survey of untouchability in Gujarat. Its 2010 report found the practice to be widespread even 60 years after independence.

“We were also the first organisation in the state trying to end the casteism that higher Dalit castes practice on the lowest Dalit castes,” said Natubhai Parmar, a Navsarjan member from Surendranagar who has been with the trust for the past 20 years.

A member of the leather tanning caste, Parmar was a young boy when he chose to give up this traditional vocation. In July 2016, he made national headlines for exhorting other Dalit tanners to do the same, and for leading a unique protest that involved dumping cattle carcasses on the streets and highways of Gujarat in protest against the Una assault.

“Our work at Navsarjan has always been about non-cooperation with casteism,” said Parmar. “How can the government consider this anti-national or even undesirable?”

Natubhai Parmar, the man behind the unique cattle carcass protests of July 2016. (Photo credit: Aarefa Johari).
 

‘Fought for six years for us’

In 1997, Natubhai Parmar and his colleagues heard of a case of 55 Dalit families who had escaped overnight from their village of Aniyali Bhimji in Ahmedabad district’s Dhandhuka block, and landed up in a marshy field on the outskirts of Surendranagar city. The families were from the Dangasiya caste of Dalit handloom weavers, and had been forced to flee for their lives after weeks of boycott and assault by members of the upper Chudasama Darbar caste.

“The Darbars didn’t like that we worked mainly from home, so they would force us to work in their fields for very little pay,” said Pravinbhai Parmar, one of the weavers from Aniyali Bhimji.

The weaver used to own two bicycles and once, when an upper-caste man ordered him to lend him a cycle, he made the innocuous error of giving him the older bike.

“This got him angry and a huge fight broke out that lasted weeks,” said Pravinbhai Parmar. “The Darbars boycotted us and beat us up. They molested our women and also beat my older brother to death.”

He added that while the local police refused to file a murder case, the Darbars allegedly made a plan to attack the Dangasiya families with swords one night. “We ran with nothing but the clothes on our back, and came here to Surendranagar where we have some relatives,” he said.

Pravinbhai Parmar (third from left) with other Dangasiya men outside their rehabilitation homes in Surendranagar. (Photo credit: Aarefa Johari).

When Navsarjan found out and came to help, the refugees were living in makeshift tents, struggling for food and money.

“Navsarjan took up our case, mobilised the larger community and fought for six years in court so that we were recognised as boycotted refugees who deserved government-allotted land to live on,” said Pravinbhai Parmar. Today, the New Dangasiya colony in Surendranagar has 55 concrete houses in which the families have set up new handlooms. “Is this the kind of work the government wants to clamp down on, by taking away Navsarjan’s funding?”
 

Women fight back

In rural Ahmedabad’s Bautha village, 60-year-old Baluben Makwana feels the same. She may be illiterate, but she is the formidable leader of a 60-member Women’s Rights Council set up by Navsarjan in her village. Bautha lies on the banks of a unique seven-river confluence, and has several acres of government-owned fertile land that upper caste groups in the village have encroached upon.

“The land didn’t belong to them, but they made us Dalit women labour on it for very poor pay, grew cotton on it and then took all the harvest and earnings for themselves,” said Baluben Makwana. “They didn’t use Dalit men because they knew the men would begin fighting for their rights to the land and produce, but they never imagined women could fight back too.”

During harvest season in 2011, the women fought back with the help of Navsarjan’s field workers, who staged a roadblock to cordon off the government-allotted land. Then, with the upper-caste groups watching helplessly from a distance, Baluben Makwana and her team of women took up their sickles and spent 12 hours gathering the harvest for themselves.

Baluben Makwana with other members of Bautha's Women's Rights Council. (Photo credit: Aarefa Johari).

“We would have never dared to do this without Navsarjan’s help,” said Baluben Makwana, who has now been accused by the upper caste groups of stealing from their land. The case is currently being heard in a lower court, with one of Navsarjan’s many lawyers representing her.

“We are not sure what will happen to the ongoing cases being fought by Navsarjan’s lawyers,” said Preeti Vaghela. “If they don’t get their salaries, perhaps they could be paid as consultants to continue their work.”
Navsarjan’s Martin Macwan, too, doesn’t have a ready solution to the problem.

“Our trust has been hearing hundreds of cases of caste-based atrocities over the years and increasingly, a good 30% of these are cases filed by non-Dalits,” said Macwan. “If we find merit in their cases, and if they are willing to share water with Dalits, then we take on their cases too. So the government’s accusation that we are disrupting harmony between castes is baseless.”
 

‘Now our movement will slow down’

Meanwhile, in Surendranagar, Natubhai Parmar and his Navsarjan colleague Shaileshbhai Makwana are worried about their ongoing project to secure minimum wages for manual scavengers employed via contract by the municipal body.
The movement began in 2014, when Baldevbhai Rathod and his wife Gauriben Rathod rallied nearly 400 other municipal sanitation workers in Surendranagar to demand a full wage of Rs 248 per day instead of the Rs 162 they were being given. They also wanted the protective gloves, masks, shoes and brooms that had been promised to them without which they were effectively manual scavengers forced to clean open defecation spots in the city with their bare hands.
“We needed organised support to take our movement forward,” said Gauriben Rathod, who has now quit sanitation work but is still working to rally other labourers. “So we went to Navsarjan, which had already been doing a lot to help our Valmiki caste.”

Gauriben Rathod displays images of the kind of manual scavenging that many Valmikis are forced to do. (Photo credit: Aarefa Johari).

The Valmikis are considered the lowest caste even among Dalits because they have traditionally been forced to do sanitation and scavenging work. When Navsarjan took up the cause of Valmikis in Surendranagar city, Natubhai Parmar and Shaileshbhai Makwana added another demand to the workers’ list: end manual scavenging and build public toilets to end open defecation.

“In 2014, we took out large rallies for 13 days and led a media campaign to highlight the horrors of manual scavenging,” said Natubhai Parmar, emphasising that the daily cost for each rally during the 13 days – including camps, loudspeakers and posters – was Rs 35,000. “That is when the government finally built pay-and-use toilets.”

Said Shaileshbhai Makwana: “Our fight for minimum wages and protective gear has continued, but if Navsarjan is no longer our full-time job, the movement will inevitably slow down. We will be spending added time looking for other work, raising funds for rallies and then taking out the rallies.”
 

‘Where do we go from here?’

Across the board, Navsarjan’s employees are determined that they do not want their work to be stalled in any way, even as they struggle for solutions to the funding problem.

“A movement is not driven by just one organisation, so by blocking foreign money they can stop neither the organisation nor the movement,” said Manjula Pradeep who served as the executive director of Navsarjan for 12 years before stepping down in the last week of December. “A lot of people in the Non-Governmental Organisation have sacrificed everything for this work, but the question is: where do we go from here?”

Manjula Pradeep, the outgoing executive director of Navsarjan. (Photo credit: Aarefa Johari).

According to Natubhai Parmar, one solution is to simply make more of an effort to collect funding from Indian donors.

“Our staff is very experienced and has built relationships with community members who we have helped,” he said. “So we can ask them to support us now that we are in need.”

In the past week, says Macwan, small donations from community members have started to trickle in.

But is it easy for Dalit rights organisations to receive funding in India?

According to Manjula Pradeep, Navsarjan’s own efforts in the past have yielded limited results.

“In India, barely a handful of Dalit and Adivasi rights groups get any kind of funding at all – foreign or Indian,” said Ashok Bharti, founder of the National Confederation of Dalit Organisations, a public platform that lobbies the government and donor agencies to support Dalit organisations in the country. “Normally corporate funders and even foreign agencies don’t like to support organisations that take on the government.”

According to Bharti, at least two major hindrances crop up for a Dalit rights organisation applying for foreign or corporate funding.

“These applications are primarily based on the knowledge of fluent English, and Dalit organisations cannot afford the professionals needed to help them with that,” he said. “Besides, most donor organisations are headed by upper-caste, upper-class elites, so I have seen their environment to be often hostile towards Dalits or other subaltern groups.”

Bharti believes that 99% of the Dalit movement is funded through meagre donations by the community itself. “Navsarjan is a rare exception, so it is shocking that its FCRA license has been cancelled.”

Courtesy: Scroll.in

As a sanitation worker employed on contract to clean drains in Mumbai, Shivaji Bhadekar is entitled to a monthly minimum wage of Rs 14,000. But he has never been paid more than Rs 7,000 a month for the past two years, despite attending numerous union rallies to demand minimum wages for safai karamcharis (sanitation workers).

But on Friday afternoon, at a protest rally of more than 2,000 sweepers, garbage collectors, sewer cleaners and dumping ground workers at Mumbai’s Azad Maidan, Bhadekar felt more upbeat and hopeful than ever. “Seeing the atmosphere this time, I am 100% confident that our demands will finally be met,” he said.

The special atmosphere in Friday’s rally was largely due to the presence of young leaders Kanhaiya Kumar and Jignesh Mevani as chief guests at the union rally. Kumar, former president of Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union, shot to national fame last year after the Delhi police briefly arrested him for alleged anti-national sloganeering. Mevani, meanwhile, has emerged as one of the main leaders of the Dalit agitation in Gujarat after four Dalit leather tanners were assaulted by cow protection vigilantes in July 2016.

More than 2,000 safai karamcharis from across Mumbai and parts of Maharashtra attended the rally on Friday. Photo: Aarefa Johari

The two leaders attended the rally to give a boost to a long-standing protest by Maharashtra’s safai karamcharis, who have not been paid minimum wages for the past 22 months. Protesters also demanded an end to the contract labour system in sanitation work.

“We have been crying ourselves hoarse about these demands in so many protests and rallies, but our voices are never usually heard,” said Vijay Dalvi, a union leader speaking at the rally. “This time, with Kanhaiya Kumar and Jignesh Mevani here, even the media has come to cover us.”
 

Seeking justice

According to the Kachra Vahtuk Shramik Sangh, which organised Friday’s rally, there are at least 6,500 sanitation workers in Mumbai, and more than 35,000 across Maharashtra. The vast majority of these workers are not directly employed by municipal bodies, but hired as temporary contract labour by private companies.

Contractors routinely deny safai karamcharis their most basic rights, including timely minimum wages, paid leave, medical expenses, protective masks, gloves, boots and other gear. Since the Industrial Disputes Act of 1947 allows all contract workers the right to demand permanent jobs after 240 days of service, contractors are also known to employ devious tricks – like offering only 210-day contracts – to circumvent the law.

In February 2015, the Maharashtra government announced that municipal workers would get Rs 14,000 as monthly minimum wages. However, most contract workers who keep municipal areas clean have been paid a mere Rs 7,000 or Rs 9,000 a month for the past 22 months. “The arrears of the minimum wages of the last 22 months in Mumbai are Rs 110,000 per worker,” said Milind Ranade, a leader of the Kachra Vahtuk Shramik Sangh. Meanwhile, the Thane and Nashik Municipal Corporations owe workers Rs 121,000 each as arrears, the Satara civic body owes Rs 198,000 and the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation owes workers Rs 83,600.

If municipal bodies are also made to pay workers the fine levied for not paying minimum wages, every worker in Mumbai would be entitled to arrears worth Rs 11 lakh for the past 22 years.
 

Speeches by the stars

At the rally, Kanhaiya Kumar was introduced to the protesters as the leader for whom Mumbai’s safai karamcharis had collected Rs 10,000 last year, so that he could pay the fine imposed on him by JNU after he was released from jail. Kumar led the crowds in chanting his popular “Azadi” slogans, and began his speech with some Marathi.

Kanhaiya Kumar and Jignesh Mevani were media magnets at the rally.

“You are all aware that the contractors who employ you are the ones pocketing your minimum wages,” said Kumar. “But you have the power not only to clean the garbage of this city, but also the garbage in the minds of the politicians who ask for your votes.”

Mevani, who is leading a similar agitation of sanitation workers in Gujarat, used his speech to tear into the Bharatiya Janata Party government’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. “When Swachh Bharat was launched, the prime minister and big Bollywood stars posed for photos in which they pretended to sweep roads,” said Mevani, who went on to ask workers to stay firm in their demand for minimum wages, even if they had to strike work. “Don’t worry about garbage accumulating on the roads, because if that happens, all those Bollywood stars will be inspired by Swachh Bharat and clean it themselves.”

Posters mocking the central government's Swachh Bharat Abhiyan at the rally.
 

Equal pay for equal work

Besides demanding minimum wages and arrears, sanitation workers at the rally also demanded an implementation of the October 2016 Supreme Court judgement allowing temporary contract workers to receive equal pay for equal work. This would mean that contracted safai karamcharis would be entitled to the same monthly wage of Rs 24,000 as their counterparts employed by Mumbai’s municipal corporation.

More than just equal pay as temporary workers, however, the workers’ union demanded an end to the contract labour system altogether, and permanent jobs for safai karamcharis directly with municipal bodies.

“The contractors don’t treat us as humans, and offer no support at all in cases of accidents, which happen quite frequently when we work in the gutters,” said Sachin Goru, a drainage worker in central Mumbai who suffered a rib fracture when he accidentally fell inside a gutter while on the job two years ago. Because the injury has not healed fully, Goru can now only work short half shifts. “The contractor has now reduced my wages by half, but till today, I haven’t received any money for my many medical expenses.”

Drainage workers like Shivaji Bhadekar and Sachin Goru wore black bands over their mouths to protest their silenced voices.

Mangesh Kamble, another drainage worker, claimed that many contractors do not even keep official records or time logs of sanitation workers’ hours. “This allows contractors to claim in labour courts that we were not working with them at all, or that we were employed as labour in their private shops, not for sanitation work,” said Kamble. “For a while, my contractor has also not been giving payment slips for the salary, and it turned out that the PF [Provident Fund] documents they gave us were fraudulent.”

Through the rally, the workers’ union hoped to get a meeting directly with Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, to put forth their demands. However, the union has now been granted a meeting with the state’s chief secretary on January 10.

Courtesy: Scroll.in

Image credit:  Aarefa Johari

Early in November, just before demonetisation kicked in, Ramnikbhai Patel harvested nearly 600 kilos of cotton from his 10-acre farm in Lakhtar, in Gujarat’s Surendranagar district. By the time he sold his raw cotton in the market, the central government had demonetised currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000, and people everywhere were struggling to withdraw cash from banks. For the first time in his life, Patel was paid for his harvest by cheque instead of in cash.

Like many other farmers, he now faced the monumental dilemma of buying seeds and fertilisers for the rabi crop sowing season. Rural banks were paying out barely Rs 8,000 a week to account holders, but Patel knew that even the official withdrawal allowance of Rs 24,000 a week would not really suffice for most farmers.

To ease the farmers’ rabi woes, the central government had ordered state-run seed shops to accept old Rs 500 notes up till December 15. But in many parts of Surendranagar district, Patel found that these public shops did not have sufficient seed stock. Farmers were forced to approach private seed stores, where cashless payments were rarely an option.

Fertilisers were a problem too, even though Patel was willing to pay for them by cheque. “For years, the government has been pushing us to use desi [organic] fertilisers instead of chemical ones,” he said. “But today the farmers selling gobar-based fertilisers are not accepting cheques, because they need cash to buy fodder. I understand their problem, because if the cattle don’t eat well, the quality and quantity of milk and dung will suffer. How can the government expect everyone to survive on ‘cashless’?”
 

A government out of touch with reality?

In his November 8 address to the nation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed that the main motive behind demonetisation was to flush out black money from the economy. Since then, the government’s position has swung repeatedly, from the black money argument to the theory that scrapping 86% of India’s currency overnight would push citizens towards an ideal “cashless” economy and use digital instruments of payment.

Demonetisation has evidently pushed thousands of Indians to open bank accounts for the first time, and e-wallet companies like PayTM have seen an unprecedented boom in business over the past two months. The central government is now promoting the BHIM app – a mobile phone-based payment system that stands for Bharat Interface for Money – as the new cashless champion of the Indian masses.

But to the average farmer in regions like Surendranagar, the very idea of living cashless is an absurdity, a laughable proposition by a government that they believe has lost touch with the ground realities of rural India.

In their growing criticism of the government’s cashless dream, farmers from rural Gujarat are now also expressing a marked disillusionment with Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party. With the state’s Assembly election coming up in October, this disillusionment could put a serious dent in the BJP’s fortunes on Modi’s home turf.
 

‘Don’t think I can vote for this party again’

Jagdishbhai Ramani, for instance, used to be a staunch BJP voter before demonetisation, but has lost all enthusiasm for the party in the past two months. “Initially I kept faith in Modi because he promised that our inconveniences were only a matter of 50 days, but now it doesn’t look like our cash shortage is going to go away any time soon,” said Ramani, a farmer with 13 acres of farmland in Surendranagar’s Gomta village. “This time, nothing has turned out the way Modi claimed, so I don’t think I can vote for this party again.”

Jagdishbhai Ramani is no longer a staunch BJP supporter. Photo: Aarefa Johari

In mid-November, Ramani earned a cheque of Rs 70,000 for his 700-kilo cotton harvest. But with his bank strapped for cash, he has been able to withdraw just a fraction of the income and savings lying in his account.

“I am in a desperate situation not just because it is so difficult to buy seeds and fertilisers, but because I am not being able to pay my labourers their daily wages,” said Ramani, who has missed several days of work to make bank visits, but is still unable to make regular payments of Rs 100-Rs 150 a day to his dozen farm labourers. “These are workers so illiterate, they don’t even know what a bank account is. How can I pay them in anything but cash?”

Large numbers of farmers, however, are only marginally better off than the labourers they employ. Hundreds of dairy farmers in Surendranagar, for instance, have not been paid in 50 days because they are yet to open their first bank accounts.
“Since demonetisation kicked in, so many small farmers have come to me from far flung villages in the district, asking for help with opening bank accounts,” said Kantibhai Tamaliya, a Congress member of Surendranagar’s district panchayat. “Too much of our population is inexperienced and illiterate, especially with respect to banking. But the government doesn’t like to admit it, now that it has made demonetisation all about going cashless.”

Kantibhai Tamaliya, a Congress member of the district panchayat.

Criticism within the BJP?

While the central government may not acknowledge the flaws in the implementation of demonetisation and its plans for a more cashless economy, party workers in the lower ranks of the BJP in Gujarat have been expressing murmured dissent, says farmer’s rights activist Sagar Rabari.

From December 14 to January 2, Rabari and other members of the non-profit Gujarat Khedut Samaj undertook a 460-km foot march through the state’s Saurashtra region, to understand the problems that farmers have been facing for the past few years. “During my yatra, I constantly met villagers who are very upset with the way demonetisation has played out,” said Rabari. “Farm labourers have become unemployed in large numbers, farmers feel like they have been reduced to beggars and several local BJP leaders I met are now extremely critical of their own government.”

In Olak village of Surendranagar’s Lakhtar block, farmer Maheshbhai Majethia claims BJP workers are unhappy because of the way they themselves have suffered through demonetisation. “All the BJP workers in my village are against note-bandi, but obviously they are too scared to say anything openly,” said Majethia. “Instead they try to spread rumours about how farmers will get money from the government once all the black money is collected.”

Dhanraj Kela, a former BJP legislator from Surendranagar, cited the “suffering of the rich” as one of the main reasons why farmers and farm labourers are bearing with the woes of demonetisation despite being severely hit by the lack of circulating cash.

“But if you think about it, only 30% of Indians are in any position to know how to use cashless modes of finance,” said Kela. Another 20% of the population, he claims, are just about starting to use mobile phones now. But the rest – particularly the masses of daily wage labourers in rural India – are still predominantly uneducated.

“These are people who barely know what a bank is,” said Kela. “I have helped many farmers and labourers open accounts recently, but when they enter a bank, they ask me, ‘Saheb, what do we have to do with any of this?’”

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On December 28, the head office of the Surendranagar District Cooperative Bank was crowded with farmers, almost all of them from the village of Timba. Nearly 50 days after demonetisation was announced, the farmers were on their third trip to the bank in Gujarat’s Surendranagar district to try to open new accounts. They had travelled the 30 km from Timba to Surendranagar town in a group, so that they could help each other with the seemingly overwhelming process of filling out the bank forms correctly.

“I haven’t been paid for any of the milk I sold in the past 50 days,” said Govindbhai Rabari, a 70-year-old dairy farmer from Timba who looked utterly lost in the corridors of the bank. “The doodh mandali mantri [dairy cooperative secretary] can only pay by cheque, and we don’t know how much longer cash will take to come back, so I am finally opening this bank account.”

Dairy farmer Govindbhai Rabari is completely new to the banking system. Photo: Aarefa Johari

In the villages of Gujarat, the heart of India’s milk revolution, dairy farmers like Rabari have been among those most severely hit by the central government’s sudden decision to demonetise Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes on November 9. With local banks acutely strapped for cash and their dues stuck in the bank accounts of dairy cooperatives, hundreds of dairy farmers have spent the past seven weeks without any pay.

Now, even as they desperately open new bank accounts to avail of their payments by cheque, Rabari and his fellow villagers are waiting for the “storm” of note-bandi to pass. “Once this whole thing is over, why would we need to use these bank accounts?” said Rabari. “It is much more practical to get our payments in cash.”
 

The base of the milk supply pyramid

Gujarat’s dairy cooperatives, which source milk from individual dairy farmers in villages, have been “cashless” at the state, district and block levels for a long time. Large milk federations like Amul buy milk every day from district-level cooperatives, who buy their milk from block- or taluka-level cooperatives called sanghs, which in turn purchase milk from village mandalis.

Typically, business is done by cheque. But these cashless transactions are not the norm at the base of the pyramid, at the level of the individual dairy farmer who has no time for bank visits between grazing his cattle, milking them and delivering milk twice a day to village dairy mandalis.

On December 24, the central government noted the distress of dairy farmers across the India’s 1.70 lakh dairy cooperative societies. It directed major milk production agencies like Amul, Mother Dairy and the National Dairy Development Board to ensure that all dairy farmers opened bank accounts by December 30, so that cashless payments could be made to them for the milk they have been supplying.

However, neither farmers nor dairy cooperative owners believe the bank accounts will make much difference.
 

Can cashless work?

“Dairy farmers need cash to buy essentials for their cattle and their homes, and I usually pay them every 10 days for all the milk they have delivered,” said Tejabhai Tamaliya, the secretary of a milk cooperative in Surendranagar’s Diksar village. Tamaliya’s cooperative has 150 members, whom he needs to pay at the current rate of Rs 5.9 per kilo fat of milk – the amount of milk that would yield 1 kilo of fat. Since most of them haven’t been paid in 50 days, Tamaliya now owes his members a total of nearly Rs 15 lakh.

“I have the money in my account, but a withdrawal limit of just Rs 24,000 a week is too little – and it’s not like the cooperative bank is able to give us even that much cash each week,” said Tamaliya, who has made numerous trips to the Surendranagar District Cooperative Bank head office since November 10 to introduce mandali members to the banking system.

“From what I have seen, each village has barely five or six residents who are literate enough to understand banking, cheques, cards and online payments,” he said. “And travelling 25 km to a bank takes up too much time and money, so villagers are finding it very difficult to switch to cheques.”

Tejabhai Tamaliya, a dairy cooperative secretary, at the Surendranagar District Cooperative Bank.
 

Restricting cooperative banks

For milk mandali owners, the delay in payments to dairy farmers is not the only problem triggered by demonetisation. Depositing and exchanging their own old notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 has been a challenge, because of the central government’s restrictions on district central cooperative banks.

These banks, recognised by the Reserve Bank of India, have been set up in every Indian district primarily to serve the banking needs of agro-based cooperatives in rural areas. By default, milk cooperative societies rely on accounts in district cooperative banks for their financial transactions. In many talukas, these cooperative banks are the only locally available banking options for rural citizens.

On November 15, barely a week after demonetisation was announced, the central government banned all district cooperative banks from exchanging or depositing demonetised currency notes. The decision was driven by a fear that accounts in these banks could be misused to convert black money to white, but for the first few weeks after demonetisation, it proved crippling for members of agriculture and dairy cooperatives.

Unable to deposit old money into their own accounts, farmers and dairy owners struggled with a severe cash shortage. “To make matters worse, for a week in November, district cooperative banks were not even supplied with new notes to distribute amongst customers,” said Sagar Rabari, secretary of the Gujarat Khedut Samaj, a state-wide farmer’s association.

District cooperative banks in Gujarat have been fighting back against the government’s move. Dilip Sanghani – a Bharatiya Janata Party leader from Gujarat’s Saurashtra region and the chairman of the National Federation of State Cooperative Banks – has been particularly vocal about the adverse impact of this ban on farmers.

The Bhavnagar District Cooperative Bank has also sued the central government and the Reserve Bank of India in the Gujarat High Court, seeking an explanation on the validity of restricting note exchange and deposits at Gujarat’s 18 district cooperative banks. As of now, even after the government’s 50-day deadline for ending demonetisation woes passed by on December 30, the court case has not moved far.

Meanwhile, at the head office of the Surendranagar District Cooperative Bank, manager SM Mori is tight-lipped about the troubles of his many account holders. “Since we don’t have government permission to touch their old notes, they must have opened accounts in other banks,” he said, before turning the conversation to the helpless “cash-bandi” his bank is facing.

“Ideally we would need at least Rs 10 crore every 10 days if we wanted to distribute Rs 24,000 per week to our account holders,” said Mori. “But what we get from the Reserve Bank is just Rs 3.5 crore every 10 days. We try to distribute it equally in all our 14 smaller branches in the district, but obviously, it is not enough.”

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