Ambedkar's Birthday and Khemraj's Place

Wednesday: Ambedkar’s Birthday!

Prayas celebrated Ambedkar’s birthday, which is a national holiday in India. As mentioned before, Ambedkar was an untouchable who got educated and became the champion of untouchable and lower-caste rights in India. He also wrote the Indian constitution, converted to Buddhism, and hated Gandhi. You can read his Wikipedia page for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._R._Ambedkar

We went to the Chittorgarh’s Ambedkar statute to put garlands over its head. There were already a lot on the statue when we arrived. Here is a picture of everyone in front of the statue:

And here is a picture of some people putting garlands over the statue.

I spent the rest of the day helping Dr. Narendra put together invites for a May 4^th panel on Patterns of Health Spending, Access to Medicines, and Free Treatment in India. This event will take place in Delhi, and will involve members of India’s parliament. Unfortunately, I will be in Karnataka by then.

At night, Dr. Narendra invited a bunch of old professor-types and otherwise important people over to talk about Ambedkar’s significance. As usual, I missed the details, but generally they taked about Ambedkar being awesome, and a little bit about the current Maoist Naxalite movement in India, which has been a subject of intense debate over the past week. Dr. Narendra also brought up Subaltern Studies and Ranajit Guha, which made me happy. Subaltern Studies is an Indian history movement that focuses on lower class/caste groups that generally have had no voice in colonial, nationalist, or Marxist histories of India. I took a class with one of the founders of the movement at Columbia, and it was one of my favorite classes ever. Apparently Dr. Narendra has read all the compiled volumes of Subaltern Studies, which is intense. Also, one of the historians of the movement, David Hardiman, actually stayed at Prayas for a couple of months with his girlfriend at some point. I think we actually read one of his articles in Gandhi’s India or Subaltern Studies.

Thursday: Khemraj’s Community Organizing

One of the older members of Prayas, Khemraj, was in the office on Tuesday, and invited me to his place on Thursday for a community meeting. He lives near a village called Amarpura, nexted to a small town called Badesar, which is about 30 km from Chittorgarh. I took a series of cramped strange vehicles to his place, and managed to only pay 15 rupees (~35 cents) total.

Khemraj now runs a sister NGO called Pratirodh. I’m not entirely clear on the goals of his organization, but I know it’s not primarily public health based. I think it’s more of a rights-based approach to helping poor people. Khemraj is basically an Obama-style community organizer, who spends his mornings and evenings walking around in villages and chatting with people. People discuss their problems with him, and he either connects them with law or health services that can address their problems, or organizes an agitation if multiple people are facing the same issue. He and his wife also run a school for poor girls from villages in the area. The girls are adorable, and apparently study really hard late into the night. Here are some pictures of the outside and the inside of the school:

(The portraits are of Bhagat Singh and Ambedkar, two nationalist rivals of Gandhi. Bhagat Singh was a young nationalist who supported using violence against the British. He was caught and schedule to be hanged. A lot of people think Gandhi had the power to prevent his death, but chose not to. Bhagat Singh is Khemraj’s nationalist hero of choice.)

Khemraj has 9 employees, and I’m not fully sure what they do, other than generally help him with these tasks. For the past few weeks he has been asking people to come to this community meeting. He was hoping for about 100 people or so, because he wanted to march in Badesar to protest some issues surrounding BPL (Below-Poverty-Line) status benefits. Unfortunately only about 30-40 showed up, so we stayed at his place and had a meeting there.

At the beginning, everyone went around the room and said why they had come. Here are some of the issues people were facing:

-Several women were below the poverty line, and even had a card that certified their BPL status, but still were not getting benefits that the government specifies for BPL people, such as subsidized wheat, kerosene, and other things. They were all from the same area, and it seemed to relate to one center of the PDS, or Public Distribution System, where the guy was generally being a jerk. Khemraj ended up writing a petition, which one of the literate people there helped everyone sign, and the women brought it to the jerk’s superior in Badesar.

-Another woman worked on a NREGA (National Rural Empoyment Guarantee Act) project, but was receiving below minimum wages. Her husband is ill and too weak to work, and she has children.

-Another woman had three children, and a mentally ill husband who vanished 11 years ago.

-One man had a small plot of land to his name, but for some reason I couldn’t understand, he could not grow anything on it. He is currently an agricultural laborer.

-One 10^th grade boy was a brilliant student, and was interested in science and wanted to become a doctor. His father was a bonded laborer, however, and he didn’t have much food at home and the boy generally was finding it difficult to focus on school. Khemraj asked me and Scott (another American who came to the meeting), if we could organize some sort of donation campaign in America for him and a few other students like him.

- A huge Maoist attack happened last week in the state of Chattisgarh. One man wanted to know more about it. Surprisingly, he was the only person in the entire room, outside of Khemraj and Pratirodh people, who had even heard that it had happened, even though it has been headline news every day.

Another part of the meeting consisted of Khemraj’s wife talking to parents of the girls in their school about the importance of studying and nutrition. Scott and I were used as examples of what good nutrition can do. I became sheepish about my belly. At some point we were asked about the literacy rate in America, and about children in school. One of the parents asked “Don’t they work?” They were shocked when we told them child labor was illegal.

After the meeting, I chatted with Khemraj. He is a self-proclaimed Marxist, and every once in a while slips “the revolution” into his sentences. I tried to ask about Marxism in the context of caste instead of class, and about whether Marxism can apply when the lower class consists mostly of super-poor, largely unproductive rural villagers instead of an industrialized productive labor force. The language barrier finally kicked in though. He speaks decent English, but I think not enough for this kind of a conversation. Which was sad, because I was pretty curious.

In the evening we went on Khemraj’s electric scooter to a village called Bhil Khera, one of the villages of the Bhil tribe. The journey there was comical, because his scooter was low on power, and we drove at a moderate jogging pace. Bhil Khera is pretty much what you would imagine an Indian village to be, with barefoot people, huts, chickens, and other livestock. It has a population of about 175. I didn't take pictures because it felt too weird. But here are some of the interactions we had at the village:

- One man, who was bicycling by, stopped to say hi (Everyone in the area knows and loves Khemraj, which made it easy for me to find his place in the morning). He had a pretty cool headdress on. When he learned I was from America, he said something like “Your country is very good. Our country has lots of problems. Right now our worst problem is water.” Apparently the rains have been very low for the past two years, but they are getting some water through government distribution.

-We sat outside the hut of another man, who lamented the general behavior and manners of the community. He wants to change them, but doesn’t know how. He said all other communities are improving, while he feels like his is only getting worse. He himself was decently well off, as he had sixteen sheep and one goat. He had steel and brass dishware, which Khemraj pointed out as a sign of his relative wealth. Through Khemraj’s translation, I asked about the literacy rate. Apparently in the entire village, there are three boys who can read and write. Outside of the two girls that attend Khemraj’s school, the female literacy rate is 0%. The guy said that his daughter is pregnant and due for delivery any day now, and Khemraj gave him the number of a free ambulance service run out of Chittorgarh. He also called a guy from the ambulance service to tell him about the upcoming delivery. The man gave me chai made with his sheep’s milk, which according to Khemraj has about 8-9% fat, whereas cow’s milk has 3.6%. I have no idea how he knows that.

-We sat with another family, whose somewhat distant relative passed away 15 days ago. They decided to throw a massive feast in his honor, which cost them 7000 to 8000 rupees. They had to borrow the money, and the money lender has now mortgaged their land. The three young men in the family are now bonded laborers as a result. Khemraj told them how stupid an action that was, and said something along the lines of “if you do things like this, you will drag your entire community down.” But he also will try to help. Apparently there is a law that says a moneylender cannot mortgage the law of Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes (categories for certain groups of poor people in India). But the owner of the land has to know about the law and make the complaint to the court themselves. There’s also apparently a law that says no one can mortgage someone else’s land for more than 5 years, but apparently this is never enforced.

-We stopped at the hut of a girl, who used to attend Khemraj's. She got into a lot of quarrels, was eventually socially boycotted by the other girls, and left.

- We stopped at the head-of-village's hut, and Khemraj asked him why had the family thrown the death feast. The village-head said he didn’t support the decision, but I guess he did let it happen. So Khemraj was still pretty unhappy.

One thing I was kind of surprised about was the government either was addressing or could address some of their problems. For instance, the government was distributing water due to the drought, a free ambulance could come to take the pregnant woman to the hospital, and there was a law protecting against moneylenders mortgaging land. These maybe pale in comparison to what a lot of people think the government could be doing, but it was more than I expected.

On the slow scooter ride back home, Khemraj told me he and his family have been beaten several times by landlords/moneylenders/other people who unhappy with his activities. Two years ago they were beaten pretty bad.

I slept Thursday night at Khemraj’s place, and ate his papayas (he has 16 papaya trees!). I returned to Chittorgarh in the morning. Here is a picture with Khemraj and his wife: