Peasantry and Dalit Poor on the Warpath as Punjab Prepares to Go to Polls
(January 5 marks the anniversary of the brutal and murderous assault on Bant Singh. Recent pitched struggles against usury, bonded labour and social boycott of Dalit labourers, show that Bant Singh’s battle has intensified in rural Punjab. With Assembly polls round the corner in Punjab, these struggles set the agenda for the rural poor. Lal Bahadur Singh reports from Punjab.- Ed.)
By all indications, the upcoming Punjab assembly elections are going to be a lacklustre affair, perhaps for the first time in recent history, as there is no enthusiasm among the masses for either of the two traditional rivals contending for the seat of power in Chandigarh. Chief Minister Amrinder Singh patted himself on his back during his Vikas Yatras, and if one is to believe the Congress election advertisement, then ‘God only rarely sends CMs like Captain Sahib’; but nothing can be farther from the truth. Even if one goes by the gross indices, Punjab, which used to be in the 2nd place nationally in terms of per capita income, has slipped to 5th place during Amrinder Singh`s regime. The growth rate in the state stagnated between 2-3%, which in many states in the country was above 7%, even if one leaves aside the double-digit states. Already scarce, industries in the state are either sick or fighting for survival. Instead of any real growth of industry and agriculture, malls, housing complexes, flyovers etc. are coming up in the name of development.
Apart from commonality of the class interests and the high stakes for the ruling elite, it only shows the vulnerability of the main opposition, the Akali-BJP combine, that they dare not challenge, even on the eve of elections, this anti-peasant, elitist ‘development’ model, pursued by Congress. Hence, the excessive focus on Amrinder-centric propaganda, instead of on Congress policies.
On the face of it, therefore, it appears to be an issueless election. However, on the ground, there is no dearth of real life issues, so far as the common people are concerned.
The landlord path of capitalist development in agriculture, euphemistically termed Green Revolution, lost its tempo long back and the subsequent economic and agrarian policies have landed the peasantry in a grave agrarian crisis. Today 92% of peasant families are indebted to banks or subject to usurious extortion by ‘commission agents’ (a euphemism for money-lending middlemen who lend money at exorbitant interest rates of around 50% per annum or 4-5% every month), thus facing constant threat to their land and other assets. Peasants are up in arms against the commission agents and they are refusing to pay back the fraudulently enhanced loans, part with their land or allow confiscation of their assets, thanks to the militant leadership provided by CPI(ML) and various BKUs. The Tapa Mandi movement is still fresh in public memory (see Liberation, August 2005).
An agitation is ongoing in Raipur where the commission agent, himself unable to capture the land fraudulently acquired from a poor peasant, sold it to a powerful Congress Sarpanch from the same village. The Sarpanch forcibly captured it and quite obviously the police and administration stand solidly behind the usurious Sarpanch-commission agent duo. However, the peasants too are in no mood to yield and the battle goes on despite heavy state repression. Under movemental pressure from the peasantry and certainly with an eye on the coming elections, the Amrinder government issued a notification to the effect that in future the payment for crops will be made directly to the peasants instead of via commission agents, in contrast to the earlier practice which was the main weapon in the hands of usurious agents. The political clout enjoyed by these thugs called commission agents can be gauged from the fact that despite this notification, within no time the commission agents lobby forced the Government to beat a hasty retreat, and restore the old, extremely exploitative and unjust practice of payment to the agents against the grain produced by the peasants!
If suicide rates of debt-ridden, hopeless peasants living under a cruel, insensitive political and administrative dispensation in Punjab are lower than Vidarbha, the credit goes to the militant peasant movement, led by CPI(ML) and BKUs rather than the grace of Amrinder Singh. Ironically, the Government response to this crisis, in the form of corporate and contract farming, doing away with the land ceiling laws and forcible acquisition of land in the name of SEZs, will only accelerate the process of land- alienation. Peasants are fighting pitched battles in Barnala (Land acquired for Trident group of Industries), Amritsar (Reliance), and other parts of the state. Recently, notifications have been issued for acquiring millions of acres of land around various major cities and towns in the name of planned development. All this is gathering explosive material for the next round of peasant militancy.
The plight of hapless, dalit agricultural labourers is even worse. It really sounds unbelievable that even today the medieval instrument of social boycott (perhaps the modern term, boycott, does not convey the real thing that actually happens; it is a virtual ‘seige’ of the dalit locality, resulting in many inhuman, barbaric restrictions including stopping them from going to their fields to defecate!) can be openly and frequently used against dalits, or that labourers may become bonded and hence may even lose their homes, i.e. their only belongings, to the usurious rural rich, in villages of Punjab, which was supposed to be the biggest success story of the green revolution. This speaks volumes about the great ‘modernising’ effects of the Indian brand of capitalist development in agriculture i.e. the Green Revolution.
Buta Singh is an average dalit agricultural labourer. A young man of 36 years (though he looks much older), Buta Singh initially tried to work as a free labour but soon he was forced to take a loan of Rs. 12 thousand from a rich Jat farmer. In return, he was to serve full time for the farmer on a salary of Rs. 15 thousand, annually. He was supposed to provide service round the clock. At times, he was not even able to visit his family, living in the same village, for months. However the reward for all this painstaking, inhuman labour was that after 4 years of service, he owed Rs. 35 thousand to his master. The debt increasing with every passing year, he was now in a debt-trap with no hope of ever becoming free. The rich man, paying him at half rate of the officially prescribed minimum wages and extracting usurious rates of interest (around 30-40%), could now take away whatever little belongings he had, including the small patch of land. He might even put his own lock on Buta Singh’s hut! Similarly, Daljit Kaur, a dalit woman, who took a one-time loan of a meagre RS. 2000, may have to scavenge buffalo-dung from her lender’s house for the rest of her life, without any wages! Buta Singhs and Daljit Kaurs are a rising phenomenon in rural Punjab rather than isolated aberrations.
Obviously, there was no end to the road for Buta Singhs and Daljit Kaurs except through militant struggles under CPI(ML) leadership. And the costs have certainly been very high – from social boycott to murderous assaults. Com. Bant Singh`s saga best exemplifies the horrifying plight as well as the heroic resistance of the rural proletariat in Punjab.
Recently, in Draj and Draka villages of district Barnala, the new year began with a barbaric boycott of dalit agricultural labourers, by upper caste Jat kulaks. Their only crime was that they were no more ready to live with the stinking, decaying animal carcasses. The dumping ground for these carcasses had been a little way away from the Dalit settlement, but had reached their doorsteps over the years, with the increasing population in their settlement. The Dalits, in a spirit of cooperation, even bought a patch of land which they proposed as an alternative dumping ground, but the upper castes were adamant on retaining the same old ground, - an arrogant way to humiliate the Dalits.
When on January 6, Dalits joined by CPI(ML) activists assembled at the spot in protest, the police came in support of the Jat Sikhs and arrested 92 persons and later sent 21 of them including CPI(ML) leaders Comrades Labh Singh, Kamaljeet and Iqbal Kaur to jail, under patently fabricated criminal charges. The agitation was initiated by women and out of those arrested, 9 were women. On January 11, a massive protest rally was organized at Tapa Mandi, the nearby sub-divisional centre. Succumbing to the mounting mass pressure and apprehensive that the issue might snowball into a major political controversy on the eve of elections, the Amrinder administration yielded. The DC sent the BDO to the rally with an assurance that the demand for relocating the dumping ground to some other spot would be accepted. Then the infuriated upper caste henchmen declared a social boycott of the Dalits. They declared that no farmer would be allowed to stand bail for those arrested, and the lambardar would not certify the identity of any labourer who stands bail for them. [Lambardar is a hereditary institution traditionally with the upper castes, a throwback to the colonial era when it had the task of revenue collection. Now this hereditary post, unrestrained by democratic elections, retains the task of issuing certificates relating to land etc…]. Later, when the matter was brought to the notice of NHRC and pressure was mounted on the administration to register cases against the boycotters, the boycott was withdrawn, at least formally.
In today’s changed times, when identity politics and sectarian appeals have lost much of their old shine, the ground in Punjab is actually ripe for a powerful people’s intervention on secular democratic lines. The insensitive attitude of main opposition parties notwithstanding, the broad masses, peasants, agricultural labourers, Dalits, and unemployed youth have waged relentless battles during the Amrinder regime and have faced massive state repression. What is most encouraging is the growing unity of the peasant and agricultural labour movement as well as a definite trend of polarization among left forces. CPI(ML) Liberation, Communist Party Marxist(CPM) Punjab, RSP and Forward Block have reached an electoral understanding and have appealed to other left forces to join hands.
On the train journey to Punjab, I met an elderly gentleman telling his younger co-travellers about the betrayal of four princely states of Patiala, Jind, Nabha, and Faridkot in 1857. He held this betrayal responsible for the defeat of that ‘Jang-e Azadi’ and all our subsequent miseries, most notably our economic ruin and the partition of the Punjabi Suba as well as the country. We can only hope, in this Birth Centenary Year of Bhagat Singh and the 150th anniversary year of 1857, that this growing urge for ‘unification’ and prosperity in today’s Punjab will turn it into a battlefield against imperialist globalisers and their domestic lackeys as well as all communal-sectarian forces