|
By Anil Saari Arora Thousands of manual scavengers headload human excrement and clean dry latrines across the state of Gujarat, even though the practice has been banned. Martin Macwan, a Dalit activist and lawyer who set up the Navsarjan Trust, has been working against this dehumanising practice in 2,000 villages. His work against the hidden apartheid against Dalits has won him the Kennedy Human Rights Award for 2000 and the 2001 International Activist Award.
 In February 1996 a group of safai karamcharis at Ranpur town, Dhandhuka taluka, Gujarat, informed the panchayat that they would no longer clean and handle human excreta.
 For years they had considered such a bold step inconceivable. They had been afraid of the consequences. Their wages would be stopped.
This time the Navsarjan Trust was behind them. They knew that the Trust would file a court case for them. They knew the Trust would buy rice, wheat and oil for them, so that no one starved in the course of the agitation. The Navsarjan Trust (NST) was set up in 1989 in Ahmedabad by a small group of dalits led by Martin Macwan, a young lawyer who started life as a child labourer himself. The Trust had stumbled upon the safai karamcharis of Ranpur in the course of routine community organisation work. Macwan had been appalled when the NST team reported that headloading human excrement was still prevalent in Ranpur. What shocked him even more, as he told Mari Marcel Thekaekara who has chronicled this struggle in her book entitled Endless Filth, was that "the women among the Bhangis there were merely agitating for the Ranpur gram panchayat authorities to replace their broken brooms. They hadn't even considered the possibility of protesting against scavenging! The panchayat, whose revenue at that time from octroi alone was Rs 13,00,000 per year, had replied that they did not have a budget to buy new brooms. A broom cost Rs 1.50, even less if you bought them in bulk!" . Ranpur's safai karamcharis did not know that headloading human waste and cleaning dry latrines had been banned in 1993 by the Government of India, through the Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act. But this was a Central Government Act and had not then been adopted by Gujarat state. Indeed, dry latrines and headloading did not exist in isolation at Ranpur. Some 8,00,000 safai karamcharis were working as manual scavengers across the state. Macwan and the NST filed a writ petition demanding the abolition of the system. But before they served the legal notice, NST sent a team to document photographic and video evidence of the dry latrines and headloading. The state government lawyer denied the existence of headloading (mathe malu in Gujarati), and then accused the NST of paying women to pose for the photographs. At Macwan's prompting, NST's lawyer Shilpa Shah said in reply: "My Lord, Navsarjan Trust will personally offer a gift of one lakh rupees to any person in this court who is willing to pose for a photograph with a basket of human excrement on his head." There was a stunned silence in the courtroom. Macwan had made his point! The Ranpur writ petition spurred Macwan and the Navsarjan workers to launch a public campaign for the abolition of manual scavenging in Gujarat. This campaign was to influence the villagers at Ranpur as well as prominent citizens of the state, educationists, social workers, NGOs and the press. Embarrassing the state government at every turn. On February 25, 1997, the state government finally capitulated. It announced an amount of Rs 30 crore to rehabilitate the Bhangi community and on March 3, 1997 the central government's Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act was formally adopted by the state. At 41, Martin Macwan is a Dalit activist who is angry, bitter and sad. But he is wise enough not to forget his mother's advice. Regina, now 66 and a former tobacco worker, taught Macwan the most important lesson of his life: "Never allow bitterness to overcome you. That will take you nowhere." That probably explains, as Anosh Malekar wrote in The Week (November 5, 2000) the "ever-smiling demeanour of the man", who with over 187 fellow workers has given Navsarjan a presence in 2,000 Gujarat villages. And who has been recognised as "a rare voice for tolerance, non-violence and effectiveness" by the Robert F Kennedy Center for Human Rights, which selected him for the Kennedy Human Rights Award for 2000. The RFK Center for Human Rights has pledged to work closely with Macwan to ensure that caste-based discrimination is addressed in India, and at the United Nation's World Conference Against Racism. In April 2001, Macwan also received the 2001 International Activist Award from the Gleitsman Foundation, California, recognising him as a leader of the effort to demolish the tradition of hidden apartheid against India's Dalit population. As the Ranpur safai karamchari movement elucidated, the effective Macwan-Navsarjan strategy comprises in-depth research into the laws and legislative acts pertaining to the Dalit condition and then brings these to bear through sustained intelligence and ingenuity. Martin Macwan began life as a child farmhand, accompanying his mother and grandmother into the fields. But he worked his way through school, teaching at a night school even before he went to college himself. A loan scholarship enabled him to graduate in psychology from St Xavier's College, Ahmedabad. Thereafter he took a degree in law and in 1983 joined the Behavioural Science Centre, St Xavier's Society, where he worked among the tribal children of south Gujarat and the Pakistani refugees in Banaskantha district. But Martin and a few of his friends wanted to go beyond social service, to work towards lasting change, and soon they set themselves up as an activist group in the Golana village area, to work for Dalit rights. Here Macwan first experienced the cruelty of caste discrimination. "It made me realise what caste is and what happens when you challenge it!". On January 25, 1986 Macwan was to lose four friends in an attack carried out by feudal Durbar landlords, who resented the Dalit movement in Golana. Macwan escaped death only because he returned home sick earlier in the day. He rushed back from Nandiad town 40 kms away, to find that four friends had been shot dead, 18 had been wounded and several villages had been set on fire. As he held on to a dead friend's body, he wept inconsolably. "He died and I escaped. I swore with his corpse in my arms: Your death will not be in vain." Three years later, Martin Macwan started the Navsarjan Trust in Ahmedabad to mobilise and empower the Dalits. In the 12 years since, Navsarjan ('New Creation') has grown into one of the most effective Dalit advocacy groups in India. Navsarjan's success is in large part due to Macwan's deep understanding of the problems of the Dalits, and their aspirations. "Once I was sitting in a Bhangi temple," he says. "It was evening and the kids slowly started coming up to me. I asked one child to bring his book to me and read his favourite passage. He began. It was called 'Ek Duglu' or 'One Step'. It went something like, 'Young man, take one step at a time. Cross mountains …..' I asked another child. The answer was the same 'Ek Duglu'. I began asking the question in different places and got the same answer. I thought: in spite of the hurt, the beatings, the humiliation and abuse, something has stuck in these kids' minds, caught their imagination." Macwan's ability to reach out to like-minded people across the political spectrum and the widespread admiration for his personal leadership qualities helped him launch the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights in December 1996. The National Campaign on DHR presently links grassroots organisations in 14 states working for the abolition of untouchability through legislation. Besides being the convenor of the National Campaign on DHR, Macwan is also part of the International Dalit Human Rights Network and has toured the nation to lobby for the inclusion of caste-based discrimination on the agenda of the forthcoming UN World Conference against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. Countering the official Indian point of view that caste is a domestic issue, Macwan told Barbara Crosette of The New York Times last November: "We say that India supported the US civil rights movement in the 1960s and also the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. In this era of the globalisation of markets and of human rights, no country can claim that caste is a domestic matter. It's a universal concern." For Martin Macwan, the slur of untouchability is India's "hidden apartheid", a discrimination practiced against some 16 crore Dalits, one-sixth of the country's population. Nor is Martin Macwan facing the simplest of black-and white odds. As Senator Edward Kennedy remarked at the presentation of the 2000 Robert F Kennedy Human Rights Award to Macwan in New York on November 21, 2000: "For Martin and the Dalit, the way ahead is not easy, predictable or certain. He and his colleagues regularly receive credible death threats. Those who support the status quo deeply resent his work. Radical groups supporting Dalit rights ridicule his non-violent approach. Others envy his success or deplore his work for scavengers. To his credit, Martin stands as a lighthouse between a raging sea and a rocky shore, providing enlightened, but too often unappreciated leadership ….. In an increasingly polarised environment in India today, Martin Macwan - like Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi - is an eloquent voice for tolerance, non-violence and peaceful change. When others in India are losing patience with non-violence, it is all the more important to acknowledge and support Martin's inspiring leadership." (Anil Saari Arora is a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Pune) InfoChange News & Features
|
