BOOK REVIEW

Betrayal after betrayal

by Darryl D'Monte

Words Like Freedom -- The Memoirs of an Impoverished Indian Family: 1947-97, Siddharth Dube, HarperCollins, 1998
I generally find it difficult to read with pleasure work which is not fictional; or at least, let me say that it seldom enthralls me. This book was different. As I turned page after page, I was filled with an almost icy numbness: contrary to all our assumptions, it reminded one that the condition of the poorest of the poor in this country is as bad as it always has been. The depressing but compelling chronicle of the lives of three generations of a landless Dalit family in UP took me back to  the '60s and '70s when people like us were caught up with the rhetoric of the left movement. Unlike those idealistic days, however, Dube's sober account has no ideological flourishes, no jargon about `semi-colonial, semi-feudal' relations, and the like. He is very much a child of the next generation, ideologically speaking.

Dube recounts the lives of  the patriarch, Ram Dass, from a village called Baba ka Gaon in Pratapgarh district, not far from the pampered Amethi. He delves briefly into the history of an abortive peasant rebellion at the beginning of this century in the area. The landless formed kisan sabhas and posed a challenge to the oppressive domination of the upper-caste landlords. When police opened fire on a group of unarmed  demonstrators in Rae Bareili district in 1921, the people responded with violence. Groups of peasants, often numbering 10,000, plundered markets and attacked landlords and their agents, forcing the bigger landowners to flee to their mansions in Lucknow and Allahabad.

"But the revolution failed," notes Dube. "At the moment of their greatest strength, the peasants were betrayed by Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi. On behalf of the Congress, they exhorted the peasants to abort their struggle. Because the Congress' disavowal of the revolt came immediately after the violence in January 1921, Gandhi and other Congress leaders sought to portray their decision as being impelled by Gandhi's famed allegiance to non-violence. But, in truth, the peasant-Congress alliance had effectively ruptured months earlier. The UP Congress's close links to the large landlords and Gandhi's conservatism in economic matters turned the Congress against the peasants, particularly because the peasants were becoming increasingly radical." A few weeks after the eruption of violence, Gandhi visited the area and asked the peasants to end their social boycott of the landlords and resort to passive resistance -- including lying down on the railway tracks.

As I said, this book stirred memories of heated debates in the late-'60s about whether Gandhi, a baniya at heart,  was an agent of capitalism,  and how he could justify his association with the Birlas and other arch capitalists. Others saw this as a tactical move and his choice of non-violent methods as an expedient method of rallying all classes and communities against the common enemy -- the Raj. Be that as it may, Dube's chronicle makes it clear that the poor peasantry was betrayed by its political leaders, including the `socialist' Pandit Nehru. On the verge of the 21st century, when Gandhi and Nehru are themselves being discarded as leaders whose time has passed, it is important to re-examine their role in this early period in the struggle for freedom (dare one use that word after reading this book?) and speculate what might have happened if  the people had succeeded in toppling the old, oppressive order. In somewhat  the same way, many observers wonder how a few thousand British troops were able to quell a seething, poverty-stricken mass ("naked, hungry" in Nehru's memorable words) for over a century. It was the same year of the 1921 revolt, incidentally, that an angry peasant told Nehru: "Give us food; we don't want swaraj."

Ram Dass owned no land and toiled for the Thakur landlords who, in his village, owned 800 acres between just three families. He and his fellow Dalits were steeped in debt and he narrates how they worked like slaves day and night but somehow could hardly fill their stomachs. Very occasionally, they could afford to rent land, which would also yield  barely enough for their subsistence. They would face an awful decision: how much food should they forgo eating to pay their debts or buy clothes? In today's age of rampant consumerism, it is a sobering thought, for although Ram Dass' children and grandchildren have been educated and escaped this crippling penury, they are still by all economic indices living in absolute poverty.

It is a harrowing reminder that life for many millions like Ram Dass and his family is made up of these very stark choices. Should they sell an animal and send a child to school? Ram Dass took a route which ought to have lifted him out of this morass: he migrated to Mumbai and took a job in a textile dyeing factory. Some of his fellow workers were educated but, as he recalls with chilling candour, "We didn't have enough to eat so how could we study?" Elsewhere, there are references to how his sons and grandsons would want to study but were all too conscious of burning kerosene to read at night. His wife, Prayaga Devi, remembers how she possessed just one sari even after her husband went to Mumbai for his first stint. "If the sari or dhoti tore, it was handed down to the children as they could do with a smaller piece of cloth."

The family's saga is full of betrayals -- at the hands of national leaders, like Gandhi and Nehru; at the hands of landlords; of petty officials and policemen; and even, sadly, of fellow Dalit political leaders. Perhaps the biggest treachery of all is the government's failure to implement land reforms which would have singly done more to benefit  the rural poor than any other measure. Indeed, the one leader who comes off well in this book is Ambedkar -- Arun Shourie, his latest and critical biographer, should please take note. He was rewarded for his consistent championing of the rights of untouchables by being made independent India's first law minister. However, when he proposed that the government should undertake an ambitious land reform programme for the untouchables, this was repudiated by the pro-status quo Congress government.

Zamindari was abolished in 1952 but, as Dube records, big landowners found ingenious methods of evading subsequent ceiling laws. In the 1960s, half a million families -- about 0.5 per cent of the rural population -- owned a tenth of the cultivable land, with an average holding of 80 acres each. The next million owned roughly as much, with an average holding of 37 acres. "In contrast," writes the author, "more than one-tenth of India's rural families were landless. The next poorest quarter owned less than half an acre each. If an average ceiling of 20 acres per rural household had been applied at this time, roughly 55 million acres would have been `surplus'. Redistribution of this huge amount of land would have had a tremendous impact on reducing poverty. But, as events unfolded, less than 5 per cent of this land was declared surplus; and not all of this was redistributed." As is well documented, to circumvent the ceilings, owners put land in the name of their pet dogs, cats and elephants!

Given the reluctance of any UP government, even the short-lived Bahujan Samaj, headed by the Dalit leader, Mayawati, failed to make a dent in the ownership of land. About the only salvation was education. Here too, Ram Dass' family had to battle, along with their fellow lower castes, to even enter a classroom, be allowed to study and take exams. How a few of them survived these odds and went on to take a college degree and become school teachers themselves is nothing short of heroic. Hansraj, a grandson, had to take his own mat to school because he was not allowed to sit with the rest; he borrowed  clothes for the exams. One is suddenly clear as to why primary education has been `neglected' these five decades since independence. It is not just the lethargy of the state, as the middle class may be tempted to think; it is the power elite which wants to keep  the benefits of  progress for itself and deny them to the have-nots. This puts the hysteria of the urban educated about the concessions granted by the Mandal Commission in the proper light.

Ram Dass himself is the most articulate about this need: "Education is very important," he tells his biographer. "It is the only wealth that cannot be taken away from you (my emphasis). I had decided years ago that even if I had to beg, I would educate my children. I saw that we are all uneducated, and that only educated people progressed and got jobs. Now many of us are educated and ensure that our children are in turn educated. Slowly and gradually there will be progress."

At a recent talk in Mumbai on the  issues that he raises in the book, Dube was not very hopeful about the plight of the poor. In his view, they would be as badly off in the next half-century as they had been in these 50 years of `freedom'. At the same time, one should remember  that India, unlike China, has been struggling to maintain a democratic system that still functions, however arbitrarily. China has been able to feed itself and meet all basic needs, but lacks freedom. Somehow, there has to be a balance between the two systems and very few countries, including the US, have been able to give equal weight to both `food' and freedom.

This is an important book that serves as a powerful antidote to much of the euphoria generated these days about the benefits of economic liberalisation. It deserves to be very widely read.