As the evening sun was setting in the village of Devdungari, Rajasthan, Shankar Singhji and his band of three young men broke into song with their loud baritone voices reaching out into the darkening sky. Sung with equal passion and humour, against the background of a simple mud hut that was the crucible in which the Right to Information (RTI) Act was forged, the song was like an immovable rock with etchings of the stark inequalities of India.
As Shankarji pointed out, the song was not created with careful thought in the comfort of one’s room but it emerged, passionately and urgently, from slogans raised during the struggle against ruthless power under the scorching heat of Rajasthan and Jantar Mantar.
For those of us born in the latter half of the 20th century and who have only read about the Independence Movement, that too perhaps only cursorily to pass school exams, learning about the MKSS (Mazdoor Kishan Shakti Sangathan) and its work first-hand was a lesson in History – it was a glimpse into what it must have felt like 100 years ago to fight a juggernaut that had its plate-boot firmly on the throat of the nation. It has been observed that despite 70 years since Independence, little has changed for the poorest of the poor in the country.
The government, in our democracy, is invested with the responsibility to provide for and protect their fundamental rights. In contrast, the government and its machinery today presents the greatest hurdle to the realization of these rights, having itself become the protector of the powerful instead, a juggernaut again, crushing and arrogant. With infinite time at its disposal, the ‘system’ can wait indefinitely – protests can be worn down and voices subdued while individual lives wither away.
School of Democracy
The evening at Devdungari was the culmination of a school trip to Rajasthan where a few teachers and students of class 11 went to learn about the work of MKSS. What we witnessed was inspiring. Courage took the shape of: speaking up against power and breaking it down, acting on one’s convictions, fighting to assert the essential rights guaranteed to all citizens of the country by the Constitution of India.
Our education began with Lal Singhji at the School for Democracy by reading the preamble to the Constitution. We debated on the meaning and significance of five words – sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic and republic. It was pointed out that two of the words ‘socialist, secular’ had been inserted into the preamble in the 1970s and we discussed what the absence of the two words would imply.
What would happen if we removed the word ‘secular’ for instance? What would happen if it was replaced by other words such as ‘Hindu’? What might that do to the laws of the land? What would happen to the many freedoms that the privileged have come to take for granted? Could a tea-seller become a Prime Minister in the land of Manusmriti?
The implications were immense and frightening for the common man. As our three-hour exploration of the preamble wound down, Lal Singhji spoke of the essence of a democracy – not the form it takes with party politics, elections and votes – but of the lived experience of the citizens of the country. He said that a democracy is one where people lived without fear. A simple yet powerful yardstick to measure with! It reminded one of Tagore’s words:
Where the mind is without fear
Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali
and the head is held high,
where knowledge is free.
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls.
[…]
In to that heaven of freedom, my father,
Let my country awake!
The RTI Story
We wondered what it meant for the poor peasants and farmers of Rajasthan to live without fear. That story is captured in the book The RTI Story written by Aruna Roy and the MKSS collective. In brief, during their struggle against oppression, MKSS realized that power resided in access to information and the exercise of power was simply the act of withholding information, often under the pretext of the archaic Offical Secrets Act framed by the British. With this simple insight, along with the assertion that denial of rights was tantamount to a denial of life, was born the Right to Information Act – the very first legislation from the citizens of the country, a true act of democracy. (This rather oversimplified account does not do justice to the extraordinary work done by MKSS. Please read the book.)
Given the extraordinary power that the RTI gives the common man, we wondered why we had not seen it used much in our own circle of family and friends. We realized that a man with urban privilege is rarely confronted with real problems that threaten his daily existence. Where he faces difficulties with a gas connection or driving license, he can pull strings or pay a bribe, and move on. He does not really come face to face with any problem, and he can thus assume logically that the problem itself does not exist! In turn, he thinks, ‘Why are these poor people making such a fuss, going on rallies and disturbing our everyday lives and opportunities to make a further profit?’ For those who struggle to get even their promised minimum wage of Rs 213 per day, their problems do not vanish magically and so they need the RTI tool to fight for their other rights.
The RTI is a gift to the nation from the poor peasants of Rajasthan. It was not something they forged only for themselves but they have offered it to every citizen of the country! When was the last time the urban rich offered such a gift to the entire nation?
For example, in Delhi, we saw posters of the unveiling of the ‘Statue of Unity’. Purported to be the tallest statue in the world at 182 m, the erection of this statue, far from being a tribute to the nation, is really a slap on the country’s face. Located on a river island facing the immense Sardar Sarovar dam on the river Narmada, the building of such a statue is an insult to the injury faced by the Adivasis who were forcibly relocated from the banks of the Narmada to enable the construction of an ill-conceived project. It is an ugly, violent act of arrogance.
Sardar Vallabhai Patel, the man in whose honor the statue was built, banned the RSS in 1948 following the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, and ironically he has now been appropriated as an icon by the current BJP government. His statue on the Narmada overlooks the vestiges of the repression of one of the greatest people’s movements in the country since Independence – the fight of Adivasis of the Narmada valley for their homes and livelihoods.
The statue is more a symbol of the triumph of the power of the state over the poor of the nation and should perhaps be renamed as ‘Statue of Punity’! If the statue were alive, it would probably shed tears. Apparently, there will be a viewing gallery along with the statue, for urban tourists who have been blind to the fate of the Adivasis. One wonders what they will really see!
Contrast this with Gandhi’s Talisman:
I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him [her]. Will he [she] gain anything by it? Will it restore him [her] to a control over his [her] own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions?
Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away.
Mahatma Gandhi – The Last Phase, Vol. II (1958), p.65
Looking Away
On the train back to Chennai, I remembered Arunaji’s gentle admonishment of us teachers that we had not shown enough to our students. She felt we needed to have seen an MGNREGA work site and to have visited the home of a poor woman who died of penury having waited and struggled for eight months to get her Aadhaar card without which she could not receive her much-needed pension.
There is also a need to realize that the ‘future of the country’ includes the three young men who sang with Shankarji that evening in Devdungari, who have now taken on the mantle of the struggle for a life of dignity for the poorest in the country. Growing up in that village, watching MKSS do its pioneering work, perhaps these young men have learnt to face fear and that might be their best education.
Living Without Fear
It seems to me that to live without fear means to live vulnerably, without hardening oneself against the senseless violence and hatred that we witness in the mad human societies we have created. At our school, we have seen that removing the structures that create fear – rewards, punishments and competitions – helps to a great extent. Yet fear persists because the mind tends to compare. So one needs to work on the mechanism that creates fear in the first place – the illusory sense of a separate self which in its insecurity grasps aggressively hoping that personal success at the cost of others would make it secure. Such striving is a futile attempt that does not calm the restless mind. The individual and the society are not separate – each creates the other with their essential qualities. To break this endless cycle of mutual conditioning is an urgent task. We could ask: Is it really possible for human beings to not just grow tolerant of each other but become utterly incapable of violence?
On returning to Chennai, the welcome silence from the ban on crackers was rudely broken by the cancellation of a TM Krishna concert sponsored by the Airport Authority of India (AAI) in New Delhi. The cancellation was apparently in response to trolling by right-wingers against Krishna for his outspoken stances on various issues. Watching in disbelief as the events unraveled in New Delhi, I was reminded of Lal Singhji and his gentle lessons in democracy. Clearly, the AAI was living in fear. Instead of standing up to those who spewed words of hate, it cowed down and took the easy way out. The Delhi government’s subsequent intervention in organizing the concert seems worthy of celebration only because of the rarity of such acts by a government. However, should they really be congratulated for merely doing their job of protecting the rights of citizens? Meanwhile, in contrast, the central government watched silently as hatred was fostered.
Amidst this cacophony of hatred, I wished someone would sing a song without fear. A song for Lal Singhji and for democracy.
This article was written in November 2018 when I was a teacher at The School-KFI. It remained unpublished until now.
Featured Image: Photo by Mansi Gujarathi on Unsplash