I am pleased to be invited to the convocation at IRMA. IRMA has relevance to my work of the last 40 years and for the 7 preceding that. Two different , if related processes of looking at the facilitation of constitutional guarantees to people who are at the margins. One was an institute of management and training for civil servants. In the following 40, I have learnt to recognize people's management techniques, admire and respect them, to build campaigns and movements. In 1991 the MKSS had conducted a peoples action research on public works . Narayan ( later our Sarpanch ) and Devilal post graduate students, enrolled as workers and kept a meticulous record of the 15 days they worked-‐ from allocation of work, to work site management. They continually asked for the work to be measured so that there would be no shortfall in wages. No one came in spite of several written petitions. The Panchayat ( Barar, Rajsmand) met and the Sarpanch and members decided to pay a uniform 11 rupees per head per day, on all works including this one,when the wage was Rs 22 per day.
The violation of norms and under payment became the genesis of the protest. When the tempo increased, 5 of us from different districts, sat on hunger strike, to protest violation of norms of JRY, whose guide lines promised minimum wages. We won the battle. Rajasthan was stopped a 100 crore installment, minimum wages were paid.
We sat on the mud floor of our home and workplace in Devdungri, after its success, happily fatigued evaluating the efficacy of processes we had used. Mohanji , dalit elderly, marginal farmer, great fighter, singer of Kabir, creator of lyrics said :
“We will never get justice till we get the records out. Our integrity, our right to life and livelihood are all wrapped up in those papers ! We must get them out". This was the genesis of the battle that began in 1991-‐2, for the right to see records of the Panchayat, for redressal, for accountability and social audit.
As graduates from a management school you carry with you theoretical proficiency for dealing with the development of rural India. This includes transfer of knowledge, skills and resultant action and its monitoring. Management is a comparatively new discipline. Like all other book learning the theory of management arises from the practice of it for years. While the practice grows and changes organically, the theory sits in a comparatively rigid framework. Even Aristotle's Poetics owed its structured understanding to an observation of the plays of Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, some 2,500 years ago. But a Shakespeare who defied every rule in the book and the Poetics, recreated theatre, became larger than those confines and a synonym for drama , and for creativity of the highest order. Every system created takes real life as the source for its creation. From Aristotle to Kautilya and Marx, artistic and political theory have built on life. Categories, structures and thought patterns are created to facilitate thinking and understanding. They cannot become ends in themselves. Informal management systems, from the home to social groupings are forced to adapt to circumstances. Even science addresses nature, natural realities and has to change and modify earlier assumptions. In this context, you carry with you a set of tools, to work with an outside reality. But you have to go with an understanding that the outside reality is bigger, more rooted and organic than the theory is. The theory will have to adapt and change in interfacing with practice. Principles may remain unchallenged, but modes and processes keep changing.
A narrative I left the IAS, after 7 years. Of these I had spent two in the Academy the training institute for civil servants in a place called LBSNA in Mussorie. I should have been equipped to deal with all basic skills to enable the transfer of rights to the poor.
When I came to work in Tilonia and its surrounding villages in 1975, I went to the home of a peasant woman confident that I would be welcomed. After all “I” represented the privileged "educated" group. She soon showed me I was not educated, but merely literate! I did not understand that she no more wanted my advice than that of the indifferent world around her, set up to help, but which ended up exploiting her. She had no time for me. She said: "mein collector nahin banna chahti hoon tumhare jaise, padharo aur mujhe kaam karne do"! That set me on a long journey, to unlearn and introspect which continues till today.
Gandhiji attributed much of his success to his many journeys around India when he listened to people and planned the national struggle for independence. He learnt to feel the pulse and understand that the common sense he heard, could alone be the basis for shaping future strategies. He talked of his ethics and principles to people who largely understood and accepted
them. A concept like Ahimsa though part of the Indian tradition has to be transformed to relate to an individual's understanding of tolerance and the capacity to address discrimination.
Another argument that holds its own in the contemporary context is the limitation of a uni-‐polar world view. In this paradigm, views masquerade as truth; and selective information and analyses arising from it are extrapolated into a world view, with claims that this is proven to be correct, and will alone deliver us from hell, amen! Our memory span is now getting shorter by the minute. It was not so long ago when we talked of square pegs in round holes. An erudite statistical professor wrote a book entitled "How to lie with Statistics"1 critiquing the basis of selective information on which an edifice of partial logic and reasoning is built. The biggest myth today is that of numbers, ( profits, percentages, shares, etc and poverty line figures, Sengupta vs Tendulkar, with the Planning Commission’s infamous Rs 27 and Rs 32 respectively, for the rural and urban,) whether we "crunch" them or fling them at people, they are a part of the attempt of the system to stymie common sense!
The poor and the groups which are in a minority (not in absolute numbers, but in such processes) in any debate listen to bewildering calculations and arithmetic. The inequality and injustice continue. If I may indulge in a bit of imaginative fancy, I often see figures flying at me like verbal bullets assaulting my sensibility. How often have we felt that we know the truth but cannot prove it with mere figures, the truth of conditions of hunger and destitution need no numbers to validate their existence. Yet our logic is ridiculed or disvalued, and the argument dismissed. Words used are often pejorative, claiming that there is no “objectivity”. I have been told I am passionate; whether I am right or not, does not matter. The form, in other words takes over the content.
We have to begin with listening to fundamental critiques from the people whom we want to serve. Also, we need to be willing to begin with their problems.
We live in a pluralistic world, where issues of diversity are not restricted merely to the exploitation of natural resources, of greed and resultant tsunamis and natural disasters. The metaphor has to be extended to cover economic, political and social differences, in thought and cultural expression. The richness of diversity exists in religion, language, dress and in dozens of other ways. We must accept that even solutions may be varied. If our minds get conditioned and branded, and if we perceive every issue with predictable solutions, we are capable of manipulation. We will kill the ability of our minds to think out of boxes. And, that is the real danger, the suppression of all original thought. For my generation hell was defined by the horrors of “A brave new world”2 and “Nineteen eighty four”3.
1 Darrell Huff (1954)
2 Aldous Huxley – A Brave New World-‐ a novel about planned conditioning of society with an intent to control it
3 George Orwell – 1984 George Orwell’s chilling prophecy about the future
Naurti my friend of 34 years standing, is the Sarpanch of Harmara , Ajmer District, Rajasthan. She is a Dalit and Women's activist, a computer teacher who overcame her illiteracy , a MGNREGA worker, who fought Sati and rape. She is one of my gurus. She has taught me more than a whole semester in the best university in the world could have, about how this country may begin to change. Her life is her message. The strike she organized of workers in 1980, led to a landmark Supreme Court judgment on minimum wages4. Minimum wages is the only entitlement and guarantee for wage workers in the unorganized sector today.
Whenever I begin a diatribe with my fellow activists beginning : " Is desh mei 60
saal se kuch nahin hua hai", she pulls my sari palla and says "that's not true. Much has changed for us. Of course a lot more has to be done". She is not wrong. Dalits forbidden to build pucca houses can do so today. She can sit at the same height as upper castes and men. In 2008 fifty percent of seats for Sarpanches in Rajasthan, were reserved for women by an amendment to the Panchayati Raj Act. She is today a recognized leader and a Sarpanch. She holds her own against corruption, discrimination against women, minorities and dalits.
The critical issues in a hugely divisive and feudal society, offer a challenge that cannot be settled through a theoretical approach. It needs a careful assessment of the hundreds of variables that affect decision making. Just to keep our sensibilities in place we should resist pigeon holing. Are you just a student, but also a daughter or son, with strong reactions for or against the liberty of women to dress as they please, to dance and sing, but also use your mind, to question and accept ? I remember that if I had not resisted stereotyping and labelling -‐ as only an "activist" , or as an elderly woman with grey hair, or as a crazy out spoken woman, or as anything limiting my identity – I would have been so fragmented that it would have been an insult to my intelligence, which has the power to collate and come to conclusions from a range of experiences. You and I need to think as a totality to grow and change. Every part of an individual influences the other. How do we know which part may dominate and push or deter change ?
Communal violence is a good example. Communal identity over rides and pushes all rationality, laws, even humanity aside when prejudice and misconceptions ride high. So much so, that even those who talk of rationality and non violence etc, sometimes promote and take part in violent acts. When mindless violence happens, everything is hung in suspended animation. It is at those critical junctures that the depth of the prejudices paralyze democracy, development, and progress as we know it. It comes as a shock, and a whole universe built through rational discourse crumbles, leaving a sense of helplessness.
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
4 AIR 1983 AIR 328, 1983 SCR (2) 271
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.”― W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems
At IRMA I should not have to labour to state the importance of peoples' perceptions in being able to choose development alternatives, when they have access to information and share decision making. Their common sense and intelligence cuts through the chaff. We the literate, are often victims of information over load and jargon. They arrive at the essence and come to the point. A series of claims from the privileged that they are the sole arbiters of intelligence and capable of planning for the country, governing and of a larger vision, compels me to share one of my favourite narratives.
Sushila an RTI activist who barely finished primary school, came to Delhi in 1996 when the Press Council, released the 1996 Press Council led "NCPRI and Peoples RTI Bill" , drafted by Justice Sawant. In the press conference, we faced a barrage of questions from people who half believed in the issues of transparency and accountability. Sushila too was there with Justice Sawant, late V.P. Singh and many others, when she was asked by the media, what could she be doing in a press conference on information. Did she a 40 year old semi literate woman have any idea of information and its power, could the literate comprehend its importance ? She answered with élan . Standing straight , in a clear powerful voice, she said:
“Yes I do. When I send my son to the market place with 10 rupees, and he comes back home I ask for accounts. The Government spends billions of rupees in my name. Shall I not ask for accounts ? Hamara paisa, hamara hisab !”
In four words she defined and encapsulated one of the most important concepts and reasons for the RTI.
As I stand in front of you the national election is in progress, one that ignores the poor in its discourse on development, growth and trickle down theories. The trickle from a pot whose holes cannot prevent the leaks of corruption, the clogging of holes by mis-‐governance and the remaining few blocked by the grit of the arbitrary use of power will take decades, maybe more to reach the poor. The marginalization of the poor and the indifference to them, is not only short sighted but dangerous, in a country so contrasted by the gap between the rich and the poor. That is why a concept like the MGNREGA, which empowers workers to demand work and equality is anathema to “profit wallahs”. In my youth they were called “box wallahs”. We are branded as “Jhola wallahs” !
We have to think of cleansing political parties. But do we have a real choice even today ? And what does it take to build a real alternative ? We are looking for political alternatives , ie change one party for another, not willing to look at alternative politics, for a different public ethos, where contradiction between means and ends will be questioned. Short term goals cannot destroy the basis of the party’s existence, its values; where success will depend as much on honesty in the battle for votes as the promises we make to deliver.
There is a Rajasthani folk story retold by Vijay dan Detha, great story teller and writer. The story goes that there was a king who liked to believe that he was fair in rendering justice. A criminal was brought to him, and as was his wont he offered a choice of punishment: either 100 onions to be eaten in front of everybody, or 100 strikes on the head with a shoe. The culprit chose to eat onions as it was less humiliating. A dozen onions, and his mouth burned and eyes watered. He pleaded for reprieve. He opted for being struck on the head. In a short time his head was pulp. Scuttling between the two, he ate 100 onions and got beaten 100 times on the head.
It is apparently a choice but actually it isn’t. What do we do? Is it going to be a passing concern or will we work towards building real alternatives? Can we cut corners with ethics? Can progress justify corruption and the arbitrary use of power? Are we willing to ask difficult and uncomfortable questions?
That is why people’s political movements and public action will always remain vital to the health of a nation. Gandhiji understood this 67 years ago when he did not accept office. His politics raised unpopular but just questions. He lost his life in the process. People’s movements and people’s politics continue his tradition in a small or big way in engaging with issues that violate constitutional guarantees.
By just the mere fact of exercising the vote we commit ourselves to being responsible citizens. We agree to monitor the trajectory of the vote and our sovereignty, handed over to representatives for 5 years, to ensure that they act both constitutionally and with justice. The RTI was born from such an understanding. As ordinary citizens we must use the Act, also learn to express our views and ideas. You have made a beginning with the use of internet and social media. The lampoons and spoofs, the older songs with newer lyrics, have been the modes of peoples campaigns for a long time. We now find strong political comments through lyrics and spoof circulated through the Youtube.
Our bard Mohanji sang against state corruption and the changing nature of it, popularizing the need for the RTI in Rajasthan:
Pehle wale chor bhaya jungalan maye rahte he
Abbe wala chor to bungala me ghus gaya re
Raj choron ko, yeh rishwata Koron roll machayee re
Pehle wale chor bhaya Bandookashyun marta wo
Abhe wale dakkuda kalman su mare re
Raj choron ko, yeh rishwata Koron roll machawe re
Resolve as you leave that you will speak truth to power for yourself and others, to ensure that there is justice and equity. Resolve that you will demand that democratic power be shared by all equally. In such action each of you and us will be the change we want to see!
