Raging resentment

Gujjars continue with their agitation as the government shows no sign of conceding their demand.

in Dausa and Jaipur

NANAKRAM, who is in his seventies, bears a vacant look as he sits beside his sons body under a canopy on National Highway No.11. Forty-year-old Gokul, who left behind four children, a wife and an aged father, was among the 20 people who were killed in clashes with the police at Sikandara in Rajasthans Dausa district on May 24. For Nanakram, the reality of his sons death is yet to sink in.

Gokuls is one of the 18 bodies in the custody of the agitating Gujjars, who are demanding Scheduled Tribe status for their community, lying in wooden baskets on slabs of ice in tents erected by the agitators. Six of them are in Sikandara, while 12 are at Pilupura village in Bayana tehsil of Bharatpur district. The agitators sitting with the bodies say they will not budge until their demands are met.

The bodies of the other victims are in government mortuaries and it was only on May 30 that post-mortem examinations were started to determine how they died. Nanakram saw it all last year when, a few kilometres away, eight people were killed in police firing at Patoli. NH-11 was under siege even then, but he could not know then that a year later he would count his son among the dead.

Meanwhile, sitting amid the caskets holding the slain agitators was Umrao Singh Doi, district president of the Gujjar Samaj. He claimed that the morale of his community was high and that it would not relent until the government acceded to its demands.

The events of the last week of May looked like an uncanny repeat of the incidents of May 29, 2007. Once again, the police fired upon Gujjars demanding inclusion in the S.T. category, but the toll this year, nearly 40, was about double that of last year. Initially, many women participated in the protests. Though the epicentre of the protest was confined to two districts, Bayana tehsil in Bharatpur and Sikandara in Dausa, Gujjar anger spilled over to engulf much of eastern Rajasthan and northern India. The Army was called out.

Last year, the Army was deployed in six districts, Kota, Bundi, Sawai Madhopur, Karauli, Bharatpur and Jhalawar. And like the last time, this year, too, the protesters paralysed traffic in the National Capital Region, which included parts of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. Rajasthan Roadways suffered the most as none of its buses could ply on State highways and the national highways leading to Delhi and Mumbai.

Rumblings were felt in other States, too, as two Gujjars were killed in police firing in Haryanas Panipat district on May 29. There were reports of Gujjar protests from Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh and from Jammu and Kashmir as well. The Northern Railway was forced to cancel 10 trains. NH-11, again like last year, remained closed for more than a week as angry Gujjars put up roadblocks at Sikandara. The central leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which runs the government in Rajasthan, allowed the stalemate to continue. One consequence of this was that the BJP National Executive had to shift its venue from Jaipur to Delhi, again like last year.

The situation could have been avoided had the Vasundhara Raje government entered into an early dialogue with the leadership of the Gujjar Arakshan Sangharsh Samiti. Led by Kirori Singh Bainsla, a retired Army Colonel, the Samiti had declared that May 29, would be observed as the death anniversary of the men killed during last years protests. On May 18, Bainsla also announced that there would be a rail roko programme at Bayana on May 23. The government did nothing in response, and there were no talks with the community.

On May 17, however, the Ram Dass Aggarwal Committee appointed by the government announced a Rs.282-crore package for the development of areas with Gujjar populations, mainly in Alwar, Jhalawar, Karauli, Dholpur and Sawai Madhopur districts.

While the government argued that this was what the Jas Raj Chopra Committee broadly recommended in December 2007, the Samiti rejected the package on the grounds that it did not address the communitys demand for inclusion in the S.T. list. The State government, the Samiti argued, should send a letter to the Centre recommending S.T. status for the community. Raje remained silent. It was clear that with the Assembly elections a few months away, the State government could ill-afford to annoy the influential Meenas of Rajasthan, who are the main beneficiaries of S.T. reservation.

Violence first broke out in Bayana on May 23 as the police tried to disperse protesters gathered on the rail tracks at Pilupura village. Bainsla later said that violent police action on the peaceful gathering provoked the Gujjars to react. Seventeen people, including a policeman, were killed in police firing.

Angry Gujjars now blocked NH-11 at the Sikandara crossing in Dausa. Despite heavy police deployment, Superintendent of Police P. Ramji and SubDivisional Magistrate Mahendra Kheenchi were forced to flee such was the fury of the crowd. Informed sources confirmed that policemen beat up the SDM for refusing to give orders to fire. When finally the police opened fire, 20 people were killed.

Combative statements by Ministers, including the Chief Minister herself, added fuel to the fire. Things took a turn for the worse when Raje and her Home Minister, Gulab Chand Kataria, threatened strong action.

It was the presence of a dacoit wanted by the State police, Jagan Gujjar, among the agitators in Bayana that apparently drew the strong statements from the State government. Jagan Gujjar, who turned up at Bayana to express solidarity with his community, was photographed in some newspapers. Raje said on television that dacoits and anti-social elements would be firmly dealt with if they posed a threat to the government. Hum logon se bura koi nahin hoga (there wont be anyone worse than us), she said, speaking in Hindi. Some channels repeatedly broadcast the statement. Matters got further inflamed when State Health Minister Digambar Singh suggested that most of the deaths had occurred as Gujjars fired at each other.

The State government backed up its strong words with massive deployments of security forces. At Sikandara, the District Magistrate of Dausa told Frontline, seven Army columns (700 personnel), one Rapid Action Force unit (100 personnel) and two Central Reserve Police Force units (200 personnel) had been deployed.

At Bayana, the deployment was even heavier. The District Magistrate of Bharatpur, Rajesh Yadav, however, felt that dialogue was necessary.

The government, meanwhile, announced the imposition of the National Security Act in 15 districts. At Sikandara, the Dausa administration required written undertakings from visiting women journalists, including this writer, stating that they were aware of the risks involved and took full responsibility for their own safety. Indeed, the Additional District Magistrate tried to dissuade women journalists from going to Sikandara on the grounds that it was not safe for women to do so. Frontline, however, found the protesters at Sikandara very receptive and accommodating.

On May 26, Raje tried to defuse the situation by writing to the Centre: she asked for a meeting of the Chief Ministers of States with Gujjar populations and recommended a 4 to 6 per cent reservation for Gujjars in the category of denotified class of tribals/nomadic tribes. The Centre dismissed the suggestions.

Meanwhile, the Gujjar Sangharsh Samiti also rejected the proposal. Who asked her to send such a letter anyway? asked Ram Chandra Saradhana, Congress legislator from Jambwa Ramgarh. He said that the Chief Minister had repeatedly skirted the main demand. All that she has to do is to send a recommendation to the Centre regarding our demand; the rest follows from that, he said. Saradhana said that the Chopra Committee, too, had moved away from its mandate, which had to do with the legitimacy of the demand of the Gujjars. We did not ask for a package from the Chopra Committee, he said.

The package, he said, was about setting up hand-pumps, community markets, or haats, and creating educational and health facilities in Gujjar areas. He said that the package had been created from the budget for rural development and it was not just Gujjars who would benefit from it. The situation is that even if Gujjars are educated, they do not get jobs as there is no guaranteed employment. The government could have considered giving scholarships to our children, waive fees, and so on. It could have constituted a Gujjar Development Board where our community could have been given similar facilities like that of the Scheduled Tribes, he said.

After the May 29 firings in 2007, the State government, in consultation with an 11-member team from the Gujjar community, agreed to constitute a committee to look into the demand for S.T. status. The Chopra Committee, formed on June 7, initially had a term of three months but later sought extra time and finally submitted its report on December 15. The 300-page report, while going into Gujjar history and conditions in detail, did not recommend the inclusion of the community in the S.T. list. The committee found it difficult to apply the five criteria used to classify a community as a Scheduled Tribe in the case of Gujjars (page 173 in the Report of the High Powered Committee on Gujar/Gurjars demand), but it was convinced of the communitys general backwardness.

It agreed with the observations of the Lokur Committee, an Advisory Committee set up in 1965 on the revision of lists of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes under the chairmanship of B.N. Lokur, Secretary to the Government of India.

The Lokur Committee had observed: There are some communities which, though not strictly eligible to be treated as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, deserve special assistance. It would not be sufficient to treat them merely as Other Backward Classes as they require larger aid than is provided to Other Backward Classes [OBCs]. The Lokur Committee mentioned the Gujjars as falling in this category, and the Chopra Committee agreed.

The Chopra Committee was also convinced that it was the geography of the habitat that defined the sociology of deprivation. It held that replacement of caste by an area-based strategy seems to be the only way out. It recommended that the State should accord priority attention to such people by instituting Special Development Fund to meet their genuine demands for raising their quality of life and standard of living. Unless the children of these remote and isolated areas educate themselves, reservation in government jobs or in political institutions, would only have symbolic value and these benefits will naturally accrue to the most advanced sections of this umbrella group, without helping those who need instant help.

The committee pointed out, too, that the five criteria used to determine a group as a tribe, laid down in the late 1960s by the Anil K. Chanda Committee, were now outdated and that even the new Tribal Policy Document of July 2006 suggested a need to fix more accurate criteria. The Gujjar Arakshan Sangharsh Samiti felt that the Chopra Committee had skirted the main issue and had not recommended S.T. status for Gujjars.

Gujjars are now listed in the OBC category. It was the Mandal Commission, set up in 1978, which recommended the inclusion of the Gujjars of Rajasthan in the OBC category. It was only in 1994 that the State government, then headed by Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, sent to the Centre a recommendation to include Gujjars in the OBC category. Then, during the Congress regime of Ashok Gehlot, the demand for S.T. status for the community began gaining momentum. In November 2003, in an election rally in Rajasthan, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee declared that his government would include the Jats of Rajasthan in the OBC category. The promise was fulfilled before the parliamentary elections of 2004, and this fetched rich dividends for the BJP in the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections in the State.

The Gujjars felt let down. They now had to share the 27 per cent reservation for OBCs with Jats, a much more powerful community. To assuage their hurt feelings, promises of S.T. status for the community were doled out. In 2005, the Rajasthan Gurjar Mahasabha led a movement to remind the State government of that promise. The government set up a five-member committee headed by State Home Minister G.C. Kataria to examine the condition of Gujjars in the districts.

Little happened before March 2006, when, disenchanted with the Mahasabha, a new forum under Bainslas leadership emerged. All through the year, meetings and protests were held, and there were discussions with the State government. A flashpoint was reached on May 12, 2007, when Bainsla told the Raje government that the Gujjars were getting restive. Preventive arrests only worsened matters. Between May 29 and 31, some 24 people were killed in police firing.

The onus is now on the Centre to provide to resolve the issue. Clause 2 of Article 342 says: Parliament may by law include in or exclude from the list of Scheduled Tribes specified in a notification issued under clause (1) any tribe or tribal community or part of or group within any tribe or tribal community, but save as aforesaid a notification issued under the said clause shall not be varied by any subsequent notification.

The State government is unwilling to make any such recommendation for fear of alienating the Meenas, who are numerically, economically and politically more powerful. The issue is not one of reservation alone; it is a question of dealing with huge segments of the population that have been neglected for years. The agitation reflects resentment at that social and economic neglect.