By Dr. Debabrata Banerjee, Bulletin[1], July 2001
In an interview given to the Bulletin, Sheopat Singh has talked about the numerous struggles for settlements and resettlements in Stage I of the Command Area of IGNP fought mainly between 1969-1972. In the project implementation of Stage II, however, the World Bank seemed to have adopted several welfare measures in paper at least.
According to a Report [No 447-IN] dated 1974, it says :
"The entire RCP area is being settled by landless farmers from nearby areas. The area has been divided into 6.32 ha farm units [=1 Moraba]. Each settler purchases one farm unit from GOR at an average cost of Rs 15755/-, payable over 15 years without interest. Pre-1955 tenent farmers living in the project area recieve one farm unit free and have the option of purchasing one additional unit."
Actually this was a recipe for the growth of a full blown land market replicated from experiences from Stage I, where " more than half of original allotees have sold off their lands[mostly to rent-seeking officials and politicians], much of it now being sharecropped' [ Micheal Goldman, The Fate Of the Desert: A Study of the Indira Gandhi Canal, Feb.1992]
But for Stage II this recipe was topped with concern for landless farmers. So what did he really get? According to the experiences narrated to M.Goldman [p.11,Ibid]
“In 1978, we applied for allotments on the Govt. land set aside for local landless in Bikaner Distt. We didn`t get the land, so we captured it. At that time I was active in a number of local struggles, and we thought this was very important. We were all canal workers and local landless. I kept my own plot for 5-6 years; then I was jailed.
Even so, they knew we were not prepared to leave the land; many finally received official allotments; they
gave me uncommand land, so I fought for seven years for water (only command land gets canal water). My case in
the High Court is still going on; one of my colleagues threatened to immolate himself if he didn`t get water. We did
n`t want him to die, so we all took over the CAD office and gheraoed the executive engineer and forced him to call up the Chief Engineer to tell him things would get bad unless he gave the farmer water. The second day, the official notice came. We built kuccha watercourses ourselves, because the canal people refused to, though it`s their job. But we wanted land and we wanted water.
Many peoples’ land is high on sand dunes and cannot be irrigated; we received the worst possible land. Those who are part of official chak plan receive water; at the start the engineers came around demanding money to put peoples’ land into the official plan; we all refused to pay bribes, and none of us got water.”
This is the kind of testimony which puts in a nutshell most of the themes and issues that are not merely abstract and fleeting, reflecting just the concerns of the time but going beyond that, driven by a dominant historical logic. This is a qualitative document on struggles being waged in the IGNP area based on its specific agenda and the mandate that goes with it.
The Origins of ‘Chaks’
The emergence of chaks at a certain moment on the historical horizon has much to do with land settlement issues in the arid zones of western Rajasthan. It was a certain form of resolution by the colonial administration to the vexed issue of maximizing revenues from cultivable lands in the desert. In a region where only 10-15 % of the total land area was under the plough, the remaining vast stretches of land in the arid ecosystem, lying even beyond the confines of village commons, came to be regarded as `wastelands` under the purely colonial `gaze`. Yet under the same gaze, these wastelands were not seen for what they were, i.e., areas of regional transhumance, even though pastoralism was seen to be a reality, because "these unoccupied wastes" fell under the "State`s landlord rights" which it was determined "to exercise" by "bringing under cultivation " [Bikaner Survey & Settlement Report,P.J.Fagan,1893]
There was a two pronged policy followed by the state; one to privilege the chaudhuries/jats as the mainstay of landowning and cultivating castes while downplaying or totally ignoring the claims of nomads/pastoralists on land per se and two, to increase the extent to cultivated land through deployment of limited ownership/lessee rights through summary settlements in the wastelands , now redefined as a chaks. Special inducements were provided through giving the girinda or the lessee of the chak a semblance of land rights in order to develop cultivation at the expense of pasture and grazing. Under the colonial `gaze`, the "pastoral tribes" made up of Joiyas, Bhatis, Lobana, Mohammadan Raths, etc., were viewed with deep suspicion, akin to ruthless marauders engaged in theft and looting.
Such has been the efficacy of this `gaze` that it has left a deep rooted prejudice vis-a-vis pastoralists/nomads in the official perception. So much so that even in post-colonial India, such attitudes have been further cultivated and rationalized through western anthropological `theories` such as the `tragedy of commons`
The RCP Deptt. in a important Report in 1984 states the bias thus :
This part of the desert is, therefore, a man-made desert caused by grazing leading to lack of vegetation and aridity. The extreme heat and coldness of the areas coupled with wind action over ages have caused desert through rock disintegration. Lack of water and vegetation due to over-grazing has turned this once fine land of abundance into desolate arid lands.
Way back in the 1890`s it was thought that the way to integrate pastoralism into an agrarian economy was possible through the chak patterns of settlement :
In order to provide for an increase in the cultivated area it was determined in exercise of State`s landlord right to the unoccupied waste to exclude from the boundaries of any village. Such waste area as was in excess of the requirements of that village for pasture and extension of cultivation. The areas so excluded which in many cases, owing to the scattered nature of cultivation, included greater or smaller number of occupied and cultivated fields were formed into blocks or chaks. Progressive assessments were fixed for these chaks, much in the same way as was done in the original villages, and it was determined to settle them with substantial cultivators from the adjacent districts of Hissar and Ferozepur and the cis-Sutlaj states.
[BSSR, P.J.Fagan, op. cit., 1893,p26]
The colonial state played to the hilt the `peasant instinct to colonize land` at the cost of, and even opposed to, other forms of land use such as prevailing in forests[ slash-`n-burn cultivation], rangelands, deserts, etc.; i.e., one pattern of land use has been made to prevail upon others as a matter of policy and subsequently, this has become the dominant form of land use along with its social relations. This has served an important additional purpose other than maximizing revenues, serving as a resource base for recruitment into the army.
The reasons of the state [raison d`etat] have not changed since the previous century and the display of subsequent moral-missionary zeal displayed during canal construction, after independence. They converged with World Bank policies and funding to extend the area under cultivation and zealously pursue the ideal of `the greening of the desert`. Chaks have continued to remain an efficient unit and index of such policies.
Why Collective Bargaining?
The resettlement policies of the Govt. backed by legislation and regulations [Colonization Act, Irrigation & Drainage Act, etc] for the IGNP areas induced a rapid growth of the land-market. This was also in the interest of the state, as the sole proprietor of land, established during the colonial period, to collect revenues from the `price of land`. Once a certain sum was fixed per unit [moraba] by the World Bank, the original allotees, the pre-1955 residents were virtually made to sell off their lands by corrupt means to state officials [from irrigation and colonization departments, CAD officials,etc.], thekedars , big landlords from the north and the land mafia [bhumafia]. Given the nature of the land most of the deals were speculative and coerced. Those for whom land was meant to be alloted turned out at the receiving end once they showed no inclination to part with it. Either they were subject to endless delays in their re-settlements [e.g. Pak Oustees] or they were cheated by allotment of `uncommand land`[ unirrigated land, mostly atop dunes] whose agricultural productivity was next to zero. As a result of all this, numerous conflicts erupted over the mode of payment in installments, the state`s right to collect kishts [installments] at whatever time and on the basis of a vaguely defined kishtbandi.
In fact, during the last quarter of 20th c., commodity-money economy around land markets operated in full swing with meager productive outlays and that too in the sphere of mechanized and chemical agriculture based on various forms of tenancies and share-cropping. This dynamic impacted very severely on traditional water harvesting and storage systems, gochars and orans [ traditional commons, pastures and forests], transhumant and migratory routes, khadins and other pre-industrial types of land use and farming and most importantly, communities based on specific activities[ e.g., pastoralists].Today their dwindling size, degraded status and neglected state tell a sad story.
The abandonment of traditional wisdom and knowledge without any alternative other than market driven chaos forces us to be in a position to kindle and generate a new consciousness for charting a future course. We also need to ask ourselves whether we are in a position to do so. What will be our measure of efficacy for the tasks set forth? We must take a hard look at ourselves as ask : what constitutes the we ?
The severe drought of 1999-2001 has inadvertently sharpened the focus onto the main problems in the region, as if it needed a severe crisis of this magnitude for things to come out in the open. What has primarily occurred in this period with unseen rapidity is what is known as the process of `de-peasantization` or, `proletarianization`, to put it in Marxist terms. Suddenly the ranks of wage-earners as well as demand for wage based employment has swelled beyond compare.
The main issue before us is the quantitative transformation and enlargement of rural wage employment. This sectoral expansion has introduced a new element, amounting to a qualitative transformation in social relations. There is tremendous pressure to bring the reserve `army of labour` or the huge unemployed sector into the ambit of wage relations. There is a considerable overlap now between the production relations in the rural areas and Industrial Relations. There is considerable scope therefore for the germination and expansion of the form and procedures of Collective Bargaining. IGNP areas are ideally situated to start a process in this direction. Having come to the fag end of internecine quarrelling, whether over water rights or the right demarcation of land boundaries, it is time now to leave them behind, as useless judicial baggage, and join hands in the form of Federation of Chak Samities. These Federations can be organized by a conglomeration of a number of Chak Samities which can further amalgamate at a higher level in the form of a Confederation. This form of organization will also strike deep roots of democracy and organize popular will which would be in a position to take on its adversaries at the local level. Each Federation can be the sole bargaining agency at the CAD level and they can seek mandates from the Panchayats at a more general level to take up a broader range of issues relating to common natural resources, gender issues, public health , education and so on. Such a mandate can be further used by the Confederation of Chak Samities at the highest level of negotiations, both with the World Bank and the Government of Rajasthan as well as the Government of India.
In the Bulletin we can only pose the question to start with. We are not here with ready made answers. Only a process of a deepening of understanding, organizing and struggles can lead us further along the path.
[1] Bulletin was a bi monthly newsletter of the Farmer Chak Samities of IGNP Stage II, supported by AZERC, URMUL Trust and OXFAM.
No comments:
Post a Comment