None can find fault with the villagers protesting against corruption in Barwani district of Madhya Pradesh state. A large number of villagers, representing mostly the tribal community, and of the poorest of the poor living in the district, have, for the past two days, gathered at a place named Court Chauraha of the district head quarters. They are demanding accountability and transparency from their government with regard to distribution of public funds in lieu of work, and their right to work, under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).
Estimates suggest that the gathering initially had 4,000 members. The gathering was initially conceived as a daylong rally to be held on 3 October 2012. As planned and organised by the Jagrit Adivasi Dalit Sangathan (JADS), the rally started from a place named Krishi Upaj Mandi, in Rajghat road of Barwani, for which the JADS had obtained permission from the district administration. The District Magistrate had even agreed to address the rally. However when the rally reached Court Chauraha, a local politician from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Mr. Premsingh Patel arrived at the scene, allegedly with a gang of thugs, and stopped the rally from proceeding. Patel is the Member of the State Legislative Assembly (MLA) from the district.
A standoff resulted, in which Patel and his men threatened and even assaulted a few persons, including the staff member of the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), Mr. Avinash Pandey.
Pandey, along with an independent filmmaker, Mr. Pallav Thudgar, is at Barwani to monitor and document the event. The AHRC had issued a statement titled INDIA: Robbery guarantee scheme of MP on 3 October 2012, in which the background of the entire incident is also provided.
The villagers resolved that they would not disperse their gathering until their legitimate demands are met. However, yesterday, the district administration did agree finally to the villagers’ demand to proceed with the rally. The rally went out smoothly and peacefully and the people have started returning to their villages. An empowered team from the Ministry of Rural Development has also started its work in the area. This however is not enough to meet the demands of the villagers, of their legitimate right to know the truth, but an enormous success of the humble effort of some of the poorest of the poor nonetheless.
These poor people, who have gathered under the banner of the JADS, are not demanding severance from the nation to form a separate geo-political entity or to hang the corrupt government officers, who have, without an iota of shame, and with impunity stolen government entitlements due to some of the poorest of the poor who call India their home.
They, in fact, do not have the constitutional impunity or the practical privileges enjoyed by the Supreme Court judges in India, like Justices S. B. Sinha and Markandeya Katju, who are of the opinion that “[t]he only way to rid the country of corruption is to hang a few of you [bureaucrats] on the lamp post. The law does not permit us to do it but otherwise we would prefer to hang people like you at the lamppost … everywhere, we have corruption. Nothing is free from corruption. Everybody wants to loot this country. The only solution for this menace is to hang some people in the public so that it acts as a deterrent on others.”
Justices B. N. Agarwal and G. S Singhvi have expressed the same sentiments, but in a milder fashion. They restrained themselves by suggesting “for the bureaucracy in the country to work without corruption, these bureaucrats need to be flogged.”
Had the villagers shouted the same comments at their government, they would have been shot dead or arrested and tortured by now by the administration who would accuse them of crimes, including, but not limited to, ‘inciting violence’; ‘hate speech’; and ‘anti-state activities’. So all the poorest can do is to continue sitting in at the district headquarters for right reasons, claiming that they are betrayed.
The seriousness of the issue and the potential of the gathering are visible from the fact that the BJP leadership is eager to resolve the issue. However, resolution is so far limited to trying to force the villagers to leave the district head quarters. There has been no attempt to address an estimated Rupees 30 Crore that is reportedly stolen from the welfare funds, intended to be distributed to the poor, mostly in the form of wages under the MNREGA.
Understandably, politicians like Patel and the bureaucrats — from the clerk at the village office to the Chief Secretary — cannot afford to throw light upon the alleged theft, since most have enjoyed the fruits of corruption. In this context, it is no surprise that Patel and his counterpart from the district sent to New Delhi, Mr. Makansingh Solanki (Member of Parliament), could gather state government officers to hold a protest against the JADS, demanding that the organisation and its activities be prohibited in the district. They almost succeeded; they managed to obtain an interim order against some of the staff members of the organisation in May this year, prohibiting them from entering Barwani and six other districts. The JADS contested this order, however.
The hold-up in Barwani, against the JADS and the villagers’ protest is ultimately an act of oppression, to cover-up corruption and where authority and power is misused. Officers like the District Magistrate of Barwani finds themselves as helpless pawns in this process of subjugation of justice by fundamentalist and corrupt forces operating in the country.
The protest by the villagers also reflects the question of accessibility of the people to their elected representatives. The aloofness starts from the lowest rungs of political and administrative leadership where people need to take such drastic steps just to put their grievances across to the very same people mandated with addressing them.
The JADS-organised protest is the result of denial by the government in providing information to the queries by the villagers as to why 40 percent of the payments received by the state administration from the union government were neither audited by the state administration nor disbursed to the right persons. The state administration had also ignored the complaints that it had received concerning corruption in the disbursement of assistance. When the JADS demanded expenditure accounts of previous instalments, the government informed the JADS that the work-wise expenditure accounts are not maintained by the administration and that these will have to be collected from the panchayats and other agencies. On 25 August the government gave written assurance to the JADS that the expenditure details for 24 panchayats will be provided to the JADS by 1 September. This, of course was not done.
Instead what is witnessed in Barwani is the alarming fact that the elected representatives, fearing that their corruption will be further exposed, attacking a people’s movement for which the state law and order machinery as well as its administrative apparatus has been misused. Similar in tine and implication was Mr. Kailash Vijayvargiya’s verbal assault upon the protest organised by villagers in Khandwa in September. Vijayvargia is a State Cabinet Minister in the BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh.
The sit-in at Barwani, in essence, is a protest against the ultimate betrayal of the people of India. The events that led to the protest contradict the publicly declared policies of the BJP. That the same political party, which held protest meets at the national capital demanding transparency in government, has on record, stolen from the very people that elected it to power in Madhya Pradesh, is now trying to stifle their protest, for which an MLA and MP are taking the lead on the ground, is the open hypocrisy that India has become. This is what democracy has deteriorated to in India – nothing more than organised betrayal, to regain or retain power.
For information and comments contact:
In Hong Kong: Bijo Francis, Telephone: +852 – 26986339, Email: india@ahrc.asia
In India: Avinash Pandey, Telephone: +91 – 9971581020, Email: avinash.pandey@ahrc.asia
Picture courtesy: Mr. Pallav Thudgar
