"Build toilets, not temples"

“Build toilets, not temples,” said a sanitary inspector I met with in Surendranagar. I thought this was a great statement given the amount of money and labor that is spent on building temples in Gujarat, while the majority of the state lacks access to proper sanitation. The dry latrines and open fields that people are forced to defecate in are cleaned by what are known as “manual scavengers” – humans, 99% percent of whom are Dalits and 95% of whom are women, who are made to clean them with a simple broom and basket. We hear a lot about “Vibrant Gujarat” and the amount of economic progress the state is going through thanks to the growth of industry and NRG (non-resident Gujaratis) investment. Yet, “Vibrant Gujarat” still has humans cleaning other humans’ shit. Is that called progress?

The Government of Gujarat passed a law abolishing the practice of manual scavenging years ago and has claimed time and time again that this practice no longer exists in “Gandhi’s Gujarat.” However, the continued practice of manual scavenging has been clearly documented and I plan to further document its existence over the rest of my time here. What is more is that the Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, glorifies this inhumane occupation Dalits are relegated to. In his recent book, Karmayog, Modi states, “Scavenging must have been a spiritual experience for the Valmiki caste.” He later goes on to say, “At some point in time somebody must have got enlightenment in scavenging. They must have thought that it is their duty to work for the happiness of the entire society and the Gods.” With a Chief Minister who thinks like this, how can we believe that there exists political will to end this practice in Gujarat? (My director’s response to this statement in the magazine Outlook was priceless. It was something to the effect of, “If it is such a spiritually enlightening experience, why doesn’t Modi go clean somebody’s shit to spiritually enlighten himself?”)

Many people claim that Dalits don’t want to stop working as scavengers. Obviously this is partly due to the fact that their status in life has left them with no other opportunities. But even when they are trained to some other work, if the upper-caste community refuses to interact with them, how can they truly have access to the markets? Beyond these concerns lies a strong psychological barrier to ending Dalit women’s work as manual scavengers. Meeting with some of them in the sanitary inspector’s office in Surendranagar that day, made me realize that centuries of being told that it is by the word of God that they must do this work has certainly taken its toll in the psyche of manual scavengers. No matter how much we told them we could train them to do other work, they seemed to think this was the only work they could and were meant to do….

I am currently in Delhi meeting with a network of NGOs around the country working to end manual scavenging. The conference was lead by Bejawada Wilson, an activist who himself was a manual scavenger as a child. His story of overcoming the caste system’s rules forcing him to work as a manual scavenger his whole life was inspiring. We spent one day of the conference protesting in the streets of Delhi calling for the government of India to focus its efforts on ending manual scavenging. Sitting side-by-side with others like Wilson was an incredible experience. We sang songs about ending this practice. One that I loved the most changed the lyrics to “Aisa desh hai mera,” from the film Veer Zaara, originally describing how beautiful India (and Pakistan) is, to lyrics portraying the invisible lives of manual scavengers in India:

Kahna ke liye roti nahi…..
Kahna ke liye roti nahi…
Pine ke liye pani nahi
Sohna ke liye kamra nahi
Dekho mera bhai, aisa desh hai mera….*

(there is no roti to eat, there is no water to drink, there is no room to sleep in, this is how my country is…)

*there are many more powerful lyrics to this song, but this was all I could remember!

Caste, gender and water

I recently went to a village in a nearby district (Surendranagar) to investigate the water situation there. A few months back Navsarjan had heard that none of the OBCs* in the village were able to access the limited amount of clean water flowing into the village, and so Navsarjan held a rally there. Navsarjan helped organized the OBCs in the community to put pressure on the village council to do their job and ensure their access to safe drinking water. When I returned to the village with Navsarjan a couple of weeks ago, we learned from the OBC villagers that while water is now flowing through the pipeline for half the village, the upper-caste (Rajputs) in the village are usurping it all for themselves, so that there is none left to flow to the part of the village where the OBCs live.

We sat with the members of the OBC community to discuss in detail their lack of access to clean water and how it’s affected their lives. While many women from the community attended the meeting, the meeting began with most of the men doing the talking. However, we pushed for the women to speak. After all, we knew that it was the women of the community who were fetching water for their families, so who would know better about the water situation than them?** The women were reluctant at first, but we eventually were able to pressure them to speak up. We learned from them that the only water that was available for them to use was from a nearby pond. As a result, they were drinking the water from the same still water that they washed their dishes, clothes and themselves in. They showed us a glass of the water they were forced to drink, it was a sharp green color:

The women explained the stomach illnesses their children constantly suffered from. Soon thereafter, the deputy sarpanch (i.e., the deputy village leader) joined the meeting. He was from the upper-caste community. Upon hearing that Navsarjan had come to speak with them, he definitely had become anxious. Knowing the trouble we caused for the upper-caste community the last time we were there, he wanted to assure us that no water problem existed in the village. As he stumbled on his words and made contradictory statements, we interrupted him and asked him to prove to us he didn’t discriminate against the low-caste people in his village. We asked him to take some chai from the house of a low-caste family, from the hands of a low-caste person. He went on and on about how that wasn’t a problem for him. He took the chai from the person’s hands but then set it down on the ground. We asked him to drink it. He said “Yes, don’t worry, I’ll drink it.” But he wasn’t picking it up. After we kept pressuring him to drink the chai in front of his, he brought the cup of chai to his mouth, hands visibly shaking the entire way.

We then went with the deputy sarpanch to meet the rest of the village leaders at the sarpanch’s (village leader’s) home. While one would ordinarily be happy to know that the sarpanch of this village is a woman from the OBC community, it became very clear, very fast that this was only to fulfill the Constitutionally-mandated reservations for women and OBCs in panchayats. Breaking down the superficiality of the gender equality her status is meant to show, I learned there is a term specially created for the actual power that her husband holds. While the head of the panchayat is a called a sarpanch, when a woman is the sarpanch, her husband is known as the sarpanch-pati (pati = husband). The fact that a title was even made for him in the first place shows how common it is that even though a woman has been elected into a position of power, the gender dynamics of the community (and society at large) are such that it is actually the man the wields the power. Even as we sat there before the sarpanch to discuss the water situation, her husband kept asking her to make chai for all of his, as he would answer our questions. She was about to obey his command, until we insisted that she sit and talk to us, and that if her husband wanted chai, he could make it himself. Breaking down the superficiality of caste equality, while the sarpanch and her husband were both members of the OBC community, it was really the deputy sarpanch, who was a member of the upper-caste community, that ruled this village council. The answers given in response to our questions by the sarpanch and the sarpanch-pati, in the presence of the deputy sarpanch, were a clear testament to this reality. It was quite a lesson in the gender and caste dynamics of a Gujarati village council.

They showed us the water they supposedly got from the village pond – it was crystal clear. They explained that the OBCs in the village were superstitious and never went to the pond to get their water. And so they didn’t drink the crystal clear water the upper-caste members of the village drank. I’m sorry but since when is pond water crystal clear? We outright told them we knew they were lying to us, and that water had to have been bought from the nearby town. We then threatened to bring this case to the high court to direct the village council to properly use the funds dispersed to them by the government to build a pipeline that reaches the entire village. We’ve decided that if when we return in a month, the pipeline is still not yet built, I will help take this case to the high court.
My professor and mentor from law school, Smita Narula, who is also the reason why I’m here doing this work, was on the visit with us, and she hoped to use this case as an example at the international level of how the pervasive caste discrimination that exists in India violates the economic and social rights of the lower-caste and “untouchable” communities. Before we parted ways with the OBCs of this community, we explained to them who we were and why we wanted to speak them. I was asked to explain to them in Gujarati the report I co-authored last year for the UN (see the side bar of this page). After passing around our report, the sweetest baby girl took to “reading” it. I think this is now one of my most treasured photos:

*Other Backward Classes – i.e., low caste people still within the caste system, unlike Dalits (“untouchables”) who fall outside the caste system

** The whole situation immediately brought to my mind one of the most insightful excerpts from a journal article I had ever read:

“In Rajasthan [India]…a woman could walk seven or eight kilometers to fetch water for her household, carrying it back on her head. When the men of her family would come home and ask for water, it would be there, cooling in the corner in a big brass jar. Consequently, the men would not perceive the availability of safe, clean water as a local problem that needs to be addressed. There is a certain logic to it: the person who carries the big brass jug on her head is always going to be more motivated to find a way to shorten the distance between the water’s source and the place where the water is needed.” (Louise Harmon and Eileen Kaufman, Dazzling the world: A study of India’s Constitutional amendment mandating reservations for women on rural panchayats, 19 Berkeley Women’s L.J. 32, 82 (2004).)

Incredible faith in the legal system

I went to observe one of our cases in the Sessions Court (i.e. trial court) in Anand (east of Ahmedabad, but still pretty central Gujarat). Navsarjan was aiding the government in its prosecution of some upper-caste persons who murdered a Dalit man. I sat with his sister-in-law – an incredibly strong woman – to hear her story.

Navratri is a cherished festival of Gujaratis. Not surprising as its celebration consists of nine nights of dancing in gorgeous clothes. So it wasn’t surprising that when Navratri rolled around one year, this woman’s children and nieces and nephews wanted to be able join in their village’s festivities. When they tried to join into the garba (Gujarati folk dance) one night, they were yelled at, with the upper-caste sarpanch’s (village leader’s) son claiming that their presence was making the crowd go away. A fight ensued and since then, there existed much tension between that boy’s upper-caste family and the Dalit family. The former harassed the latter for several years—coming to their house to threaten and abuse them. When the woman I was speaking with wanted to file complaints, her family stopped her over and over again. As the threats became more serious, she just decided something needed to be done to end it, as she thought “it was better to die than continue living like this.” So she submitted several complaints to the police, who subsequently ignored them. In retaliation, the upper-caste family murdered her brother-in-law.

Our lawyers were helping the family with what came down to three cases: the original harassment, the subsequent police neglect and the murder. The day I went to observe the trial, it was this woman’s turn to take the stand. The composure in which she strongly and clearly told her story, especially given what she has been through, thoroughly impressed me. When I was talking to her, she kept repeating how uneducated she is and how she had never even set foot in a courtroom until now—you would never have guessed with the way she delivered her testimony. She told me she was planning on coming back to court every day until her family finally saw justice. Seeing such faith in the rule of law, when the rule of law so badly failed her family, was incredible...

The invisible strength of empowerment

I went with some of my co-workers to Shinur, near Baroda (eastern part of Gujarat). This region of Gujarat is beautiful – lush and green, with willow-like trees bending over winding roads and beautiful lakes. So different from the dry, dusty north part of Gujarat where my last field visit was or the industry heavy district of Ahmedabad, where I live. Shinur is a quaint, old small town right on the infamous Narmada river, where our field workers’ office is located. We met with the local police there to better sensitize them to Dalit rights and Dalit-protective legislation. Given the good relationship Navsarjan’s human rights defenders have developed with the local police, they seemed pretty receptive to us.

We then visited a Dalit and adivasi (tribal) community in a small nearby village to meet with their panchayat – the village governing body. Sitting under the village pavilion waiting for the members of the panchayat and the rest of the community to arrive, I almost couldn’t believe I was there. After having written so many papers involving the strengths and weaknesses of this localized governing structure, it seemed unreal to me that I was going be to sitting with one to discuss the issues this villages was facing.

The sarpanch (the leader of the panchayat) there is currently a woman – one of the strengths of the panchayat system. Both because reserved seats for women on a panchayat are constitutionally mandated and because localized governance structures are more accessible and relevant to the lives of poor, rural women, it’s not unusual to find women in a position of power here. But it was funny because even though the panchayat runs under this woman’s leadership, she was very shy around us, and more of the men answered our questions before she would. But when they spoke, it appeared to me that they actually did respect her and her ability to lead their village decision-making body.

It is an agricultural community in the sense that most, if not all, of the people in this village work as agricultural laborers on the Patels’ (the upper-caste*) farms. For the longest time, they were receiving no more than 20 rupees (~ USD 0.50) /day from the Patels for their work – about a third of the legally mandated minimum wage. While there exists a law protecting Dalit and adivasi ownership of land, most of the land allocated to these marginalized communities is uncultivable, forcing them to toil away as laborers on the upper-caste farms in order to provide for themselves and their families. Their days would last 12 hours, and during the dry season, the men would have to go and water the farms after work hours—a task they received no extra wages for.

The Patels got around the minimum wage law and its reporting requirements by keeping registers of false wages and having their Dalit and adivasi laborers, who are illiterate, give them thumb print on them certifying the amount they were getting paid. Such tricks are almost as old as time, but my mother had an interesting comment to make on this fact when I talked to her later that week. When the Patels served mostly as agricultural laborers on the Shahs’ farms a long time ago, they had received the same treatment the Patels are now meting out on Dalits and adivsasis. I guess in this world you either have one of two initial instincts: you can either learn from the pain you suffered and prevent that from happening to someone else, or believe that what you suffered was the natural order of things, and now that you’ve risen above it, it’s time for someone else to have to go through it. Depending on the context, many of us like the Patels’ in this situation follow the latter, whether we’d like to admit it or not….

When Navsarjan found out about their situation, they had stepped in and helped the community organize. Feeling empowered, the community went on strike and stood their ground in front of their employers. As a result, their work hours decreased and their wages increased to 50 rupees/day. While their wages are more than double what they used to be, because of inflation and the fact that 50 rupees/day still comes out to only a little more than USD 1/day, the families of this village are still struggling to survive.

But picture is not so bleak. Empowerment is, for the lack of a better word, incredibly powerful. This village’s success story has spread to other similarly-situated communities. While they were on strike, their neighboring villages shared their grains for them to live off of. Partly out of sheer human compassion I’m sure, but also partly due to the fact that I think that victims of a situation feel empowered when they see others like them fighting against it. Since hearing this village’s success in getting higher wages, other villages have begun to organize themselves to do the same.

But even within the community, the empowerment of the adults was quietly observed and adopted by their children. A group of middle-school aged girls and boys came and shared with us their stories of discrimination by the Patel children and teachers in the neighboring community. They told us how if they rode their bikes through the Patel village, the Patel kids would beat them up, and how in schools the teachers would force them to make tea, and do other chores rather than schoolwork. But then they too began slowly standing up for their rights, and going to the police to report this kind of abuse and harassment. Since then, the harassment has decreased and the teachers have begun to respect their right to education (though, grudgingly, I’m sure). This empowerment is also partly the result of these Bhimshalas that Navsarjan set up in such communities, where the children get proper tuition (tutoring) after school from Navsarjan volunteers – apart from regular lessons, as in the school I described in an earlier post, they’re taught to value themselves higher than their society does. The ability of these kids to now stand up for their rights at an age when most kids don’t even know they have rights shows that the strength of human rights education should never be underestimated…

*While I refer to the Patels as “upper-caste”, I mean as relative to the Dalits, those falling below the caste system. However, within the caste system, the Patels are actually pretty low.

Out in the Field: The romantic/un-romantic side of human rights work

I want to describe one of the field visits I went on for work to give you a snapshot of some of the issues I’ll be working on. My first week of work, I traveled with a colleague to Palanpur in Northern Gujarat. We spent two days interviewing victims of atrocities and their perpetrators, and manual scavengers* who hadn’t been paid for 6 months for their work. Each and every one of their stories was heartwrenching. However, we were able to make immediate change for one of the victims. The widow of a Dalit man who had been murdered by upper-caste villagers and her community had been camped outside of the Collector’s office (sort of like the public prosecutor) for 8 days waiting to be seen by him, to demand that the murderers be arrested. After listening to their stories, we drafted a letter for the Collector on behalf of our organization listing their demands and took a group of them into the Collector’s office with us. Since we were there, the Collector agreed to meet with them. The next day, the accused who had been at large for 3 weeks were finally arrested.

While doing a field visit like this was a dream come true for me, it was as taxing, both physically and emotionally, as one would imagine. I had never been so homesick in my life as I was while I was there those two days, and I couldn’t understand why. But now that I reflect on it, I think that after being around people whose security was so severely threatened made me just want to be in the place I feel the most secure – at home with my family.

*I posted a link to a video below (“I’m Dalit, How are you?” on manual scavenging in Gujarat.

My placement: Navsarjan

In addition to the legal work my NGO does (which I will talk more about in another post), Navsarjan has several schools set up for Dalit children. Their biggest school serves as a vocational high school for Dalit children to expand their vocational skill set so they are empowered into believing that despite the caste system, they are neither predestined to do any one specific job nor must the work they do be humiliating and degrading. They also have several primary schools. On my visit to one, some of the children preformed a song and dance for us. While the style of the music was typical Gujarati folk music (garba), very familiar to me, the words these kids sang were not. Instead of singing about getting water from the river or going to a fair, like many of these folk songs that I danced to as a little girl are about, they sang about the fact that when they are in government schools the teachers make them sit in the back and refuse to call on them. But now they’ve learned that they are worth more than that and that they will fight back against the discrimination they face and demand to be treated as humans. While I was proud of them for recognizing their self-worth, I thought at that moment that no child should have to sing a song like that in the first place.

"The Land of Contrasts"

The common theme throughout all the presentations at orientation was that India is a land of contrasts. The moment you try to make a blanket statement about India, it will be contradicted. While I think I’ve always known this given how incredibly diverse this country is, this is my first trip to India where I’ve been trying to catalogue these contrasts in my head. I’ll describe a few.

Caste discrimination: While waiting to get into a supposed exclusive club in Delhi one Saturday night, the crowd outside the club started to get restless. Wanting everyone in line to chill, a guy behind me in line said something to the effect of, “I’m Brahmin, we’re peaceful people.” I was so irritated by the fact that he thought his caste was relevant to the situation. But before I could even complete my thought, the woman in front of me in line retorted something to the effect of “You’re a racist is what you are.” I smiled. I didn’t have to say a word. In my rural visit in Rajasthan, I met two teenage girls who were students there. As we introduced ourselves to each other, one asked me what my caste was. I asked her why she was asking me that question. She said it was just to get to know me. I told her I didn’t think it mattered what caste I was. Her friend standing next to her jumped in saying, “My grandmother says it doesn’t matter what caste anyone is; we’re all human first.” I smiled again. Again, I didn’t have to say a word.

Religious discrimination: At some point during my 16-hour train ride from Delhi to Ahmedabad, a young Muslim man in my compartment, laid out his mat and began to pray while surrounded by a Hindu family. The family had a little child who had been running around the compartment until then. But when this Muslim man started his prayers, the father of the little Hindu boy picked up his son and told him to not to bother the man because he’s praying. I smiled because such respect for an outward display of religion different from yours is not something you really see in the States. But then I reached the state of Gujarat, the site of the massacre of 2,000+ Muslims by Hindu fundamentalists 5 and half years ago, and I traveled through a section of the city informally called “Little Pakistan,” where many Muslims were displaced and segregated from the rest of the city, where no government hospitals or schools are found.

"Validating our work" in the land of lions, tigers and snakes

Our orientation included a rural site visit to Rajasthan’s Alwar District. Though I had known that Rajasthan was supposed to be one of the most beautiful states in India, it didn’t really hit me until we were there. We made a trek to a school set up by an NGO called Bodh, where we stayed the night – we were told that we might see lions, tigers and snakes. Sadly, I didn’t see any, but the beauty and simplicity of living at the campus that we stayed at matched only in comparison to the farm I once lived on in Honduras. It was breathtaking. We spent part of our day visiting one of Bodh’s schools. Bodh provides an alternative to the government schools found in the rural areas of this district, where the children’s voices are suppressed and discipline is a carried out by a stick. Bodh encourages their students to question their teachers and treats them with more respect than is shown to them in the government schools. Bodh concurrently tries to train government teachers in this model so that their method reaches more children and becomes sustainable in the community. We sat in on one of their lessons, during which some of the children read me the stories they had written as part of an assignment. After their lesson, we played Kabadi in the playground. A game sort of like tag and wrestling put together, needless to say when I tried to play, one of the other fellows, Brian, knocked me out immediately.

While in Rajasthan, we also visited a group of women in a farming community who are clients of a microfinance organization. In microfinance parlance, their group is called an SHG – a self-help group. The women told us about how they run their meetings, how their loans are used (mostly for water buffalos – the animal that to me symbolizes rural India), and most interesting to me, the other ways their meetings have helped improve their lives and their communities. For example, by working together, they were able to get the teacher to regularly come to their children’s school. In other words, they used the social capital they created through this network to aid in the social development of their community. I spent a lot of time in my last year of law school reading and writing about the social capital that arises out of microfinance initiatives. I honestly believe that this capital created through social networks is what sustains a community. When women—the backbone of society—are able to create social capital and use it alongside the financial capital they’ve been given through microfinance initiatives is when true development can occur.

I labeled this post as “validating our work” to quote another fellow in our program. He had worked with the Grameen Foundation in the States (an NGO that focuses on microfinance initiatives) prior to this fellowship – and for him, meeting the women of this self-help group in Rajasthan and seeing how the microfinance initiative improved their lives really validated the work he had been doing over the past few years. I know that we all felt that way in some shape or form throughout orientation so I thought quoting him encapsulated what I took away from those two weeks.

OPV – an unbelievable morning in Uttar Pradesh

My middle school was named after Jonas Salk – and all I heard about when I was going to school there was how he developed the vaccine that eradicated polio. Years later when I was at the UN, I remember seeing a clock in the lobby of the UN building counting down the eradication of polio throughout the world based on the number of vaccinations administered, and realized how little of the story of polio I had been told about as a child.

Rotary International funds a program whereby the oral polio vaccine (much cheaper to administer than the injection) is administered once a month in the areas in India most plagued by polio, including the state of Uttar Pradesh. So one Sunday in September, I had a chance to travel to Uttar Pradesh with some of the other fellows to a Muslim town in UP where stalls were set up on the street to administer the oral vaccine to children under the age of 5. In order to fully eradicate the disease in a community, every child under the age of 5 must be fully vaccinated. Unfortunately, similar to the reception anti-retroviral drugs have received in many parts of Africa, there are some in these Muslim communities who believe the polio vaccine is a conspiracy of Hindus trying to wipe out Muslim men in India. As a result, some families will hide their sons on vaccination days, but allow their daughters to get vaccinated. A weird twist of events given that the trend in India is female infanticide. The volunteers of this program, thus, vigorously focus their efforts in these communities, both by setting up these stalls and by going door to door to make sure as many children are covered as possible.

I had the incredible opportunity to actually place two drops of the oral polio vaccine into a little boy’s mouth. (He was not very happy about it!) Our being there did cause quite a stir in the neighborhood with all the children wanting to have their pictures taken on our digital cameras. Normally, I hate making a spectacle of myself in a foreign country, but this was one time I didn’t mind, as it drew more children to the stalls!

The angels and elite of Delhi

The first two weeks of my fellowship were spent in Delhi, as part of an orientation program set up by AIF. We spent our days listening to different speakers from various parts of Indian society, including representatives from NGOs (non-governmental organizations) working on development, the former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, a journalist, a feminist publisher, the director of the National Gallery of Modern Art (who gave us a private tour of the gallery!*) and the list goes on. The diversity of India is truly reflected in the endless layers of political, economic and social issues the country deals with on a day to day basis. Our speakers exposed us to the wide range of problems facing India and at the same time, shared with us some truly inspiration stories about what they have accomplished for this country. From improving the livelihoods of bicycle rickshaw-pullers to uncovering a World Bank scheme to make water harder to access in Delhi in order to benefit an American corporation to publishing a book on women’s health created by poor, rural women to educate themselves and others, the people who work for these NGOs are no less than angels. Each day I was inspired to continue on my chosen career path and at the same time reminded about how frustrating and difficult that path would be.

However, beyond the formal presentations of orientation, I had the wonderful opportunity to learn from the 28 fellows joining me on this program. Given that we all come from different backgrounds (law, health, education, social work, finance, etc.), but share one common passion—to be a part of the social development of India, the discussions that would arise among us after each lecture were great learning opportunities on their own.

There were some other prominent and inspiring people that we met who sit on the AIF board of directors. I’ll refrain from going into detail of who they all are here, but there was one person I met worth noting for you fellow Bollywood fans out there: the owner of the production company that produced films like Saathiya and Mangal Pandey! Sadly, my lifelong dream to be recruited for a Bollywood film was not fulfilled that night…

* We were invited by the Director of the National Gallery of Modern Art to visit the gallery after hours and attend a private lecture about Indian classical and contemporary art by him and Anjolie Ela Menon, a renowned Indian artist. Given that the kind of Indian art that is usually displayed in museums in the West, I hadn’t realized how very much alive the Indian contemporary art scene is. If only such pieces had more prominence in the West would some of the exotification of India die down – Indian art is not just about ancient carvings, Hindu gods and the Kama Sutra...