"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!