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).)