Frustrated by unemployment, envious of the Meenas’
gains, betrayed by the BJP, Gurjars in Rajasthan are only making their
anger felt, reports Shivam Vij
Photos
Shailendra Pandey |
| |
The
Gurjars want to downgrade themselves to ST status only because
that will help them elevate their status from shepherds to babus |
In rural Rajasthan,
as in much of rural India, the mode of travel on the highways is an
archaic-looking ten-seater vehicle. Passengers hitch a ride for a few
rupees to go from one village to another. They huddle together like
sardines in a can. Some hang precariously outside the vehicle, holding
on to a handle, their feet on the footboard. Others, particularly women
who are not willing to risk their dignity and lives, just get left behind
and wait for hours for another vehicle to arrive. Sometimes they don’t
get a ride at all, and return home, their patience unrewarded. One such
vehicle that Tehelka encountered in Alwar was appropriately blaring
the Adnan Sami song, Lift Kara De.
The story of affirmative
action for the Gurjars in Rajasthan is the story of a ten-seater passenger
vehicle plying without a licence from the transport authority. Very
little room and too many people waiting to hop on aboard.
Kailash Poswol,
in his early forties, is one of those who managed to board the bus.
A patwari in the state revenue department in Alwar’s Ramgarh tehsil,
Poswol is erecting what seems like the tallest building in the area.
It is called Gurjar Sadan, and perhaps because it seems a little out
of proportion to the salary he draws that Poswol is unwilling to be
photographed in the courtyard outside. But he is most happy to pose
in his nearly-complete bedroom, which already has eight black and white
photographs of him taken at different stages in his life. The social
mobility gained by his family over three generations is as dramatic
as the differences in Poswol’s features in the photographs. Poswol’s
grandfather did what the caste system had ordained for the Gurjars:
he reared goat and sheep, took them out to graze in the fields, sold
their milk and offspring. But he did one thing different: he put his
son in a school. Fateh Singh, Poswol’s father, read till Class
v. This proved enough for him to become a primary school teacher. This
was a few decades ago, and at the time he was the only school teacher
between several villages. In time he studied further, completing his
b.ed, and put Kailash through higher secondary. Kailash’s two
children, both in high school, are dreaming even bigger.
FLASHPOINT
RAJASTHAN |
Naorem
Ashish |
Poswol’s house
is the first one in this Gurjar basti. The ones after it don’t
have similar stories. Some of them are not even pucca houses, with sheep
and buffaloes jostling for space with people. Like Hira Lal’s,
who works as a labourer in the fields. He lives in a joint family of
25 people and supports the agitation for granting Scheduled Tribe status
to the Gurjars. “The general category is for children of the rich
and those employed by the government,” he says, as if “general”
was also “reserved”.
The story of the
Gurjar unrest is a story of agrarian distress. Meet Male Khan, an old
man grazing 20-odd goats in a field in Alwar. He earns at the most three
thousand rupees a month from them, and has to feed two children who
are in classes 9 and 10. He used to earn a lot more from his fields,
but there’s no irrigation. Agriculture won’t work out and
the cattle earn him peanuts. That can’t be the situation he can
leave his children in.
But even if Male
Khan manages to put his children through college, getting them jobs
would be nearly impossible. Unemployment is the central reason behind
the Gurjar upsurge. One of the agitators was Harmukh Singh, who has
a ba from Alwar’s Rajrishi College. For three years, he has been
filling up all the forms for government jobs in vain.
“Nowhere else
in the world is there competition to assert backwardness and then to
claim we are more backward than you.” These words of the Supreme
Court, while quashing the Central law extending OBC reservations to
all centrally-funded educational institutions, have been much quoted.
But the truth is that the Gurjars want to downgrade themselves to st
status only because that will help them elevate their status from shepherds
to babus. Like Rajesh Kumar in Alwar, who doesn’t want to graze
cattle and grow mustard and barley like his father. He hopes his ba
in History, Political Science and Hindi will get him a job some day
— if not in the police or the Army then in some government department.
Masters degree
holder Sumer Singh of Nisura village in Dausa has also been hoping against
hope. When the Rajasthan Public Service Commission advertised for 30,000
school teacher jobs, 30 Gurjars from his village applied. Despite 8,000
of the vacancies being reserved for OBCs, none of the 30 got in.
At
delhi’s gates: a lathicharge in Aya Nagar on the
capital’s outskirts |
| |
A
day after the police firing, a cartoon in Rajasthan Patrika described
home minister Gulab Chand Kataria as Goli Chand Kataria |
The police and the
Army, school teachers and peons, railway clerks and village patwaris
— these are jobs that won’t (legally) earn them more than
a few thousand rupees a month, but even that job security is better
than grazing cattle, selling milk, growing wheat and mustard on land
that doesn’t grow anything anymore. Outside Jaipur, there is no
such thing as the private sector.
Like Sumer Singh,
Ram Kiladi is also amongst the 20,000 protesters who sat under the open
skies in Patoli, 40 km from Dausa. “Seeing that education does
not get us jobs,” says Kiladi, “many Gurjar families in
villages see no point in putting children through school and college.”
The OBC list for
Rajasthan includes more than 60 castes and though they together make
up more than 40 percent of the population, the collective quota for
them is only 27 percent. During the 1999 Lok Sabha election campaign,
Atal Behari Vajpayee promised the Jats that he would include them in
the OBC category, a move that remains controversial but won the Jats,
who make up over 10 percent of the state’s population, over to
the BJP. But the Gurjar Arakshan Sangharsh Samiti says that even before
the inclusion of the Jats, the Gurjars were hardly able to exploit the
27 percent quota. Many states have solved similar situations by dividing
the OBC pie into OBC and Most Backward Classes (MBC), but neither the
Gurjars nor the Rajasthan government have made any noises for such a
split.
For the Gurjars,
this has to do with direct competition with the Meenas. “Gurjars
are the other side of the Meena coin,” says Colonel Kirori Singh
Bainsla. “It’s not envy,” says Ram Kiladi, an unemployed
Gurjar youth.
“Our culture
is the same, our status in the villages is the same, we live side by
side, share the same well and smoke hookah together. Why then do they
get the jobs and scholarships but we don’t?”
Bainsla says this
is because the Meenas were given st status in 1954. “Reservations
provide a sort of guarantee,” he says. “Give that guarantee
to everybody or nobody.”
So if the BJP had
promised the Gurjars st status during the elections, why did it not
fulfil the promise? “Who says we made this promise? Have you read
the manifesto?” asks BJP’s Rajasthan state cell president
Mahesh Sharma.
Having pulled the
rug from under the Congress’ feet by wooing Jats in the Lok Sabha
elections, the BJP found itself facing another challenge in the Vidhan
Sabha elections. During the fag end of Congress rule, Vasundhara Raje
took out Parivartan Yatras wherein, in the words of a veteran BJP leader
in Rajasthan, “she promised everyone everything.” In personal
meetings with Gurjar leaders and in public speeches, she promised them
st status. Her son Dushyant Singh, the mp from Jhalawar, is married
to a Gurjar from Uttar Pradesh, and so Raje apparently called Gurjars
her “samdhan”. When she came to power, though, she conveniently
forgot the idea: Gurjar mlas weren’t a powerful enough lobby.
In a House of 200, the BJP won 120. Of these, 20 were won by Meenas
and six by Gurjars. The Congress tally was six Meenas and two Gurjars.
The betrayal of
the promise has deeply hurt many ordinary Gurjars who say they had been
completely wooed by the BJP. At the first barricade that Tehelka encountered
in Dausa, manned by an ex-serviceman, one activist said, “Just
because we graze cattle, they think they can treat us like cattle to
be herded during elections. But we are not your cattle!”
