BAREFOOT: Childhoods of hunger and want

Memories of a childhood lived with hunger are stark, and heartbreakingly different from those of all other children. Bansi Sabar from Bolangir in Orissa recalls that his father toiled hard from morning to evening as a bonded halia. He used to eat in his employers' home and would get 15 kg paddy for the whole month. “Whatever food I bring home is always insufficient for you,” his father would cry out in frustration. His mother, though sickly, used to gather different green leaves, flowers, kardi (smooth bamboo), tamarind and mangoes from the forest, which they ate with water-rice. “That was almost all water with a few grains of rice floating in it,” commented Bansi wryly. Many days they had to sleep hungry. Similarly, Drupathi Malik's mother used to collect all the rice they could manage to get in a day and put it in a container, mix it with salt and all the members except her would sit to eat from the same container. She explains that there was never much to justify use of different plates. Their father would allow the children to eat more and later any left over rice or water was eaten by her mother.

Heaviest burden

Destitute women and men whom I have spoken to in many parts of India testify that the burden their hearts finds hardest to bear is to be forced to deny food to one's children. A Sahariya tribal man in Baran, Rajasthan, laments that there are times when his children cry for food, and he feels so desperate that he wishes he could take out his own liver and offer it as nourishment for his children. Bansi Sabar has now grown to mourn the agony of four children who are always hungry. His wife begs for starch water left over after cooking rice from their neighbours for the children. Many days both of them fast to feed their children. His wife becomes weaker and weaker by the day, but she will still trek up the forest slopes to collect mahua and kardi to boil these for food, and her children would protest the foul taste and refuse to eat.

Sheikh Gaffar, an elderly man in Andhra Pradesh, confides about his recurring anguish when his granddaughter “takes a fancy to something and demands it. Shamim, her mother, gives her a slap by painfully raising her paralysed hand, and the child who is, after all, too young to understand the limitations of poverty, sobs herself to sleep.” Laibani, a separated mother, grieves when her children “see the neighbours” children eating biscuits, snacks or chocolate; they come to me and ask me for it. If I have some money or rice to barter at the shop, then I give them something to eat; if not, then I try to explain my predicament to them and promise them something in the near future, a promise I know I will not be able to keep.”

Mani, a young widow in Rajasthan, forcefully breastfeeds her younger daughter, and then leaves her the whole day in the care of her older daughter, barely a year older. They wait desperately for her to return with some food, and Mani herself has lost count of the times she had to sleep hungry. Kamala, another widow, sets aside some money from her earnings from brewing illicit liquor to buy new clothes for her daughters, but never for herself. “Of what use are new clothes to me? If I wear new clothes, people will say that this widow is on the prowl, looking for a man,” she jokes sardonically.

Hunger in the household often makes children themselves take painfully adult decisions about their lives at a very early age. A large number of children I meet on the streets beg when they are very young, and turn to waste-recycling, casual sex work and petty crime to survive, and sometimes also to feed their homeless families. Among the excruciating choices that hunger compels parents and children to make is to pull a child out of schooling into work. Most parents would ideally like to see their children study and have the opportunities for a better life. It is the State that must ensure that every child enters school and every adult is assured food and dignified work. But in households where hunger is a way of life, they see no other realistic option than to starve with them or send them out to work.

Still prevalent

Even more harrowing for a parent than to send out a small child to work, is to send him into debt bondage, which is still not uncommon in many parts of rural, and especially tribal India. Indradeep earned his own food as soon as he was four years old, as a bonded kutia in the sahukar's home in Bolangir. He rose early to graze cows and bullocks and carry food to the fields, all seven days a week, every month of the year without any break. In return, his employers gave him tea and mudhi in the morning and a meal at noon and 12 kilograms paddy for a year as remuneration. As he entered his 21st year, not much had changed except that he graduated into an adult bonded worker or halia.

Indradeep in time married, and only one son, Sadhu, survived. Whenever they would walk past the village school, he noticed how his little son gazed at it with interest and longing. He resolved that whatever it cost him, he would not send his son out to work as a bonded child labourer — as generations in his family had done before him, as long back as they could remember. Instead, he and his wife would willingly shoulder his burden and send him to school. Life held together for them until Sadhu reached 14 years, and had passed Class 7.

Disaster again struck, when Indradeep was diagnosed with TB and nearly died. He was admitted in hospital for prolonged treatment. They sold the little gold which his wife wore in her ears, which had helped bail them out often in the past, when they had mortgaged it for loans at the doorstep of the moneylender. They also mortgaged her gold nose-ring. In the end, Indradeep could survive only with a blinded eye and a crippled body, with loss of normal functioning in one side of the body and heavy burdens of debt. He could no longer depend on his own hard labour, which had been his only wealth.

His young son realised that it was his turn now to assume his responsibilities, which he did readily. On his own, Sadhu took the decision of quietly dropping out of school when his father was admitted in the hospital, and went to work like his father in the fields of landlords, and he grazed their cows. He then got in touch with other people in the village who regularly migrated, and left for the brick-kilns in Hyderabad when he was 14, for an advance of Rs. 900. He has continued to migrate in bonded conditions after that every year. Slowly they were able to repay the loans and sustain themselves. We were witness to his tearful departure one year, when he migrated for an advance of Rs. 8,000. Before leaving, he gave Rs. 500 to his parents and released her mother's nose jewel from mortgage for Rs. 1,000.

It still weighs heavily on Indradeep's heart that the boy could not study. But he is proud that his son is responsible and caring, “He does not waste even a single rupee on himself, and saves it all for his family.”

In this way, each generation valiantly but hopelessly battles hunger, both for the generation that has passed, and the one that is to come.

Hunger in the valley

Even as the larger battles are being fought, Kashmiris have to struggle for simple everyday needs like food and job security…

Whenever Kashmir is mentioned, people tend to think either of an idyllic paradise, or of a valley wrought with the suffering of two decades of violent conflict. The aching reality of the convergence of both these images have tended to exclude Kashmir in the popular imagination from the more everyday discourse of poverty and hunger, governance and the delivery of programmes for disadvantaged people.

Official data suggests that indeed levels of poverty are negligible in the valley. As compared with 28.3 per cent people officially estimated to survive below the poverty line in India in the year 2004-05, the comparable ratio for the state of Jammu and Kashmir in the same year was pegged by the Planning Commission a meagre 4.5 per cent. Kashmir is one of the most egalitarian societies in the country, in which land reforms were implemented with greater vigour than in most other regions of India. In the first decade after India's Independence, big farms were abolished resolutely, and subsequently surplus lands were distributed among landless farmers.

A couple of years ago, I spent 10 days touring villages and slums in Kashmir, investigating the impact of the two decade long conflict on children. Although I did not find evidence during my visit of extreme destitution of the kind I had observed in Bihar, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand, I still observed widespread visible poverty, and struggles for livelihoods and food, across the valley.

Lagging behind

A careful examination of the disaggregated official data also suggests that although overall ratios of poverty are much lower in Jammu and Kashmir than in the rest of India, the state lags behind many others in several specific indicators of poverty. This is a predominantly agrarian economy, in which 80 per cent of the population of the state is dependent on agriculture directly or indirectly. Ninety-seven percent of the cultivators are small or marginal farmers, with average land holdings as small as 0.7 hectares. There has been a worrying deceleration of agricultural production in the state. The valley suffers from a 44 per cent deficit in food grain production, 33 per cent in vegetables and 69 per cent in oilseeds, all of which are imported into the state from the rest of India. These crises of livelihoods have been aggravated by the collapse of the carpet weaving industry, and setbacks to tourism. The per capita income of the state is only two thirds of the national average, at Rs. 17,174 against Rs. 25,907 in India taken as a whole. Its unemployment rate is 4.21 per cent, against a national rate of 3.09 percent.

The great socialist and humanist L.C. Jain who recently passed away, on his deathbed was worried most about the teenaged children who were driven by despair and anger to throw stones at policemen in Kashmir. His dream was: This winter why does not every Indian resolve to wear Kashmiri clothes? “If those young hands have work,” he said with characteristic compassion and wisdom, “only then will they not lift stones.”

The two decade long conflict has gravely impacted on the normal functioning of government at local levels, but it also provided an alibi for public officials to not perform. The failure to hold elections to Panchayats for two decades has meant that people do not have local elected representatives from whom they can seek redress for everyday survival problems. It has also impacted badly on actual implementation and reach of various food, social security and livelihood programmes, critical to the survival with dignity of poor and vulnerable residents of the region.

We decided therefore to undertake a survey of the status of actual implementation of food, social security and livelihood schemes in 50 villages in Kashmir. We took the help of students and alumni of the Department of Social Work in the University of Kashmir in Srinagar, led by my young colleague Tanveer Ahmad Dar.

The researchers found it difficult to even find five job card holders in each of the surveyed villages under the employment guarantee programme JKREGS (the local version of the Mahatma Gandhi NREGA). Those who did could not access an average of more than seven days of work in an entire year. The programme anyway was designed for failure, with wage rates until recently pegged at Rs. 70 rupees a day, whereas the prevailing wage rate is almost double this figure; and no work is provided in winters when hunger and the demand for work is highest. Many officials claim that there is no demand for public wage employment in the valley. But when wages were raised to a more realistic Rs. 110 a day, there was a massive expansion of demand. An unfamiliar state administration is still to gear up now to meet their statutory duty to provide work to all who seek it.

Irregular payments

Only around six per cent eligible women received maternity benefits. The coverage with old age pensions was only slightly better, with 35 per cent eligible aged people being able to access pensions. Pension rates are low, and distributed very irregularly. An old woman we spoke to recalls getting pension only twice a year, on the two Eids. And when the pension dues are accumulated in this way for many months, it is easy for local officials to make large cuts.

Given that this is a food deficit state, the contribution of the Public Distribution System to food security of the residents of Kashmir cannot be over-stated. The researchers found functioning ration shops even in the deep interior, and less than four per cent people did not have ration cards. Most reported that they were able to access the subsidised grain, even if sporadically. But the shops are opened only one or two days in a month, and if they miss their chance, their allocations of food lapse, and are presumably sold in the black-market.

The study found gaps in the opening of ICDS centres in some remote locations, but the supply of hot cooked food to children was heartening. However, in most locations, the centres functioned as little more than feeding points. Children were not weighed, and malnourished children not identified or treated. Few centres run pre-school classes, and expectant mothers are not examined or advised about their nutrition and that of their children. Ninety-eight per cent children reported that they ate hot cooked meals at school, although there are many months in which the meals are not served as supplies to do not reach. Teachers are burdened with this work, instead of this being entrusted to women's groups as in some other parts of the country.

This study indicates some pointers of the colossal unfinished agenda for public officials in the state, to implement various programmes that are critical for the everyday survival, and social and economic development, of the people of Jammu and Kashmir. Even as people and the government must struggle to find a just and peaceful solution to the on-going militant conflict in the Kashmir valley, impoverished women, boys and girls who live in this beautiful but troubled land must in the meanwhile be enabled to survive with dignity. The state government must be held far more accountable than it is at present to secure the rights of people, to food, healthcare, education, livelihoods and security.

In villages I visited in the valley in the past, I heard everywhere grim stories of violent deaths, detention, disappearances, crackdowns and searches. During the study it was strangely almost a relief to hear people clamour instead for ration cards, school meals, pensions and feeding centres. It was an important reminder that even as ‘big' battles play out, the ‘small' battles of everyday survival never cease. People still have to struggle to ensure sufficient food for their children, for decent work, for survival for the aged and infirm. No government should forget this.

Cry, the Beloved Country by Harsh Mander April 04, 2002 00:00

 

There is much that the murdering mobs in Gujarat have robbed from me

Reflections on the Gujarat MassacreNumbed with disgust and horror, I return from Gujarat ten days after the terror and massacre that convulsed the state. My heart is sickened, my soul wearied, my shoulders aching with the burdens of guilt and shame.
As you walk through the camps of riot survivors in Ahmadabad, in which an estimated 53,000 women, men, and children are huddled in 29 temporary settlements, displays of overt grief are unusual. People clutch small bundles of relief materials, all that they now own in the world, with dry and glassy eyes. Some talk in low voices, others busy themselves with the tasks of everyday living in these most basic of shelters, looking for food and milk for children, tending the wounds of the injured.
But once you sit anywhere in these camps, people begin to speak and their words are like masses of pus released by slitting large festering wounds. The horrors that they speak of are so macabre, that my pen falters in the writing. The pitiless brutality against women and small children by organised bands of armed young men is more savage than anything witnessed in the riots that have shamed this nation from time to time during the past century.
I force myself to write a small fraction of all that I heard and saw, because it is important that we all know. Or maybe also because I need to share my own burdens.
What can you say about a woman eight months pregnant who begged to be spared. Her assailants instead slit open her stomach, pulled out her foetus and slaughtered it before her eyes. What can you say about a family of nineteen being killed by flooding their house with water and then electrocuting them with high-tension electricity. What can you say?
A small boy of six in Juhapara camp described how his mother and six brothers and sisters were battered to death before his eyes. He survived only because he fell unconscious, and was taken for dead. A family escaping from Naroda-Patiya, one of the worst-hit settlements in Ahmedabad, spoke of losing a young woman and her three month old son, because a police constable directed her to 'safety' and she found herself instead surrounded by a mob which doused her with kerosene and set her and her baby on fire.
I have never known a riot which has used the sexual subjugation of women so widely as an instrument of violence as in the recent mass barbarity in Gujarat. There are reports every where of gang-rape, of young girls and women, often in the presence of members of their families, followed by their murder by burning alive, or by bludgeoning with a hammer and in one case with a screw driver. Women in the Aman Chowk shelter told appalling stories about how armed men disrobed themselves in front of a group of terrified women to cower them down further.
In Ahmedabad, most people I met - social workers, journalists, survivors - agree that what Gujarat witnessed was not a riot, but a terrorist attack followed by a systematic, planned massacre, a pogrom. Everyone spoke of the pillage and plunder, being organised like a military operation against an external armed enemy. An initial truck would arrive broadcasting inflammatory slogans, soon followed by more trucks which disgorged young men, mostly in khaki shorts and saffron sashes. They were armed with sophisticated explosive materials, country weapons, daggers and trishuls. They also carried water bottles, to sustain them in their exertions. The leaders were seen communicating on mobile telephones from the riot venues, receiving instructions from and reporting back to a co-ordinating centre. Some were seen with documents and computer sheets listing Muslim families and their properties. They had detailed precise knowledge about buildings and businesses held by members of the minority community, such as who were partners say in a restaurant business, or which Muslim homes had Hindu spouses were married who should be spared in the violence. This was not a spontaneous upsurge of mass anger. It was a carefully planned progrom.
The trucks carried quantities of gas cylinders. Rich Muslim homes and business establishments were first systematically looted, stripped down of all their valuables, then cooking gas was released from cylinders into the buildings for several minutes. A trained member of the group then lit the flame which efficiently engulfed the building. In some cases, acetylene gas which is used for welding steel, was employed to explode large concrete buildings. Mosques and dargahs were razed, and were replaced by statues of Hanuman and saffron flags. Some dargahs in Ahmedabad city crossings have overnight been demolished and their sites covered with road building material, and bulldozed so efficiently that these spots are indistinguishable from the rest of the road. Traffic now plies over these former dargahs, as though they never existed.
The unconscionable failures and active connivance of the state police and administrative machinery is also now widely acknowledged. The police is known to have misguided people straight into the hands of rioting mobs. They provided protective shields to crowds bent on pillage, arson, rape and murder, and were deaf to the pleas of the desperate Muslim victims, many of them women and children. There have been many reports of police firing directly mostly at the minority community, which was the target of most of the mob violence. The large majority of arrests are also from the same community which was the main victim of the pogrom.
As one who has served in the Indian Administrative Service for over two decades, I feel great shame at the abdication of duty of my peers in the civil and police administration. The law did not require any of them to await orders from their political superivisors before they organised the decisive use of force to prevent the brutal escalation of violence, and to protect vulnerable women and children from the organised, murderous mobs. The law instead required them to act independently, fearlessly, impartially, decisively, with courage and compassion. If even one official had so acted in Ahmedabad, she or he could have deployed the police forces and called in the army to halt the violence and protect the people in a matter of hours. No riot can continue beyond a few hours without the active connivance of the local police and magistracy. The blood of hundreds of innocents are on the hands of the police and civil authorities of Gujarat, and by sharing in a conspiracy of silence, on the entire higher bureaucracy of the country.
I have heard senior officials blame also the communalism of the police constabulary for their connivance in the violence. This too is a thin and disgraceful alibi. The same forces have been known to act with impartiality and courage when led by officers of professionalism and integrity. The failure is clearly of the leadership of the police and civil services, not of the subordinate men and women in khaki who are trained to obey their orders.
Where also, amidst this savagery, injustice, and human suffering is the 'civil society', the Gandhians, the development workers, the NGOs, the fabled spontaneous Gujarathi philanthropy which was so much in evidence in the earthquake in Kutch and Ahmedabad? The newspapers reported that at the peak of the pogrom, the gates of Sabarmati Asram were closed to protect its properties, it should instead have been the city's major sanctuary. Which Gandhian leaders, or NGO managers, staked their lives to halt the death-dealing throngs? It is one more shame that we as citizens of this country must carry on our already burdened backs, that the camps for the Muslim riot victims in Ahmedabad are being run almost exclusively by Muslim organisations. It is as though the monumental pain, loss, betrayal and injustice suffered by the Muslim people is the concern only of other Muslim people, and the rest of us have no share in the responsibility to assuage, to heal and rebuild. The state, which bears the primary responsibility to extend both protection and relief to its vulnerable citizens, was nowhere in evidence in any of the camps, to manage, organise the security, or even to provide the resources that are required to feed the tens of thousands of defenceless women, men and children huddled in these camps for safety.
The only passing moments of pride and hope that I experienced in Gujarat, were when I saw men like Mujid Ahmed and women like Roshan Bahen who served in these camps with tireless, dogged humanism amidst the ruins around them. In the Aman Chowk camp, women blessed the young band of volunteers who worked from four in the morning until after midnight to ensure that none of their children went without food or milk, or that their wounds remained untended. Their leader Mujid Ahmed is a graduate, his small chemical dyes factory has been burnt down, but he has had no time to worry about his own loss. Each day he has to find 1600 kilograms of foodgrain to feed some 5000 people who have taken shelter in the camp. The challenge is even greater for Roshan Bahen, almost 60, who wipes her eyes each time she hears the stories of horror by the residents in Juapara camp. But she too has no time for the luxuries of grief or anger. She barely sleeps, as her volunteers, mainly working class Muslim women and men from the humble tenements around the camp, provide temporary toilets, food and solace to the hundreds who have gathered in the grounds of a primary school to escape the ferocity of merciless mobs.
As I walked through the camps, I wondered what Gandhiji would have done in these dark hours. I recall the story of the Calcutta riots, when Gandhi was fasting for peace. A Hindu man came to him, to speak of his young boy who had been killed by Muslim mobs, and of the depth of his anger and longing for revenge. And Gandhi is said to have replied: If you really wish to overcome your pain, find a young boy, just as young as your son, a Muslim boy whose parents have been killed by Hindu mobs. Bring up that boy like you would your own son, but bring him up with the Muslim faith to which he was born. Only then will you find that you can heal your pain, your anger, and your longing for retribution.
There are no voices like Gandhi's that we hear today. Only discourses on Newtonian physics, to justify vengeance on innocents. We need to find these voices within our own hearts, we need to believe enough in justice, love, tolerance.
There is much that the murdering mobs in Gujarat have robbed from me. One of them is a song I often sang with pride and conviction. The words of the song are:
Sare jahan se achha
Hindustan hamara.
It is a song I will never be able to sing again.