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Pushed Out Of Town

The meeting was held one gorgeous Sunday afternoon in the SP High School quadrangle in the town of Santrampur, Gujarat. As always, the women and men sat separately: the women in a colourful collection on the ground, the men on benches on either side. In the large field outside, a keen cricket match was in progress, watched by what seemed to be half of the little town's residents. But some of the residents had chosen to miss the match, chosen instead to meet here, to listen to several speeches.

Kanji Patel, a Sahitya Akademi Award winning author who teaches in the nearby town of Lunavada, made one of those speeches. In the car as we drove to Santrampur, he told me this was the third in a series of meetings over about a month-and-a-half. Various Central Gujarat denotified and nomadic tribes gathered at these meetings to discuss their problems, to learn about their rights. With each meeting, said Patel, the josh, the enthusiasm, is rising. For the first time, members of DNTs -- like Vadis, Chamthas, Vichpadas, Nats, Vagharis, Bajanias and others -- are coming together, finding ways around their own mutual dislikes, finding a common voice.

The common voice is vital. For the treatment DNTs receive from society, as Patel told his audience, is "without dignity and full of prejudice and hatred." Since British times, when many of these communities were termed criminal in the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act, they have been viewed with suspicion and hatred. Even though Independent India repealed that Act in 1952, suspicion and hatred remains an indelible part of DNT life: one Vaghari man at the Santrampur meeting told me his two boys were asked to leave the local school simply because they were Vaghari.

One by one, the speeches were made. After a while, I noticed a few men gathered at one end of the quadrangle, taking a beedi break from listening to the men on stage. I walked over and asked if we could chat. They were most eager, and within minutes our little conversation proved to be enough of an alternate attraction to the gathered DNTs that I got an urgent message asking us to keep our voices down.

Low voices or not, the things I heard from the men served only to cloud over the sunny day for me. Kalyanbhai Rumalbhai Vadi, an agricultural worker, managed to keep his children in school till the 10th standard. But now that they have finished school, nobody in town is willing to give them jobs; sometimes they are asked to pay bribes of 50,000 rupees or more. Since it is a struggle to find steady work, they do a number of odd jobs. Some are knife-sharpeners or bell-makers, some sell a few vegetables in the village market, some work in fields. 54-year-old Babubhai Pathubhai Vaghari described himself as a "box-repairer." I could not help wondering how he supported his 10 children -- eight boys, two girls, ranging from 3 to 35 years old -- on his earnings as a "box-repairer."

Most of Santrampur's DNTs live in little huts on the outskirts of town. But even there they are in a constant state of flux: as Santrampur expands, they are pushed steadily even further out. Vinodbhai Bawabhai Vaghari said the local Panchayat had often promised them land of their own. Taking me outside the school, he pointed out what the Panchayat had earmarked for them: the distant top of one of the hills surrounding the city. There are wild animals there, said Vinodbhai, and in any case: "If we go there, all our things will be stolen! How can we live there? How will we come to town to work and buy food every day?" Besides, he says the Panchayat has often promised to find jobs for members of the DNTs, taking a couple of hundred rupees per promise. Nothing has come of those promises.

If all this wasn't enough, these men said, there's always the harassment from the police. Any time there's a robbery in Santrampur, the police descends on their huts and rounds them up. They are beaten and have false cases slapped on them. To let them go, the policemen demand bribes: anywhere between 200 and 500 rupees. "We are oppressed because of our poverty," Kalyanbhai said phlegmatically.

The speeches were still on. We listened for a while. Then Deepakbhai Bawabhai Vaghari, a slim 30-year-old with a child in his arms, turned to say to me: "Meetings and talking here are one thing. If you really want to know our situation, come see our homes. Come see how we live."

It made sense. I left the quadrangle with him and Vinodbhai, his brother. A brisk 15 minute walk through the mess of Santrampur town brought us to its edge. "There," said Deepakbhai, pointing past a wide ribbon of black ooze and a couple of piles of garbage to a small cluster of huts set amidst thorny bushes. "There are our homes."

We picked our way through the ooze and rubbish. I knelt down in front of Deepakbhai's small hut to look inside. In some naive amazement, I blurted: "It's so much tidier than my home!" I folded my hands to his shy wife, said hello to one of his three daughters who was playing in the dust nearby.

Vinodbhai showed me his hut. It teetered on the edge of several large pits being dug to lay the foundation for a new block of flats. "In just a few days, I will be evicted and told to move on," said Vinodbhai. "The world is moving ahead, but we are being pushed out of town."

I looked at my watch. It was time to go back to town.

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This article is part of the project Dilip D'Souza is pursuing to study India's Denotified and Nomadic Tribes on a National Foundation for India Fellowship for 1998-99.

Correction:

In my last column ("Ever Wonder Why Crime Is On The Rise?"), I quoted some lines from a book by Rajnarayan Chandavarkar. Unfortunately, I contrived to call him Chandrashekhar. I am still trying to puzzle out how I made that mistake. Apologies to him and all concerned.

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