12565 - Jharkhand hunger death: A girl died crying for food. Her family is now accused of shaming India - Scroll.In

Jharkhand hunger death: A girl died crying for food. Her family is now accused of shaming India

Koili Devi lost her daughter to hunger after failing to link her ration card to Aadhaar. A social boycott has added to her trauma.

Taramani Sahu

Dec 26, 2017 · 12:30 pm

Harsh Mander

In October, Koili Devi lost her young daughter to creeping hunger. Life gave her no chance to grieve – this was only the beginning of her long nightmare. The state administration, even at its highest levels, stigmatised her for bringing shame to her village and the nation with her claim that her daughter had died of starvation. Her predicament is a mirror to what we have become as a nation.

Life was hard enough for Koili Devi before her husband descended rapidly into mental illness five years ago. They own a tiny rump of stony land in their village in Simdega district of Jharkhand, which yields nothing. He would constantly look for work. Some five days a month, he would earn maybe Rs 100 a day in exchange for hard labour in the fields or house-building. Koili Devi would bring in even less, cleaning cowsheds or collecting leaves from the forest. But now, he only sleeps or wanders about, and the burden fell on Koili Devi’s thin shoulders to feed and tend to him, his aged mother, and their four children.

She married off two daughters when they were around 12; one has returned home. A young boy she holds to her breast. Santoshi, 11 years old, was her youngest daughter. Koili Devi pulled her out of school after she completed Class 5, to graze the cattle of landlords and bring a little money home. This is not unusual in their Dalit habitation.

Critically dependent on the subsidised rations they receive through the public distribution system to keep hunger at bay, catastrophe struck the family when the state administration made it mandatory for all ration cards to be linked to biometric identification through Aadhaar. Koili Devi’s was only one of around 11 lakh households whose ration cards were cancelled in the state because they failed to link these to Aadhaar.

Subsidised grain was the thin thread that held the family aloft above hunger. When this thread snapped, the family plunged into starvation. This was aggravated with the collapse of a range of other social entitlements as well. There was no wage work available under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act – the government scheme that promises every rural household 100 days of work a year – because contractors illegally used big machines and wage registers were fudged. Koili Devi’s mother-in-law had not received her pension for months. Even though Santoshi had dropped out of school, she would still take a break from her cow-grazing to eat the mid-day meal served in school. But the school had closed for the Durga Puja break.

Koili Devi says her 11-year-old daughter Santoshi died crying "bhaat, bhaat". (Credit: YouTube)

Unable to find work, Koili Devi and her daughter begged for food outside the homes of their richer upper-caste neighbours. But, as she said to me when we met later, “You cannot force anyone to give you food, can you?”

Santoshi’s health began to slide, and she whimpered all the time, begging for rice. Her stomach ached unbearably, so her mother took her to the vaid. He gently told her, “There is nothing wrong with your child. All she needs is food.” But all they had in their hovel were tea leaves and salt. She gave her child salted tea to assuage her hunger. The child finally died, crying “bhaat, bhaat” (rice, rice), her mother recalled.

The custom in their caste is to bury rather than cremate the dead, so she tearfully laid her child down in a shallow grave. Activists from the non-profit Right to Food Campaign had been helping her and many others facing the same problem for months before the child’s death, demanding that her ration card not be cancelled. When they learnt of Santoshi’s death, they announced to the media that the child had died because of the state administration’s callous denial of rations to the family because of their failure to link to Aadhaar. This story somehow penetrated the customary indifference of the national press and Santoshi’s story nudged its way on to the front pages of newspapers. In this way, it briefly pierced our conscience.

Punished for telling the truth

Officials in the area were swift in their defence. They claimed the child had not died of starvation but of malaria. Koili Devi stoutly refuted this claim. “Why should I say she died of malaria when she was not sick at all?” she said. The story refused to die down. Instead, it exploded, with dozens of air-conditioned vehicles, some with flashing beacons, winding their way into this dusty village. Some visitors took pictures and selfies holding candles at the child’s grave, some offered charity to the family, and officials and members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party remonstrated that Koili Devi should abandon her claim that her child had died of starvation and accept that she succumbed to malaria.

Officials told her that if she did this, she would be adequately rewarded. But destitute Koili Devi displayed exceptional resolve, determined to stand firmly by the truth of the circumstances of her daughter’s death. When rewards did not work, they threatened that if she persisted, the officials would have to take her child’s body from its grave and cut it up for a post-mortem. But here again, Koili Devi replied with calm rationality, “Now that my daughter is dead, how does it matter what anyone does with her body?”

Chief Minister Raghubar Das announced that Koili Devi had brought a “bad name” to her village by claiming that her child had died of starvation. Taking this cue, the upper-caste residents of her village also reproached her for disgracing the village with her contention. Some went further and said she was bringing shame to the nation. After she resisted every attempt to force her to backtrack, they imposed a boycott on her family. No one will employ them, or sell them anything. When the residents heckled and threatened to assault her, the right to food campaigners demanded that she be given police protection. A police guard now stands outside her hovel.

The question remains, what brings shame to a nation? Is a nation diminished because a destitute and unlettered mother insists simply that she must uphold the truth of how her child died? Or is it shamed because a callous administration thinks nothing of cutting off the lifeline of the country’s poorest people because they fail to adhere to its digital imagination? Because we have still not built a robust social protection to guard against destitution and want? Because galloping economic growth and overflowing government warehouses of grain have done nothing to prevent children from dying, crying out for food until their last breath?

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1726 - Development with Brutality - EPW

Increasing recourse to repression indicates that the state is losing the argument over “development”.

On 5 October 2011, the police and security forces fired at people celebrating Durga Puja in Roing town of Lower Dibang Valley district, Arunachal Pradesh. At the time of writing, nine students have been hospitalised with serious injuries and are reported to be in a critical state.

The context behind this particular act of state-terror is the forthcoming public hearing for the Dibang multipurpose project slated to be held on 24 October 2011 in Roing town. Arunachal has been identified for a slew of dams on its rivers and the 3,000 megawatt (MW) Dibang project is among the bigger ones (with the proposed dam being the world’s tallest concrete gravity dam at 288 metres). Other projects are slated for the Siang and Subansiri rivers. The resultant dislocation and destruction of local populations and ecologies is expected to be large and has led to strong opposition from the people. The central and state governments have only offered vague and, as has been shown almost always in other cases, doubtful assurances about relief and rehabilitation.

The growing opposition to these dams has not stopped the government from proceeding with its plans. In 2008, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh laid the foundation of the Dibang multipurpose project even though it had yet to get environmental clearance and as such, according to the laws of our land, was not yet cleared for construction. By this one act, the top executive authority of the country had shown that he was willing to forgo even the basic formality of following the rule of law when it came to such “development” issues.
 

The district administration of Lower Dibang Valley is reported to have claimed that Maoists had infiltrated the anti-dam movement in Dibang. A few days after that the police arrested some people in the neighbouring Lohit district alleging that they were members of a Maoist front organisation. It may well be that some local activists are influenced by the Communist Party of India (Maoist). However, none of the government authorities have as yet shown any evidence that they have actually arrested Maoists who were planning violence and in any case the arrests were in another district. Even if some activists are Maoists or members of other militant organisations, none of this can be a reason for the police to shoot at unarmed civilians at a religious function. The authorities claimed that the Maoists have influenced the Idu-Mishmi tribe of the area and the firing was on members of this tribe when the situation went out of control. It seems, prima facie, too much of a coincidence that the Maoist threat is announced about a month before the public hearing is to be held on the Dibang multipurpose project and that extra security personnel from the special task force and the Central Reserve Police Force is brought into the district to counter this alleged Maoist threat and is then used to fire on unarmed civilians. 

Given that public hearings on this and other hydropower projects in Arunachal Pradesh have often been delayed due to the strong local opposition, there seems to be some merit in the assertion of the local people that this entire Maoist allegation is a bogey to increase police presence, create incidents of violence, clamp down on public protests in the name of Maoist activity and then organise a public hearing where most opponents will find it difficult to attend and the common people can be terrorised into silence.

The chairman of the Roing Zilla Parishad, Chiliko Meto, has gone on record to state that the Maoist threat has been planted  by the district administration to mobilise additional troops for a “forceful conduct of the public hearing”.

The public hearing for the 2,700 MW Lower Siang Valley project is also slated for 18 October and is being similarly opposed by the local people, especially those downstream. The chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh, Jarbom Gamlin, has been a strong votary of these dams and for developing the entire 50,000 MW worth of hydropower the state supposedly sits on. 

Unfortunately, despite so much popular opposition and many obvious alternate policy choices, governments in India, both at the centre and the states, have managed to only push “development” projects which dislocate without compensation and destroy without regeneration. This is clearly unnecessary, unsustainable and often, illegal. It is a moot point why this destructive “development” path is clutched so obstinately but it is increasingly becoming clear that this can be continued only with the help of ever greater repression and brutality.
 

This accusation of being Maoist, like the accusation of jihadist against Muslims, is routinely hurled against those opposed to the takeover of land, livelihoods and natural resources from local people for industrial development without the State thinking it needs to provide any proof or accountability. The charge itself is enough to damn entire peoples, organisations and  communities

The State, Prejudice and the Marginalised

The adivasis of Vachati village in Tamil Nadu secure justice for state violence conducted two decades ago. The judgment by the principal judge in Dharmapuri on the Vachati incidents of 20 June 1992 finally punishes the law enforcement agencies for at least one event of what has become a horrific pattern in parts of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka since the 1990s – the brutal persecution of adivasis, particularly the “denotified tribes”, dalits and other marginalised groups.
 

In an unprecedented judgment, 215 officials from the police,
revenue and forest departments of the Government of Tamil
Nadu were pronounced guilty of various crimes, with 17 of
them guilty of rape. All the 269 officials who had been arraigned as accused by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which had probed the incidents in the village after the Madras High Court directed it to do so in 1995, were found guilty, but 54 of them have since died. (See “When Public Servants Came Calling at Vachati”, pp 32-33 for the details of the atrocities and the follow-up.)
 

Dharmapuri district, where Vachati is located, was and remains amongst the poorest districts of Tamil Nadu. The Malayali adivasis of Vachati had been subjected to a “crackdown” for three days by government officials who suspected them of illegally hoarding sandalwood taken from the forests nearby. During the crackdown, many women of the village were raped, many kept in illegal confinement, and houses were damaged as mass violence was perpetrated by government officials. If not for the steps taken by the adivasi and women’s mass organisations of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) to approach the courts and by the CBI to
meticulously investigate the claims of the adivasis, justice would never have been delivered – even if it has taken 19 years for it to be handed down.
 

In many ways, the misery that the residents of Vachati went
through was to be repeated in the forest tracts of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu where the sandalwood smuggler Veerappan was believed to be operating. The justice Sadashiva panel of the National Human Rights Commission brought to light incidents of human rights violations that had been perpetrated in the mid-1990s by the joint task force that had been constituted by the two states to capture Veerappan. Some compensation was eventually awarded to the victims of state violence but few of the police officers involved were
punished; they were instead later promoted.

If it was sandalwood smuggling and operations against Veerappan that featured violence against adivasis in northern Tamil Nadu and the forest areas abutting Karnataka and Kerala, atrocities against dalits were legion in southern Tamil Nadu during the 1990s. The Supreme Court punished 82 police officers for their role in perpetrating violence against dalits in Nalumoolaikinaru in the same district in 1992 and ordered compensation to be paid to the victims. 

In Kodiyankulam village in Tuticorin district in 1995 dalit residents were targeted in an organised attack by police teams after caste clashes had erupted in the area. Similar incidents took place in Sankaralingapuram and Challichettipatti villages in the Tuticorin district in the early 2000s. Police action also resulted in 17 deaths when workers from the Manjolai tea estate were protesting their working conditions on the banks of the Thamirabarani river in Tirunelveli district in 1999.
 

It has taken years of concerted actions by dalit and adivasi
organisations – either led by dalit parties or mass organisations of left parties – to achieve justice for state violence in many of these cases.

Apart from continuously mobilising the victims these groups
have effectively used provisions of the law that offer protection to the marginalised groups to obtain succour from the courts. This is as much a credit to these organisations as it is an indictment of the Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu. The metamorphosis of the Dravidian parties from rationalist, anti-caste and social justiceprofessing organisations to patronage-dispensing machines that are reliant on upper caste bodies for support is widely known. 

Most – though not all – incidents of caste violence and attacks on dalits and adivasis have taken place during the rule of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK). True to form, the violence in early September against dalits, who had gathered to observe the death anniversary of a local dalit leader, Immanuel Sekaran, in Paramakudi town in Ramanathapuram district suggests that this pattern of periodic police excess continues. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa has tried to rationalise the police firing that resulted in the death of six dalits and injuries to several others by claiming that the police fired in self-defence and that the violence had to do with caste clashes with the Thevar community in the area. Reports from the area, however, clearly point out that this is far from the truth and prejudice against assertive dalits seems to be the core cause of police violence.
 

Verdicts such as that by the sessions court in Dharmapuri on the 1992 atrocities in Vachati should caution the state government in Tamil Nadu against allowing the law enforcement bodies to act in line with caste and other prejudice against the marginalised. But will Jayalalithaa’s government learn the appropriate lessons? and provides the State and its security forces freedom from any legal and ethical restraint.
 

While on the one hand the Maoist tag is used to persecute and
torture those who speak out against the excesses and illegalities of the State, whether it is Binayak Sen or Lingaram Kodopi and Soni Sori, on the other there is a growing trend where the institutions of the State are used to push the vested interests of one section of the population – those who consume high energy and high cost industrial products and profit out of its investment, production and distribution. If the State insists on using its institutions, not as neutral actors in society as is expected of them but rather as partisans in this increasingly gruesome war over lives and livelihoods, then it will find, sooner rather than later, that the legitimacy of these institutions and of the State itself stands hollowed out.