They were either moments of collective action or instances of individual courage, but all of them changed India’s political landscape for the better.
Linguistic states had been pledged by the Indian National Congress from 1917, yet it took Potti Sriramulu’s death from fasting in December 1952 for that promise to bear fruit. Born in Nellore into a trading-caste family, Sriramulu had embraced prison in the 1930s and 1940s as a satyagrahi and also campaigned for Dalit rights. After this loved figure fasted for 58 days and died, a separate state for the Telugu speakers of what was still a British-era Madras Presidency became unstoppable. Andhra emerged in 1953, and other internal boundaries too were fruitfully redrawn. Karnataka and Kerala appeared in the south, Maharashtra and Gujarat in the west, Punjab, Haryana and Himachal in the north. Citizens could now converse with officials in their own language!
Although the Northeast’s ceaseless stirs for autonomy, which started along with India’s Independence, have not been friction-free, the recovery of pride by the region’s varied communities has been inspiring. Because of their struggles, the Assamese, Bodos, Garos, Khasis, Mizos, Meiteis, Nagas and Tripuris (to name but a few of the Northeast’s ethnicities in alphabetical order) have stamped their intellectual gifts on the consciousness of countless people in India and the world.
BHOODAN MOVEMENT
Begun in April 1951 in response to the needs of landless Dalits in a village in Nalgonda district in today’s Telangana state, Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan or land-gift drive is thought to have resulted in donations by 1957 of around 4.5 million acres of land, a large proportion in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Although a few gifts were bogus, and some recipients faced difficulty registering donated land, the remarkable Bhoodan movement had social, economic, political and psychological ramifications. A belief entered minds that India’s lands were meant for the needs of everyone.
DALIT RIGHTS
When in 1956 Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and lakhs of his Dalit followers repudiated the inferior status imposed on them for centuries and became Buddhists, indirectly affirming nonviolence, they performed a feat of noble defiance. It caused some to feel that the liberty, equality and fraternity enjoined in our Constitution might become the actual goals of Indian society. Picking up the social justice baton in the 1980s, Kanshi Ram attempted to create an ‘invincible’ alliance of Dalits, deprived non-Dalits and Muslims for ending social and economic oppression. The imagined alliance proved elusive, yet the social justice call personified by Dr Ambedkar, and pursued by Kanshi Ram and others, remains a powerful vision.
LIBERALISATION
Launched in 1959 by Chennai’s C. Rajagopalachari, Mumbai’s Minoo Masani, Andhra’s N.G. Ranga and associates, the Swatantra Party raised a much-needed voice against ‘the licence-permit raj’, an unintended byproduct of independent India’s anti-poverty and egalitarian policies. Over three decades later, in 1991, finance minister Manmohan Singh, backed by prime minister Narasimha Rao, began removing obstacles to enterprise placed by the State, and the Indian economy took off. The runway for that take-off was painstakingly laid by the earlier critics of the licence-permit raj.
The nationwide campaign for democratic rights that Jayaprakash Narayan led in 1974-77 seems in retrospect a natural corollary of his brilliant role in the 1942 Quit India movement and the disquiet he expressed when Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in 1948. The Emergency Indira Gandhi was panicked into declaring was central to the 1970s’ story, but JP’s goal of ‘total revolution’ went far beyond defeating a political foe. That modern free India must aim simultaneously at individual liberty and equal rights for all Indians is the takeaway from the JP movement. Having drawn Indians of every stripe into a struggle for democratic rights, that movement remains, in 2022, a hope-giving memory.
MANDAL AGITATION
If history endowed power to India’s high castes, and constitutionally mandated reservations brought some relief to SC/ STs, that still left half the population uncared-for. It was Dr Ram Manohar Lohia who in the 1950s started a movement for the rights of the nation’s neglected middle castes—the OBCs. And it was V.P. Singh who, by implementing in 1990 recommendations of the Mandal Commission, revealed the OBC’s salience. After first fiercely opposing OBC quotas in colleges and government jobs, the Hindu right backed the new quotas in a bid to deploy OBCs for a divisive, anti-Muslim push.
In 1994, thousands of Rajasthani villagers (galvanised by a handful of activists who had tossed away elite careers to live in the impoverished village of Devdungri in Rajsamand district) demanded information (along with bills and vouchers) about public works in their area, including the muster rolls listing worker attendance, wages due, wages paid, materials ordered and materials transported. Expectedly, this demand for an open hisaab was fiercely resisted, but the villagers’ persistence, and the dedication of their activist friends such as Aruna Roy, produced the Freedom of Information Act in 2002 and the Right to Information Act in 2005, magnificent all-India feats launched from a little-known dusty patch in Rajasthan.
FARMERS’ PROTEST
Enduring Covid, a hard winter, a blistering summer and calumnious propaganda, the victorious 378-day protest staged in 2020-21 on Delhi’s borders by India’s farmers against the Modi government’s farm laws will be remembered for the solidarity offered from one tough month to the next by family members, neighbours and friends—and for the government’s climbdown. Led by cultivators from Punjab and Haryana, the protest was backed by farmers across the land who felt the new laws had weakened them against big buyers. On November 19, 2021, Modi said the laws would be repealed; eight days later, they were.
Courtesy : India today
Note: This news piece was originally published in indiatoday.in and used purely for non-profit/non-commercial purposes exclusively for Human Rights
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