How They Shut Down A City

A reprieve: villagers from Nagari in Jharkand have started to cultivate during a delayed monsoon, taking time off protests against land acquisition.

This article appears in Daily News & Analysis on the 5th of  August, 2012

The failure of the courts and the state to take cognizance of constitutional rights leads Anti-displacement movement in Jharkhand to shut down the capitol Ranchi on the 25^th of July

Nagari village near Ranchi is facing the wolves of urbanization at the door. A town of congested roads and apartment buildings ends, and the lush green fields of Nagari begin.

‘In 2000 rupees a person can survive in Nagari,’ Says Arpana Bara, one of the young leaders in the village of Nagari of Oroan and Munda adivasis and muslims, who had contacted almost everyone in the human rights movement and the adivasi activists in Jharkhand about their village months ago, and who today is facing police cases herself.

The youth of Nagari village today sit down to attend meetings with the villagers, and make themselves heard and their contribution to the movement is seldom understood.

‘For months, Dayamani Barla and a group of women sat on a dharna, and the walls kept getting built, we kept losing land and they kept losing cases in the courts.’ Said a young man at Nagari, ‘And we were getting tired of it, and that’s when we decided to break down the wall.’

‘Let them put cases on us, we knew we had to break down the wall.’ Said another young woman.

Four months ago, the movement included a group of women who sat on a dharna under the auspices of activist Dayamani Barla. Two women would die of heatstroke. There was zero press coverage. And they lost their case in the High Court and with their review petition. Agricultural land, that too, on the Fifth Schedule, and in Jharkhand as per the Chotta Nagpur Tenancy Act, should not be acquired for non-agricultural purposes yet the courts took no cognizance of it’s own constitutional law, to side with the building of the National University for Study and Research in Law, IIM and IIIT on Nagari village.

15,000 people would march to the governor’s home to demand intervention by law and there was, again, little to no media coverage.

And finally, as the Supreme Court dismissed the villager’s petition, the boundary wall that was being built for the law university was partially broken down by the villagers on the 4^th of July, 2012. The police retaliated. A section of the media would run frontpage articles on the police action with photographs of women protestors being beaten by policemen, and later of villagers blocking of the Ranchi-Patratu highway for the release of arrested villagers. The local media would then begin to give coverage to regular protests that followed the confrontation (while some newspapers continued to demonize the protest movement).

The movement had taken on a life of its own after the breaking down of the wall, and on the 25^th of July, the city of Ranchi was shut down by the protests against land acquisition taking place not just in Nagari, and its 35 villages, but by organizations fighting displacement across Jharkhand.

And while a section of activists from different organizations resorted to arson, the police resorted to beating protestors and human rights activists.

A large number of factors were involved in taking a movement that was isolated by silence, by the media and the state, into the forefront of politics in Jharkhand today. Shibu Soren’s visit and his statement against displacement, the involvement of middle class adivasi activists, the Adivasi and Mulvasi student unions, the creation of the Jharkhand Alliance of Democratic Movements which consists of numerous people’s movements and human rights groups, the All India Progressive Women’s Association, the Adivasi Jan Parishad, the fact that a large number of people losing land in the villages are party workers across the political spectrum in Jharkhand, and the creation of a core committee of Nagari and 35 other villages facing displacement that works as a driving force. But it is commonly known in Nagari, that it all really changed when the youth decided to break down the wall, against the wishes of many ‘outsider’ activists and those who took faith in the courts and non-violence.

The police frantically lathi-charged villagers and in a state with a long history of police firings against protest, there was an anomaly: the police did not fire. They broke the arm of a woman who was the sole breadwinner of a family and they put cases on a large number of villagers, but there was no firing. The memory of the Islamnagar firings of Ranchi last year that claimed two lives, and the Dhanbad firings that claimed four lives were fresh in the memory of the villagers. Many activists and political workers were even veterans of the Jharkhand Movement and to them, there was the Gua firing in West Singhbhum on the 8^th of September, 1983, when the police even resorted to firing into the hospital, killing 12 people.

In Nagari, Jitu, a young man on crutches would quietly mention, ‘The Superintendent of Police was also an adivasi.’

‘The only good thing the non-violent protest and losing cases in the court taught us, is that it convinced us that it doesn’t work.’ Said an activist who wishes to by anonymous.

Recently, a special leave petition filed in the Supreme Court by representatives of Nagari was dismissed citing that the land was already acquired in 1957-58 for the nearby Birsa Agricultural University for what would now be termed a pittance. Land that would cost Rs.1.5 lakhs an acre, were taken for Rs.7 a decimel, where each decimel is around 436 sq feet of land.

Across India today there are a large number of pockets from district to district, all facing displacement for industrial projects and non-agricultural purposes yet, to the fear of state policy, Nagari is the one movement whose struggle spilled onto the streets of the capitol of Jharkhand. Nandigram is invoked in Nagari today, with a growing fear of state response.