History’s Footnotes

HOST

Welcome to Grassroots Nation, a podcast from Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, a show in which we dive deep into the life, work, and guiding philosophies of some of our country’s greatest leaders of social change.

What prompts a person to devote their life to social change? A calling can be awakened by an encounter, or shaped by a mentor, be triggered by the witnessing of an event, or as a response to a deeper search for truth and justice. The paths to social change are many. 

This is the first of six episodes that presents important themes that have arisen in the conversations with the guests of Grassroots Nation. These episodes showcase what shaped their thinking, their relationships, and how small acts form the basis of collective action. 

In this first episode: many of these leaders have witnessed some of India’s most important historical events and moments. We bring you these first-hand accounts.

Dr Kamal Bawa the founder of ATREE, The Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment speaks about his childhood in Punjab, at a time when India was a fledgling country, its birth the result of a violent rupture: the partition. 

Dr Kamal Bawa

 In 1947 I was living in Kapurthala. Our house was right on the road, and you can go on the balcony and you can see the traffic downstairs down on the road. And I remember one particular moment that I heard the sound of a truck, and I ran to the window to see what was passing, and the truck was full of corpses that was being driven to the nearby river where the bodies were being dumped. 

I remember very vividly the scenes on the road where these people who were migrating, traveling on foot with nothing but clothes on, with the cart, the lot caravans passing on that road going towards Jalandhar the next town.

And Ludhiana and so on and so forth. And again, I think that had a lot of impression on me in terms of how to, how to build relationships, how to bring harmony, how to build consensus, and how to avoid divisiveness.   I don’t know, but that’s what I think happened. I think for the rest of my life. That’s what I learned from those experiences.

HOST

The life of Ashok Khosla, the founder of Development Alternatives, was also shaped by  Partition. His family was forced to leave their home and settle elsewhere. 

Ashok Khosla

We, at Partition left Lahore, where we used to live and go back to where our grandparents lived in Kashmir.

One evening in late October 1947, the Pakistani government sent Raiders in and they were pretty awful people. They did nasty things. And all of a sudden the lights went off because they got to the power station in Barramulla and we were left with no electricity and lots and lots of shouting outside saying “you better get out of here, you will be killed or raped and you don’t have much time”.

And my mother had a few canisters of petrol and we commandeered the next door neighbor’s car, filled it up with petrol and started driving towards Jammu, towards civilization. And basically it was an adventurous journey. We ran out of petrol, we walked for five or six days down to Jammu, down the hills, up mountains and all all over the place and ended up in a refugee camp here in Delhi.

HOST

Ravi Chopra, from the People Sciences Institute was a young man in Delhi in 1984 when riots broke out following the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister. He talks about those days and how he and his colleagues and friends took to the streets to help their fellow citizens:

Dr Ravi Chopra

31st October, Mrs. Gandhi was shot and killed. 

MUSIC

And then the riots broke out and we were shocked. I remember I was staying at the home of an uncle Krishnakanth in the Connaught Place area. The next morning as I was going to… I was staying with Anil Agarwal and Press Enclaves, Southern Delhi. So as I went to Press Enclaves on the way I saw that there were some buses were burnt and there was some smoke coming from some places. So I was very surprised what happened. When they reached there, a friend of mine, Poonam Muttreja, called me and said, “Listen, do you know about the riots?” And I said, “No, what riots?” She said, “We are meeting at the home of Sumanto.” Sumanto Banerjee was another journalist and she said, “Why don’t you also come?” He lived in Press Enclave. I said, “Sure I’ll come.” So that morning, about 10 or 12 of us gathered at Sumanto’s home. And different parts of Delhi, there are reports of riots and Sikh communities being attacked and people being killed, so we should do something, but do what?

So we first decided let’s go around the town and see what was happening and somebody said, “Par woh curfew laga hua hai, kaise jayenge?” So very quickly we made a sign ‘Press’, put it in front of Poonam’s jeep and we started travelling around. We went and first got hold of Swami Agnivesh.

Swami Agnivesh was an Arya Samaj Swami who was known for his left of centre views and had started this thing called Bandhua Mazdoor Mukti Morcha to get people out of bondage. And I had gotten to know him because I had written some pieces on the labour camps for the building, the stadia for the Asian Games in 1982. So we picked him up and we decided we would just go around the town. And having him with us, known face, the police was less likely to bother us. We ran into some friends of Rajiv Gandhi and we said, “Do you know what’s happening in the country?” And so that was the first time we heard that line, “You know, when a giant tree falls in a forest, everybody hears.” 

So we were quite disappointed with that response. By the time we came to Lajpat Nagar, we saw that there was this, this is the Lajpat Nagar Market in Delhi, and we saw that there were some young kids who were setting some shops on fire. So immediately Swami Agnivesh got out of the jeep and as soon as he got out of the jeep, “Idhar ao, idhar ao!”

All the kids got scared and ran away. So he got up on a makeshift podium and delivered a speech, “You’re not burning anybody’s shop, you are burning the nation. Please be careful what you are doing. These things will have long term repercussions. The Sikhs are no less than us, they are our brothers.” And soon, pretty soon a crowd collects and then somebody invites us home, “Achcha chai toh peelijiye.” So we went, we talked to about 30-40 people who collect in that drawing room, and we had a discussion. I said, “Par Swamiji, aapne suna? Aaj toh Amritsar se gadiyan aayi hai laashon se bhari hui!” Swami Agnivesh said, “Aapne dekhi?” “Nahi dekhi.” “Aapne dekhi?” “Nahi dekhi.” Nobody in the room had seen it, it was a rumour. So, he said, “Why do you believe rumours?”

By then we had made phone calls to other people and we had organised a small meeting of activists in Lajpat Bhavan. So 4:30 in the evening we are sitting there, we have this meeting, and it’s decided that we would set up some kind of a relief effort to intervene. As the meeting is progressing, somebody comes out, “Arre, they are burning a gurdwara over there!” So meeting cancels, we take out a march to that gurdwara. By that time, the gurdwara is already on fire, it’s burning, and people are rushing around with buckets of water to throw the fire out.

AUDIO

No response has come in from the fire department. And then we hear that there’s another kind of fire that’s breaking out in another part of Lajpat Nagar market. So we take out this march, shouting slogans of “Hindu Sikh bhai bhai,” and all that. And we went back to Lajpat Bhavan, decided that at night we’d go and meet the opposition leaders and next day we will take out a big march through Lajpat Nagar because that was a hotspot. And I lived nearby in Lajpat Nagar. I went to see Chandrashekhar whom I had known earlier. And he said, “Main abhi jaa raha hoon, Pradhan Mantri ne meeting bulaya hai, kal subah National Executive Janta Party ki National Executive ka baithak hai. Aap subah aake bataiye kya haalath hai sheher mein. Aur agar aisi hi haalath rahi, toh hum aapki march mein poori National Executive ko le ayenge.”

So the next day things were as bad and we had done an early morning recce. By 5 o’clock in the morning we had gone around various parts of the city. So 9 o’ clock I went to the party office and I said, “Things are as bad.” In the meantime they’d received news that Madhu Dandavate was supposed to come for the meeting. His train has been stalled somewhere and people are beating on the windows of the train to see if there are any Sikh passengers in there.

We did the march and all the Janata Party came and there was one very, very unusual moment. So we are walking through a narrow lane and suddenly from the other side a group of young men come shouting slogans with talwars in their hands. We are walking about three or four in our line and the guy next to me, he says, “Kya karna hai?” “Kuch nahi, khade ho jao,” and I held both the hands very tight, should anyone try to run away. I mean, I had not the foggiest idea of what we were going to do, but I figured Chandrashekar is somewhere at the back. He’s tall, he should be seen, they might stop. And then my friend Poonam, who was in the next row behind me, she said, “Ravi, you come back.” And she and her friends, they moved to the front. So they moved to the front. I thought that was a brilliant idea because she was a woman, they were not going to harm a woman. And we are about this distance where you and I are sitting now about what is it about a metre and a half? And suddenly there is a flag march, a contingent of army people coming through with a white flag. And the youth saw them and then they immediately ran away.But that was a very decisive moment for me that you know, when this guy said, “Kya karna hai?” I said, “Kuch nahi khade ho jao bas.” 

HOST

Aloysius Fernandez had committed to a life of service when the Bangladesh war took place in 1971. The war resulted in a terrible refugee crisis and soon after, a devastating famine emerged in 1974 when heavy monsoon rain affected food supplies in a country still reeling from the effects of war.

Aloysius Fernandez

The war was the Bangladesh War, 1971, where I was asked to go and look after the refugees. So I left my studies in England and came back to do that. I was just told in Bombay that there is a problem, and there was no TV in those days so we knew much more about what was happening in London than you knew in India. But I was told by Col. Gracious, “There’s a big problem, we want you back. Money is promised from all over the world, but somebody has to run the show. Would you come and do it?” I said, “Well, I don’t have a choice, so I’ll do it.” “So here’s your ticket to Calcutta and here is ₹10,000. You will get it from the secretary downstairs.” That was my introduction to development. 

As I said, we were given the opportunity to by our Jesuit education to have reasons for our belief, by the Vatican Council to be open to other sets of beliefs, and all this was within the framework of the Catholic Church. So you were protected by the Catholic Church. And a person in my stature, which I was pretty high up in the structure, I was almost at that level of what you could call Joint Secretary in the government. Life was fine, I mean. But Calcutta the situation was – the whole ecosystem collapsed. There was no, no sort of Church influence around me, it was the refugees, it was this, it was that, it was politics, it was the government, and it was a new ecosystem. Now, once you were outside this protective ecosystem and you began to see things, you began to realise there’s a whole new world.

I wrote about this in my book, it’s on page 377 – 

[MUSIC]

“This experience challenged several of the beliefs in which I was grounded as a priest. I was trained to be detached from worldly even, but how could I be detached from the suffering of people I had come to support, with the objective of providing whatever little was possible to keep them alive and healthy till they return to their homes? Their sufferings and deaths were enough to undermine my detachment. I had been trained to consider myself to be God’s chosen one, I had been taught to believe that I had been empowered to bestow God’s forgiveness on others for sins they had committed. A mobile Ganga, as it were. What sins had these people committed to suffer so much? Except vote for the wrong person according to their oppressors from West Pakistan,” they voted for Mujib, if you may not know, which would have made Mujib the President of Pakistan. “Yet I found strength and power in several of the refugees I interacted with. I had been taught that Catholicism was the only path to salvation, and therefore conversion to Catholicism was the only way to reach the Supreme Being. Here I found thousands of local people who were not well off, but were willing to share what they had with their fellow human beings. Surely they too would find a place in Paradise.” 

HOST

For Aruna Roy, the march that followed the rape of Bhanwari Devi in 1992 was a turning point. Bhanwari Devi was a midwife and saathin for the states Women Development Programme  who intervened to stop the child marriage of a nine month old baby girl. 

Aruna Roy

I was asked if I would go to [Nairobi for the Women’s decade, and I said, no. I told the people who give us some money and we will have a thousand women get together, and 900 local women and hundred urban women got together.I won’t go into it because it’s too long, but the process of interaction and understanding finally led to the first big demonstration, organized demonstration against rape, at least in that part of Rajasthan when we went on silent rally in Kishangarh. And it has lived on people’s memories. How things transform, like the Prabhat pheri in the morning transformed into the rally and how these transformations take place actually in the minds of people.

RAJNI 

Yeah. So building upon this, Aruna, how did the community then grapple with the Bhanwari Devi rape case? Because it was, it was in many ways an attack on the whole culture of Sathens. And it was, of course, it was a personal tragedy. It was also a kind of a political act. How did it all of you, you know, cope with it? Because in many ways. There were echos of the Roop Kanwar sense of pain.

ARUNA

In my mind they are two separate things, actually, I don’t couple Roop Kanwar with Bhanwari Devi. By the time Bhanwari Devi happened, I was in MKSS. So my whole political formulation of support was very different. Thousands of us women there, but women working and fighting for rights and, understanding wages and understanding sexual assault on the body.

In the case of Bhanwari Devi, I think it was the first feminist issue, which was taken up by the WDP. It had been taken up outside, but the WDP had not taken up any such thing. And it was something which called for strong support to Bhanwari and an affirmation of those values. And it did happen across all ideologies.

And in that mass support for Bhanwari emerged a politics, which has not gone as far as it should have in Rajasthan. But it did change each one of its units and MKSS was the lead group that broke the cordon on the day we broke the cordon. And many of us, one of our fellow beings, got hit badly by a baton and had to have stitches and all that.

And we broke the cordon. And then to, and it brings me to another area of how do you deal with that fear when you face an armed constability with nothing in your hands? And the absurdity of calling non-violent protest cowardly. It’s still something that baffles me. It requires the greatest courage in the world to face that armed layered group of police constables and women who stand there to beat you up, to go there and actually break it. So brought Gandhi into me at that stage and I thought I had understood him before in all the protests, but in this facing of violence, I really understood the strength of non-violence and how really strongly you have to believe in what you think you are is right to face that baton and that rifle and that gun pointing at you.

HOST

Grassroots Nation is a podcast from Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies. For more information go to rohininilekaniphilanthropies.org or join the conversation on social media at RNP_foundation. 

Stay tuned for our next episode. Thank you for listening to Grassroots Nation.