(BRUSSELS) — It all started on U.N. International Non-Violence Day, last Oct. 2, and lasted for one month: 100,000 people, representing rural communities, tribal and indigenous people, landless and small farmers, walked in formation, together, 350 km from Gwalior to New Delhi, in India. The aim was to raise awareness about the situation of landless and small farmers, indigenous and tribal people, the poor and nomads who are being deprived of the natural resources – land, water and forest – they have been living on for decades.
“Like other countries, India is going through a process of globalization,” Rajagopal, leader of the Indian landless and founder of the Ekta Parishad movement that organized the October march explains. “The global market has become power and it has opened the door to capital and technology, which are invading India. They take natural resources, water, land, forest from people that used to live on them.”
In India, 65-70 percent of the population lives on agriculture and land. A piece of land often means the capacity to feed oneself; but it also means dignity and identity. In recent years, the Indian government has been taking land from small farmers and expulsing indigenous people from forests to sell them to the industry, often multinationals. With no resources left, having lost their dignity and identity, the farmers end up in urban slums that get bigger and bigger, leading to increasing violence and a soaring number of suicides. It is believed 40 percent of the Indian population is affected by the demand on natural resources by the industry and multinationals.
“We believe India has moved away from the philosophy of Gandhi,” Rajagopal says. “Gandhi thought our action should aim at empowering the poor; and what determines our action is the conflict between greed and need. In other words, whenever you do something, you must see whether you are actually serving need or greed. He also used to say that it is not about mass production but about production by the masses, i.e., involving masses in production. We have to promote a production that involves the weak and the poor. Instead India is now lost in a Western model of development.”
The use of non-violence
Rajagopal wants to use non-violence to move poor people’s interests forward, to promote resistance and reverse the onslaught on natural resources by foreign multinationals. His movement, Ekta Parishad, founded in 1991, started training young Indian people in non-violence. They were sent to remote communities and villages; they were trained to understand poverty and how to remove it.
“You know in India many people believe that poverty is God sent and that if you are poor, this is your Karma, there is nothing you can do about it. We try to move from Karma to man-made poverty. But it takes time to change minds. It takes even more time to change things. We want to make non-violence a way of living and not only a methodology.”
To Rajagopal, it is about people’s control of natural resources but it also is an opportunity to train people in non-violence. Because violence is becoming so strong in the world, it is important to have more and more people trained in non-violence to counter it. Otherwise, he says, “there is a risk that violence is answered with more violence. Our slogan is ‘between silence and violence, there is active non-violence’ and we promote it as a tool to challenge violence.”
The young people sent to villages start by organizing small things like a shop or a water pump for the community; after a while, they move to the district level and then to the state level. And by the time they are at the national level, “they are so to speak graduated in non-violence. And we know that when 25,000 people walk together, it is going to be non-violent.”
The strengthening of a movement
Ekta Parishad organized several marches at state level in Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Orissa in the 1990s and early 2000s before setting up a first national march in October 2007 called Janadesh, or “People’s Verdict”. For one month, 25,000 people, small farmers, tribal people and bonded laborers walked along the national highway, from Gwalior to Delhi, attracting the attention of people in India and abroad. It was one of the largest non-violent actions in human history. After the arrival in Delhi, the government reacted swiftly and promised to meet their demands on land reform.
In January 2008, it set up the National Land Reform Committee, hailed as the first step toward creating an equitable land reform. But progress was slow.
“It stayed on paper, it was not implemented,” Rajagopal explains in his soft yet assertive voice. “We had warned the Indian government: ‘If nothing is done in five years’ time, we shall come back and we will be 100,000. And we did.” In October 2012, Ekta Parishad organized another march, the Jan Satyagraha, or the “People’s March for Justice,” with 100,000 people, including some that had come from abroad.
“We actually started our march in October 2011 from the southern tip of India, in what we call a dialogue journey. We organized five or six meetings per day, we spoke to the media, we listened to grievances of the people, we sent letters to the Prime Minister …”
That gave the movement one year to build pressure on the government — one year during which Ekta Parishad was engaged in a dialogue with the government to say: “If you don’t act today, if you don’t act tomorrow, if you don’t act the day after tomorrow, you are going to face us.”
“This is part of the philosophy as well, give to the government the possibility to react at any stage,” Rajagopal explains.
What the future will bring
In the end, what did the Indian poor achieve? Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh publicly signed a 10-point agreement in front of marchers as they gathered in Agra, Uttar Pradesh. “This is quite something you know, because generally, a government would not sign in front of a social movement, because if you do that, the next day, you have 10 other social movements coming and wanting to sign an agreement. But it will be an achievement only when they are translated into action and this will be our task for the next years.”
A joint National Task force – 50 percent government, 50 percent social activists – is now working on the 10 points. One of them is to give to each poor a piece of land for a house or a shelter. The aim is to make having a place to live a human right that the government has authority over. There is also a push to ensure a minimum land holding for landless laborers and small farmers. Rajagopal is aware that this might be more difficult since they need to find the land first. “But there is quite some land owned by religious foundations and by companies that don’t use them. These can be given to the poor.”
Other issues to be tackled by the Task Force involve restoration of land to those who have been forcibly pushed off; enable the indigenous people to be protected on the land that they inhabit by customary law; create a fast track court to settle land disputes; and recognize women as farmers, thereby giving them access to land and credit.
“Today,” explains Rajagopal, “when a woman goes to a bank and asks for a credit, the bank says, ‘where is the farmer, bring the farmer,’ because women are not recognized as farmers.”
To keep up the pressure on the Indian government, Ekta Parishad has already found a new weapon: “We are having general elections in one year and a half: we believe that these elections will be around the issues of control over land and livelihood resources. So the Jan Satyagraha has introduced a new slogan: First land, then vote. No Land, No Vote.”
The Indian social movement is determined to continue the struggle for justice.