John Hogan Interviews

Rajagopal P. V.
Founder & President of Ekta Parishad

(Ekta Parishad is a social organisation dedicated to the Gandhian principle of

nonviolent action with the aim of assisting people to gain control over livelihood
resources such as land, water, and forest. Ekta Parishad is Hindi for Solidarity
Forum or Forum of Unity.)

“Okay, you are speaking about Mahatma Gandhi and nonviolence, but
have you ever practised nonviolence? You are only making speeches.”
Such was the challenge frequently made to Rajagopal on the “Gandhi Express” in
1969, the centenary year of Gandhi’s birth. To say it was like waving a red rag at a
bull would not be an appropriate comparison in one way, for what was provoked was
not violence but nonviolence. Nor does the physicality of the bull fit Rajagopal, for he
is not a big man. But it reminds us of the weight of his conviction, his immovable
dedication to Gandhian principles, which underpins his grassroots activism.

Rajagopal has been practising nonviolence for over thirty five years. His wife, Jill
Carr-Harris, herself a social activist, describes what this commitment to the Gandhian
ideal means:
“In 2003 in Chhattisgarh an adivasi was axed to death by the forest department
because he would not move out of the forest. We went on a dharna, a sit-in, in a town
near that place. The wife of the man who had been killed was there with her four
children, and there were some 1500 to 2000 very primitive tribals that came and
joined us. On about the fourth or fifth day of the ten day process, there was a group
within Ekta Parishad that wanted to turn violent against the district official. They
wanted to go and smash up his car and burn his house. Rajaji had to pull this back.
With crowd psychology it’s much easier to whip up a crowd to do something than it is
to keep them quiet, especially when you have two thousand people who feel that an
injustice has been done to them. So what Rajaji did was to go on a fast and remain
absolutely cool. I think in that period he also stopped talking for one day – that’s a
Gandhian technique. But he used various techniques to stop these people from
becoming violent.
“I remember standing with Rajaji and watching him physically resist this violent act
that was about to begin. It was almost as if he were straining every sinew in his body
to pull back the people’s sentiments in such a way that they would not become
violent. It was like holding back a wave because there was such huge pressure on him.
It’s an aggressive engagement in nonviolence, not just a passive acceptance, but
actively maintaining nonviolence in the face of an unjust system… What one realises
is that in the practice of nonviolence you have to remain somewhat in control of your
fear, to remain fearless, though you’re never really fearless. But to control your fear
and your instinct for self-preservation, and somehow go beyond that. I think that is a
real aspect of nonviolence that requires a certain inner strength, which is a part of the
satyagraha concept.”

Rajagopal was born in Thillenkery, a remote village in Kerala, in 1948. He was the
fourth of five children. His father was a freedom fighter, so mother was mostly left to
bring up the children. The family had some land and property and was facing a lot of
problems in communist-dominated Kerala. His early education was in Calicut, at a
Ghandian institution called Seva Mandir. The Principal of the school was a very well
known Gandhian, Radha Krishnan Menon. At Seva Mandir he got a basic education,
which followed the philosophy of Gandhian education and included community work,
spinning cloth, producing food, being part of the community and not depending on
society. Next he attended a classical dance and music school for four years, before
moving on to Sevagram, Gandhi’s ashram in Maharashtra, to complete a degree in
Agricultural Engineering.

After you finished your degree, what did you do?

I finished my studies by 1969, which was the time of the celebration of the centenary
of Gandhi’s birth, and one of the ideas was to take a mobile exhibition train across the
country to introduce Mahatma Gandhi to a younger generation of people. I got an
invitation to be a volunteer in the train for one year. I said yes. It was just luck. The
train was organised in ten compartments beginning from the childhood of Mahatma
Gandhi to his death. The story is: how can an ordinary boy like Mohan, shy, not
bright, become Mahatma? Anybody can become a Mahatma if you want. It’s a
question of your own determination. I was a volunteer in this compartment today, and
in that compartment the next day. In the process I found that young people were
asking me, ‘Okay, you are speaking about Mahatma Gandhi and nonviolence, but
have you ever practised nonviolence? You are only making speeches.’ It was very
difficult, every day some young people would challenge you in that way. So towards
the end of the journey it was becoming a real challenge. What right did I have to stand
up and speak about Mahatma Gandhi, had I practised anything of that kind, except for
spinning a bit of cloth and processing a bit of coconut? Towards the end of the
journey, Mr Subba Rao, the leader of the train, proposed that we set up a project in
the Chambal Region, where there are so many dreaded dacoits, robbers and robin
hoods, and he asked who among us would like to be a volunteer. I was waiting for an
opportunity, so I put my hand up and said yes.
After the train journey I took a train to Gwalior, and I got down there in 1970, a very
dark place, and after six o’clock nobody will move because of dacoity. All the doors
are closed. I was told I should go to a place called Joura, about forty or fifty
kilometres away. I reached Joura by late night. People were genuinely surprised to see
someone travelling around late at night – it’s not common there. Then we decided to
start an ashram in an old broken building about two kilometres out of Joura. Generally
people said, ‘That is very dangerous. Any night people can come and kill you, or
shoot you, or kidnap you,’ but I was at that age when you feel like facing challenges.
I began the ashram with four or five people, all volunteers. We had a buffalo, which
we grazed during the day to sell the milk, earn some money to live in the ashram, go
to the villages to organise people and train people, play with children, etc., so it was
mainly contact building and building a new atmosphere. The idea was that we would
not be able to stop dacoity instantly, but we could influence a new generation of
people not to become dacoits. In the process of this work there came messages from
the gang leaders that they would like to talk. Under the leadership of Subba Rao and
others we began a dialogue with the dacoits.
The final result for us was about a thousand dreaded dacoits surrendering in front of
Mahatma Gandhi’s photograph. From 1972, April 14, to 1974, there was a series of
surrenders of dacoits who came voluntarily, saying, ‘We want to put our arms in front
of Mahatma Gandhi’s photograph, and publicly apologise to people for all the crimes
we committed, and go to prison.’ All these people went to prison for fifteen, twenty,
twenty five years, voluntarily. While they were in the prison my job was to go to the
prison and console them, telling them that everything was fine at home, don’t worry,
your children are fine, they’re getting educated, they have got land now, they have a
buffalo now, you stay in the prison and read the Baghavad Gita and the Ramayana
and meditate etc., creating an environment in the prison so that they were not
frustrated inside, they have a community life and they also learn to read and write if
they want to. At the same time we were looking after the families of a thousand
dacoits across the region who could have been shot any day because the protector of
the family was in the prison. So we were helping the people in prison and helping the
families and generally creating an environment so that people were not taking
revenge, and telling them, ‘Look, now we have peace. Let us use this atmosphere of
peace for development activities, let the schools reopen, let the farmers go to farm, let
the buses run.’ That was a very interesting process, really being the central player in
the process where a region is coming out of terror to freedom and peace.
I stayed there until 1978. When I moved out of Joura, I went to Nagaland because
Nagaland was burning again. It had a lot of problems with the underground and the
military clashing. So Nagaland needed a lot more peace work. I decided to devote one
year in Nagaland. Then I decided to go to Orissa for one year to work among the
tribal communities.
After doing all that, I came back to the tribal areas of Madhya Pradesh that is now
called Chhattisgarh. By that time I had developed a new concept, that you not only
had to deal with physical violence. I also understood that violence is much deeper,
violence is also structural, as long as there is poverty and injustice and corruption and
deprivation. Anyone can take a gun and shoot, but how do you deal with this
exploitation and poverty? I may like to deal with exploitation and poverty
nonviolently, but there are many young people who would deal with it by taking a
gun and shooting people. So I said this physical part of violence can be dealt with
later, but I need to deal with the structural violence. That is where I made a major
shift in 1980 to train a large number of young people to go back to villages and
address this issue of poverty, exploitation and injustice. I got involved in training
young people and sending them to villages, and every time they went to a village
there was a problem because they were challenging feudal society, corrupt officials
and corrupt politicians. Everyone became angry and they became anti-Rajagopal, like
Rajagopal was a problem, not a solution. The newspapers started writing against me,
the government officials started speaking against me, the politicians started hating me
– everyone was against me because I was raising issues like why the land is not
distributed, why there are bonded labourers in the country, why so much corruption in
the government offices, why the politicians are not responsible, and as young people
are organising people to fight against this process, to say, ‘We will not give you
money. You are our elected representative, you have to come to our meeting, you
have to listen to us, you can’t give less wages when we are putting our thumbprint for
full wages.’
There was one round of propaganda that went against me that I was a Christian
missionary, converting people to Christianity. Then for quite some time I was called
an American agent – in India you can be called anything – and then finally I was
called naxalite in the sense of one who is promoting violence, because the
government officials don’t have the sense to recognise what is a nonviolent
movement and what is a violent movement. They don’t understand what is Gandhi
and what is Marx and what is Lenin. Anybody who is opposing the government is a
naxalite. They think anybody who is opposing the government today will take a gun
tomorrow. I had this game going for ten years, from 1980 to 1990, where I was
everything that was bad in the eyes of powerful people, and they were trying to finish
me off completely, saying that this man was going to be problematic and he should be
finished off, in the sense of ‘Get him out.’ Luckily for me, that was the time when the
Supreme Court of India decided to appoint me as Enquiry Commissioner on the issue
of Bonded Labour. As Supreme Court Commissioner I got some status and power,
which I used a lot. I was able to travel around, see the bonded labourers in their
quarries, release them, and make the state accountable, bring them to the Supreme
Court. Most of the bonded labourers in Tamil Nadu that we are rehabilitating now, in
Trichy and Erode and Salem, they are all people I released back in 1985 and 1990.
There were thousands of them who were drawn out of stone quarries and major dams
and other projects and told, ‘Go back.’ I had this power to allow them to go back
without them even settling their accounts, everything was forgiven. That was a very
powerful position and I used it very effectively to get thousands of people out of this
damned life in the quarries and difficult places.
The period of 1970 to 80 was one phase where I was trying to deal with physical
violence. Then I had little opposition from the society or from the powerful people,
because the powerful people were benefiting from my action. When I said dacoits
should surrender, the dacoits were not attacking the poor people, they were attacking
the rich people, kidnapping them and their children. Because of the dacoits, the rich
farmers were not able to go to their farms. So this mechanism of controlling the
violence in the region definitely benefited the rich. As a result I had great recognition
in the society. They all said, ‘Oh, you are a great guy!’ But the moment I turned to
say, ‘Look, I am not going to protect you, I am going to protect this guy who is being
exploited, who is under terrible pressure because of corruption, injustice and
exploitation,’ the other community became very anti. This is something that I learned
in that period, that when you support the rich, the poor will never oppose. But when
you support the poor, the rich will always oppose. If you run an English school, the
poor people will not say, ’Why are you running an English school for the rich
people?’ But if you run an ordinary school and say it is only for the poor people, the
rich will say, ‘These people are very dangerous. They are trying to organise the poor
people against us.’ That slowly made me believe that I will spend no time with the
middle class. I have no time for those people. They don’t deserve any of our attention.
They will not fight for their own cause, or let others fight for theirs.
From 80 to 90 I was in great trouble. I was attacked, but I had this counter possibility
because of the Supreme Court. That was also the time that I was setting up one
institution after the other, because I knew that one institution was not going to work.
If I needed to take on the government head-on then I needed to have a larger base.
Just one state would not do. Only through a mass base will I really be able to take on
the government. So I was silently moving in that direction, setting up institutions in
different places, training young people, and creating the strategy of mobilisation at the
bottom. Once this was done, the proposal came: Why do we do it in isolation in every
place? Why don’t we create something that is larger? And that is how Ekta Parishad
was born in 1991.

You mentioned Subba Rao as an inspiration and mentor for you. What other people
and what events have had an impact on you?
I had many good teachers, happily. One was Radha Krishnan, whom I have
mentioned. Even as a child I looked up to him as a person who inspired me. He was a
person who believed in Gandhian philosophy, a person who was simple, a great
teacher, and it was because of him that I decided to go to Gandhi’s ashram in
Maharashtra for higher education.
Subba Rao is a very very interesting person. He gives you a lot of freedom and space
to act. I was the secretary of the organisation in Joura, and he was the President. You
can have a President who is very dominating and who doesn’t allow you any space,
who doesn’t want to see you becoming very powerful, whereas Subba Rao gave me
all the space and freedom to do what I wanted to do. And he enjoyed it. For example,
he would go to a village and all the children would run to him and say, ‘Where is Raju
Bhai?’ I was called Raju Bhai in the villages. And he would say, ‘Raju Bhai didn’t
come.’ Then they would all run back saying, ‘Raju Bhai didn’t come so we don’t
want.’ So he would come back to me and say, ‘Look, if you don’t come there is no
chance to meet the villagers.’ Somebody else would very much feel the competition,
but he enjoyed it. He was a great inspiration because he gave me that freedom and
space for my personality to grow and to take responsibility and become assertive.
Another person, who is no more, is Krishnaswamy. I was trying to be a grassroots all
the time and Krishnaswamyji identified me and invited me to come and be secretary
of Gandhi Peace Foundation, be convener of National Campaign Committee of Rural
Workers. He was the person who was trying to draw me to the national scene more
and more. He promoted me in a big way. So I had the privilege of these three main
teachers or supporters who pushed me from stage one through to three. They were
great support in my life. There was also Mr Hans A. Deboer from Germany, who was
a teacher in Sevagram. I was brought up in the local medium, which was Malayalam,
and Mr Deboer was very helpful in organising an English course in the evening. And
for cleaning his toilet and room he would give me his old English language
newspapers. He was teaching international relations, and he gave me an international
perspective because he had also worked in South Africa and other countries.
But there were three women who also influenced me. One is my mother, who played
a very important role in shaping me as a child. And I have seen her as a person who
was all the time suffering for someone else. Suffering for others became an interesting
concept that she brought to me. Take trouble for others. Your comfort is not ultimate.
The comfort of many others is more important, at the cost of a bit of sacrifice that you
make. And Maja Koene influenced me in a big way. She helped me set up the centre
in Madurai. I was already partially involved in France and other places, but because
of Maja my visits to the western world became more frequent. Through her I was able
to get to know more people, so all my support in Switzerland was basically built by
Maja, and it’s a great support base now. Looking back, without her it could have been
really difficult without the kind of sacrifice she did in that process, putting all of her
resources into a social project. She was a very inspiring personality. And now Jill,
who plays a very important role in terms of moral support. You need this kind of
personality to give you the space to act.

Whom do you look up to now? Do you have role models?

There are two personalities I draw my inspiration from. One is Mahatma Gandhi. I
draw a lot of inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi, from his quotations and from his life.
The other person is Vinoba. All my land movement is really drawn form Vinoba. He
was a kind of a spiritual follower of Mahatma Gandhi. He didn’t take the political
part. But at some stage of his life he realised that land is a very important issue. And I
was always wondering why should this spiritual person take this economic agenda.
But he understood that the violence and the problems of this country cannot be
tackled unless land is redistributed. He walked across the country for fourteen years
asking people to give land, and he got 4.1 million acres of land in donation. What I
am doing is sharpening his agenda. Land as an economic agenda, and nonviolence
and a conceptual framework. I am putting it together. And I am saying that, look,
Vinoba was not a radical person, and Gandhi was a radical person but in a hundred
years people have made him non-radical. In front of Marx, what is Gandhi? Marx is
radical and Gandhi is some kind of old man walking for peace, man. Slowly, Gandhi
has got a projection of an old man walking for peace. So if you are with Gandhi you
have to be just peaceful. You don’t have to fight. I say this is a very dangerous
projection of Gandhi. Throughout his life he was fighting the British, he was
imprisoned, he was getting beaten up, he was getting insulted, and he was putting up
this fight against the British. But that image of Gandhi who is a fighter against
injustice is gone, and the only image that remains is Gandhi as a person for peace, at
any cost, let us have peace. This is a projection made by left and right both. The left
ideology projected Mahatma Gandhi like that, making him a compromising person, he
compromised with the British, etc., etc. And the rightist groups projected Gandhi as a
person who compromised with Pakistan. So Gandhi has got down to a level where
Gandhi is a compromising personality not a fighting personality. What I am trying to
do is to draw the land reform from Vinoba and get Gandhi’s nonviolence and
radicalise these two together into a new form that is applicable to today’s reality. That
is what I have been trying to do since 1980. Can I help young people to appreciate
Gandhi? Not as a museum piece, but as a person who is relevant in today’s society,
and relevant in the lives of millions of people who are suffering? Can I bring
Vinoba’s agenda of “gift” to the concept of rights? Vinoba said, ‘Please give land as a
gift.’ Now I am saying it is not a gift, it is the poor people’s right. They have a right to
have land, and you have no right to keep this land because you are not cultivating the
land and you are keeping more than you should. So turning gift into right, turning the
nonviolence of museum into nonviolence of action. This is what I am doing. Simple,
right? And I am taking hundreds of young people into that direction. So I look upon
these two people, but I slightly radicalise them into today’s reality, into more relevant
action, in a globalising world where poverty is more and more difficult for people.
This was not appreciated by many initially, but more and more people are now
appreciating it. They thought I was taking Gandhi’s name and behaving like a
Marxist. What is ‘Marxist’? Making Gandhi relevant to the poor people, if it is
Marxism it is Marxism. And making people aware and empowered, if that is a CIA
agent then I am a CIA agent. I said, ‘You call me what you want. I know what I am
doing and I am going to do it.’ That’s the position I take.

What Gandhian principles are most important to you personally?

Gandhi’s concept of thinking of the poorest whenever you think of an action. For me
the ultimate goal will be how can I be an instrument in helping the poorer section of
society. Basically I don’t have any other agenda. How do you mitigate the suffering
of millions of people?

So your entire life is focused on that?

Just on that. And for that I am willing to take any risk, and work any hours of the day
and night. That is the driving thing. Poverty needs to be fought, and the poor need to
get what is their share in the world today. Another thing that I definitely believe in is
the principle of need and greed. Accumulate only what you need and don’t get into all
this funny stuff of accumulating what you don’t need. Living with just one suitcase is
something that I have learned from this principle. Concentrate on the agenda of the
poor and live as simply as you can without accumulating anything, this is something
very important for me from Mahatma Gandhi’s life, and I think I have practised it as
far as I can. I think if you want to be a social activist in today’s world you can’t avoid
these two principles. If you are part of a consumerist market, then you have to be
ready to fight against the consumerist market. You take only what you want because
there are many others waiting in the queue. These are two things that I practise in day-
to-day life. I may be practising many more. There are eleven principles of Mahatma
Gandhi. Sometimes we evaluate things and ask ourselves how many of them we are
really following? Manual labour, for example. I would like to put in manual labour
every day, but I don’t do that, I don’t produce food for myself. When there is a youth
camp I try to work to compensate, but it’s difficult. If you are strictly living in an
ashram then you can do all of that. And even on the agenda of truth. All his life
Gandhi said this is an experiment with truth. People like me, I don’t know how close I
am to truth. You would like to be, but sometimes you feel you are not. There are
irritations within, but at least, you know, you are asking yourself the question.

What successes had Ekta Parishad had so far?

Many. One main success that one can claim is that Ekta Parishad was able to reach
out to the poorer section of society and create leadership from there. When I began
my training program, people said that unless you had graduates and school-educated
young boys and girls how are you going to train them? How are you going to make
them understand all the social-political realities? But that is not important. Leadership
has to emerge from the section for which you are fighting. You can’t have leaders
coming from outside and fighting, and finally making the benefit of the fight to
themselves. And this is what we have seen – middle class people moving in,
organising the poor, and then when the election comes they will fight the election and
go to parliament. This is the usual tendency. So I said we don’t want the middle class
to come and organise people, but we want the poor people to stand up and organise
themselves, and that is where we need to train leadership from the poor. Initially
people had difficulty believing it. The first advertisement I put in the newspaper read
like this: We are looking for uneducated people to come for a training programme.
Please come on this and this date to participate in a youth training programme. And
underneath we wrote: We know that the uneducated people will not read it, so the
educated people may help us to read it out to those guys.

Did it work?
It worked. When every other advertisement is only looking for graduates, now here is
an organisation looking for people who have had no opportunity to go to any schools,
and that itself is a moral boost. I have hundreds and hundreds of them coming for
every youth camp. And we designed a strategy of training them without using any
writing. People who can write, they can write if they want, but generally we used
games and songs and debates and discussions and theatre. This training became very
popular. And the kind of change that you will see in each one of them after ten days
of training! Someone who comes in saying that I don’t know anything, on moving out
is saying that now I am going to change my village situation. That is the level of
change you are able to bring about in them. And then they go to villages, they work,
they come back, it’s almost like action-reflection training programme. Education now
became a path. One big achievement was in shifting this trend of dealing only with
educated people as social activists or social workers to dealing with uneducated
people and creating leadership among them. So people notice us for that. The only
complaint people make is that I’m not doing it as much as I should.
The second achievement is the large number of women becoming activists. I
remember those early days, people said the centre that I was running was a
prostitution club, because young men and women were coming together and sleeping
in the same place and what has happened to morality etc., etc. Those very people
appreciate it now. They will say, ‘We never thought it was possible in this country,
that men and women could really come up together like that.’ Giving women a major
role in changing society was a great achievement for Ekta Parishad. With time girls
get married and they go, so the numbers are not always equal, but women coming as
leaders is very important. The third achievement is mobilising and organising the
tribal community to ask for their rights on jal, jungle, – water, forest, and land.
These should be in the control of the ordinary people, there’s no compromise on that.
You can keep your factories and Rolls and scooters and everything. Jal jungle jameen
should be the property of the ordinary people, not the property of multinational
companies. That is where the battle line is drawn. You can take everything, but not
this. This is poor people’s property. But what is now happening is that more water,
forest and land is coming under the control of multinational companies.
The achievement is also through nonviolent struggles, giving nonviolence itself teeth.
In a world where people think that nonviolence is an old story, slowly making people
believe that it works. You need to prove that it works, then people will believe it. Act,
and show people that it works. Through various padyatra and actions when we have
forced the government to change policies, people have seen that it really works. When
we were walking though very violent areas and the violent group had no guts to come
and challenge us, people thought, ‘It works, only this works.’ So one contribution that
we have made, and Janadesh is all about this, is to show that nonviolence works.
The last area where we have achieved something is that we have been able to bring
about a shift, some task force set up in Madhya Pradesh, some task force set up in
Chhattisgarh, some land distributed to poor people, and finally bringing in land as an
agenda up to the Prime Minister and Planning Commission. So from building
grassroots-level leadership to pressurising the national government to act on this
agenda, these are steps of progress that Ekta Parishad really made.

What was the result of your meeting with the Prime Minister on the 24th December
2005?
Now the Planning Commission of India is going to set up a committee to look into the
land issue, and they are consulting us as to who should be on the committee. We have
given them some names, which will be announced soon. And I will also be sitting on
the committee. But I am not going to compromise in that. I am not asking for a
committee, I am asking for land to be given to the poor people. So I am trying to say,
‘Set up a national land authority which will have the capacity to look at various
controversies and problems related to land and to take decisions.’ That is what
Janadesh is all about.

What is Janadesh 2007?

Janadesh is a Hindi term. Jan means people, desh means order. People are ordering
the government, so we translate this as “People’s Verdict.” People are trying to tell
government what is to be done and what is not to be done. This is how it should be in
democracy. It’s basically taking the spirit of democracy. Do people have the capacity
to tell the government what is to be done and what is not to be done? The government
says we are here because of the people’s verdict – that’s what they claim. So we
coined this word – People’s Verdict – Janadesh 2007.
I see Janadesh as the culmination of all our struggles. We had many padyatras, many
rallies, and protest marches. We were able to put pressure on State Governments in
Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Jarkand. So we have done a lot of
work at local level and at state level, and we realised that nothing can really change in
a globalising world unless the central government can take the initiative. Going to a
state government means what? Then you are only asking a state government, and
there are another twenty three state governments that are not listening to you. We
have done that for many years and we have learned. Ultimately you need to ask the
central government to change their policies and programs in the interests of the poorer
sections of society. Jal jungle jameen agenda again. We thought after fifteen years of
work, on one side we have grown through various experiences of working. On the
other we have had globalisation for the same time and it is reaching a point where all
the resources are going out of the hands of the poor people. We were fighting so that
everything would go to the poor people and we have seen that everything is going to
the powerful and rich. There is a mismatch between what we wanted to achieve and
what is actually happening. We can go on like that for another ten years and we can
watch this mismatch happening further. So we said no, that is not what we should do.
If they are going in this direction and we are fighting small state governments, we will
get nowhere. We should take the central government head on at some stage and make
them accountable for what is happening, not work with small state governments and
try to get some small benefits. It is basically trying to take the central government
head-on, and saying, ‘Look, your industrial policy is making a negative impact on
poor people’s lives. Your forest policy is making negative impact on the tribals and
adivasis in this country. Your water policy is giving away the water to multinational
companies. Your land policy is giving land to the corporate houses. All of these
policies are against the poor people, and this is not acceptable. So you face us.’ We
are walking to the central government, walking to the enemy’s field. The
government’s reaction can be both: the reaction can be a dialogue, if they know that
we are powerful enough; or the reaction can be very oppressive and violent, if we are
not powerful enough. And in a do-or-die fight you should be prepared for both. In the
fight for democracy in China what happened was bulldozers, not democracy. But at
some stage people have to fight. So Janadesh is a fight against many of the policies
that are dividing people from their basic resources. One is never sure what is going to
be the reaction of the government. That is why we are engaging with the government
in dialogue. We have met the Prime Minister. We are meeting the planning
commission. We are telling them to change policies, so they cannot say, ‘Oh, you
didn’t come to us.’ We are saying to the government, ‘If you are interested to enter
into dialogue to resolve the issue, you are not interested in fighting, and fighting is not
our obsession. But in the absence of concrete dialogue and action from your side, we
will fight.’
So Janadesh is all about a big fight, forcing the government to get down to dialogue
to resolve the issues faced by the poor people. It’s too difficult to say at this stage
whether it is going to be a very successful fight, or if it’s going to be a fight that will
be oppressed by the state, because twenty five thousand is not such a big thing for this
country. But we have to fight. We are at that stage now, and the more preparation we
do the better. And that is where the international community is very important. Every
bit of action from the international community will help us. More journalists coming
in, more media coverage, more people writing letters to the Prime Minister. In a
globalising world the government is more interested in what the international
community is thinking of them. The opinions of some Americans or French or
Australians are more important that the opinions of Rajagopal or some Gandhians in
this country. That is where the challenge is: in order to max this fight, how do you
build an international campaign that will back it up?

And that is one of the reasons you’re going to Europe?

Yes. This message has to go to people here: a movement has decided to take on the
government. And while they take on the government they look for the moral, political
and economic support of the international community to really get it to happen. You
can’t fight every day. In order to build another fight it takes another five years. When
people get demoralised in their fight and don’t really get much out of it, then it takes
more time to rebuild. So we would like to succeed. We are preparing for success. It all
depends on the kind of mobilisation we are able to do from the bottom, the kind of
advocacy we are able to do with the government here, and the kind of support we are
able to get from the international community. If these three components are put in
place properly, then we win. And I hope that we have a possibility to win. “Win” in
the sense of effecting a policy shift that will benefit the poor people. Ultimately when
I retire after some years and I sit down to make an evaluation, the only evaluation I
can make is whether my life as a tool did contribute to mitigate the suffering of the
world’s people, and I will have to answer to that. My inner voice will answer to that.
When I evaluate anything I will only evaluate it from that point of view It is not
success from any other point of view – not in terms of media coverage, not in terms of
how many committees I can become a member of, but in terms of actual delivery to
the poor people.

What is your dream for India?

My dream for India will be very close to what Mahatma Gandhi said. He said this
country has taken a wrong path from day one. The first Prime Minister thought we
needed to become a powerful nation like England or America, so the decision of
industrialisation was taken there. But for quite some time industrialisation and
agriculture received the same attention. Or industrialisation of heavy industries and
small industries and cottage industries got the same attention. But the model of the
west won’t work in a country where you have one billion people, because a small
population will behave differently. They don’t need so many people to produce food
or cloth. But in a country of one billion, what is important is what Gandhi said:
production by masses. Everyone should have meaningful employment, to be part of a
productive process so that people feel that they are living a dignified life. I think the
country has to make a radical shift to understand that poor people are not a problem,
they are an asset to the country because they are the labour force. There should be a
shift from looking at machines and mechanisation as an asset to looking at people as
an asset, and re-planning the country’s programs around people, not around GDP etc.,
etc. Like my English friend said, if all these developments are for happiness, then we
should look at the people, at how happy they are. If the tribal people are saying they
are happy in the forest, just give them right to the forest, and they will happily dance
and sing and collect honey and sell it and make a living. If the poor people say,
‘Look, give us a piece of land and we are happy, working eight hours, cultivating our
own food, looking after our own children, sending them to school,’ then give them the
land. Why should that land be given to the corporate houses and the people sent to
cities and be made to live in slums? Why complicate things? So my dream will be a
decentralised society like Gandhi said, a very self-sufficient village system federating
into a national government. Not a powerful national government controlled by the
World Bank and IMF dictating how the villagers should behave. It should not be a
top-down process, it should be a bottom-up process. That is my way of looking at the
economy and the happiness of the country.

Is there a place for you in mainstream politics?

I don’t think so. I have a place in terms of influencing the mainstream politics. In
many states Ekta Parishad is in a position to decide who is winning and who is not
winning. That way we impact the mainstream politics in a small way. Ekta Parishad
should never become a political party. One more political party is not the solution to
the problems of this country. What is the solution is a mass organisation which is able
to make the political parties accountable to people. Rather than standing on the other
side of the fence, you should stand on this side of the fence with the people, whoever
may come to power, whether left or right, and play this role of making them
accountable to the poor people. So you don’t forget your role, give to your role, play
your role, and I’ll stop at that with Ekta Parishad. I will not permit them to cross the
fence and become part of that, saying that once we become powerful we can solve all
the problems. This story we hear from many parties. Even the most radical parties
have said, ‘Once we get power we will change everything,’ but they will never
change it and they will rather become part of the system. So don’t get into the system,
play the corrective role always, play the pressure role always. That is what is missing
in many societies, mass-based people’s organisations to play that role. If it was there,
then the governments may have behaved very differently.