| ashu |
Posted
on 03-Feb-01 05:05 AM
What follows was recently published in slighted edited
form in Nepali Times, the weekly newspaper.
Special thanks to and appreciation for Mr. Yagya Raj
Chaudhary, 42, the "bhagat" from Geta VDC in Kailali
for his compassion, calm wisdom, fierce determination
and for being, all in all, a great inspiration.
As of February 3rd, the government has arrested
no ex-Kamaiya in Kailali and Kanchanpur. The
ex-Kamaiyas are prepared to settle permanently
in places they had recently moved to.
Missing is: political will of the Kathmandu Sarkar
to move its administrative machinery to 'solve' the
kamaiya issue ASAP.
oohi
ashu
**********
Ex-Kamaiyas' Act of Peaceful Civil Disobedience
By Ashutosh Tiwari
Six months after successfully pressuring the government to free them from decades-old vicious cycle indentured servitude, ex-Kamaiyas (former Tharu bonded agricultural laborers) in Far Western Nepal have made history
again.
According to the data available as of January 24, from the early morning hours of Thursday, January 18, 2001, about 3000 ex-Kamaiya families in Kailali and Kanchanpur districts started to move peacefully from 51 different makeshift camps into 19 undesignated chunks of government-owned but non-forest land, occupying a total of almost 1500 bighas of land.
While doing so, contrary to what appeared in some Kathmandu-centric 'national' media, the ex-Kamaiyas were careful not to encroach upon forest land, not
to chop down trees and not to build their sheds in privately-owned or otherwise contested properties.
One significant result of this has been that, as of five days later, no one had been arrested, and that the local administration had issued no statements opposing the ex-Kamaiyas' actions. Except for a few angry villagers here and there who wanted to either keep the open spaces open for grazing purposes or create community forests out of them, the public has been, on the whole, quite supportive of the ex-Kamaiyas' actions.
As such, once the moves were successfully completed in most locations, the ex-Kamaiyas, under supervision from their designated leaders, mapped out a parcel each of 10 Katthas (i.e. six and half ropanis) of land, and started distributing it to each family. In some places, such as Balchour in Baliya VDC in central Kailali, up to 500 families moved in from various camps --
clearing up the shrubs, dividing up the land, building sheds and even assigning names to newly emerging bastis. So far, altogether big, open spaces have been occupied by the ex-Kamaiyas in Kailali and Kanchanpur.
Arguably, this is the first time in Nepal's history whereby thousands of free, poor, indigenous yet landless people, possessing no other skills but agricultural, have issued a frontal challenge to the government.
Their challenge is that the government either help them settle permanently in these newly-occupied areas or soon show them places where land is available.
Either way, the ex-Kamaiyas want the government to fulfill its own promise to speedily get on with programs to rehabilitate them.
To that end, the ex-Kamaiyas and activists leading the Kamaiya Andolan (Movement) say that only after the ex-Kamaiyas own land, at the rate of 10 Katthas per freed family, can they take care of their pressing needs for housing and farming. They further say that only after those primary needs are met, can concerned NGOs, INGOs, and other bilateral and multilateral agencies come in to assist the government in rehabilataing the ex-Kamaiyas with programs related to nutrition, construction, healthcare, education, skill-development and income generation.
Else, they ask, why and how long should the ex-Kamaiyas live with
uncertainty under utterly squalid conditions in temporary camps? And what purpose would it serve to continue to hold rehab programs for the ex-Kamaiyas when they are living as internal refugees in cramped spaces in their own ancestral land? As such, their fear was that that if the government's indifference continued, then the ex-Kamaiyas, most of whom were driven out from their landlord's estates last July, would be stuck in 'temporary' shelters.
It is against this background the activists argue that
surely with enough national problems in its hand, it is not in the
interest of the Kathmandu government to burden itself further by unwittingly creating Bhutanese-refugee-like camps in the Far West.
"We decided to start occupying government-owned land as an act of peaceful civil disobedience," says Dilli Bahadur Chaudhary, president of Backward Society Education (BASE) who is also a 1994 Reebok International Human Rights Award winner [in Boston]. "The first phase of our Andolan was about achieving unconditional freedom from debt bondage. That, we accomplished. All we are
doing now is make it easier for the government to come to a decision: Either show the promised land to the ex-Kamaiyas or help them settle permanently in these occupied spaces."
"To get land, no other pressure tactics seemed to work," says Yagya Raj Chaudhary, a BASE central committee member who helped spark off the Andolan last May by having 19 Kamaiya families in Geta VDC file formal complaints against their then landlord Mr. Shiva Raj Pant, a former Minister of State.
"To make the demand for land heard in Kathmandu, we sent a letter to the Prime Minister. We lobbied our Representatives. We sought help from the press. We organized sit-ins in the offices of the local DDC and the CDO. We even blocked traffic on the East-West Highway for a day. Now that we are breaking the law by occupying government-owned land, maybe something will
happen."
"The government said that it would give us land by Dassain," adds Raj Deo Chaudhary, an ex-Kamaiya who heads the Kamaiya Struggle Committee. "That did not happen. Then we were told that we would get land by Maghi [the middle
of January].
That did not happen either. Now that our camp has moved to an open space near Manehara River [not far from the town of Dhangadi], and have measured our shares of 10 Katthas each, we are not going to move to any other place. We have always done nothing but farming, and we are anxious to start farming in our own land for our families from [April] onwards."
Though all involved in the Andolan are happy to be making history, their day-to-day worry is about where to get food, shelter materials and medicines to provide to the ex-Kamaiyas. They all say that this is where, with or without the government's assistance, they need all the help they can get.
(Affiliated with Kathmandu's Martin Chautari organization, Ashutosh Tiwari has been assisting those heading the
Kamaiya Andolan).
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