| Ashu |
Posted
on 28-Jun-00 04:38 PM
In December 1994, a young, 25-year-old Tharu activist from Chakhaura, Dang in Nepal visited Boston. He was in Boston to accept a $25,000 ko Reebok International Human Rights Award. To this day, he remains the ONLY Nepali to have won such
an important international human rights prize.
Dilli Bahadur Chaudhary, the activist, was selected for this very prestigious award
for successfully running, under very harrowing circumstances, adult-literacy classes for several years for thousands of Tharus, mostly kamaiyas or bonded agricultural laborers in Dang, Bardiya, Kailali, Banke and Kanchanpur districts of Far Western Nepal.
When Dilli was in Boston, the then GBNC Council, following Prem-La's Prahlad KC's lead, had hosted a reception for him and his colleague Defu Lal in Cambridge.
Anyway, Dilli and I have since been in touch intermittently (indeed, later, on a grant
from Harvard, I worked as a legal-aid volunteer at the Backward Society Education (BASE), Dilli's organization). Recently, we met again in Kathmandu, and he invited me to visit him in Dhangadi, Kailali where, since May 1st of this Year, he, together with his very fearless colleague Yagya Raj Chaudhary, is spearheading a potentially explosive "Kamaiya Mukti Andolan" (Emancipation of Bonded Laborers) in the Far Western Nepal.
After spending little more than a week in the Far Western Nepal with Dilli and some friends, traveling deep through Tharu villages, and talking at length with the CDOs, the LDOs, the Jamindaars, the activists and, most importantly the Andolit Kamaiyas, here are two conclusions I have reached:
a) Starting this coming January (Magh), the Kamaiya system as known in the Far Western Nepal so far will pretty much END.
b) Kamaiyas will become, by new laws, daily wage-laborers earning AT LEAST 60 rupees a day for 8-hour-a-day work.
Meantime, as things stand in the Far West, the jimdaars (or jamindaars) who are losing their kamaiyas to the Andolan and to freedom, are not too happy about Dilli's work, and, as such, Dilli's life remains in danger, with everybody else (i.e. government bureaucrats plus jamindaars) pretty much against him and his organization. Just
last Wednesday, in Sripur VDC in Kanchanpur zilla, we were 'gherao-ed' by 50+ jimdaars ready to beat us to pulp!!
Still, all in all, it's been both intriguing and inspiring to be following this Mukti Andolan led by no other than a former guest of the GBNC.
One truly begins to appreciate what it means to be FREE after meeting and talking with Kamaiyas, citizens of Nepal, who are now free.
oohi
ashu
ashutosh@post.harvard.edu
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