The popular perceptions of Punjab and its contiguous agrarian expanses often evoke narratives of bountiful harvests, high wages, comfortable standards of living, high levels of mechanisation, market-governed cultivation, and regular displays of affluence—an overall oasis of prosperity that delivers economic salvation. Moreover, an oasis that also helps feed multiple states, while keeping India’s granaries stocked up for future contingencies. With a culture that revels in merry-making and extravagance, these narratives are reinforced and propagated by the entertainment industry. Hardly ever, however, do these images of Punjab bring into focus its dark-skinned Dalit natives, who have spilled their sweat and blood at the fields of the fairer, well-to-do, landed castes for generations, creating and enhancing their wealth and property.
Those who hold sway in the state, along with the upper and backward castes, are the Jatts, a dominant, agrarian community who constitute just about 27 percent of the state’s populace, and around 60 percent of the state’s Sikh population. It is the Punjabi Dalits who are the largest community within the state, forming 32 percent of its populace. However, it is the kith and kin of the Jatt Sikhs who make up the significant chunk of all the land-owning castes over a huge expanse, across Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Western Uttar Pradesh and the bordering areas of Rajasthan. The Punjabi Dalits, meanwhile, happen to be remarkably landless—particularly so, because no other Indian state has such a large proportion of landless Dalits. Official data has revealed that only 4.3 percent of Scheduled Caste households in rural Punjab are self-employed in agriculture, and 94.2 percent of Dalit households in the state do not have any land for cultivation.
This alienation from land continues despite decades of laws in place that, on paper, seek to ensure the distribution of land to Dalit landless labourers for cultivation. In 1961, the state government introduced the Punjab Village Common Lands Regulation Act to decree that one-third of panchayati land would be distributed to Dalits through public auctions. In Panjab: Journeys Through Fault Lines, Amandeep Sandhu notes that these common lands reserved for Dalits would amount to 51,000 acres of the state’s 1.4 lakh acres of panchayat land. Another estimate, collected through Right to Information applications by Pampa Mukherjee, a professor of political science at Panjab University, reportedly found approximately 170,000 acres of such common land, or shamlat deh, in the state. But what emerged as the common practice ever since was that the land was rarely, if ever, actually leased to Dalits. Instead, the Jatts would field Dalit proxy candidates to bid on their behalf, often in collusion with the revenue officials, and then take it over.
Since 2008, a movement of solidarity emerged among the landless and poor peasants, with Dalit labourers asserting their right over the public land, coming together to submit joint bids, and reclaiming their land from the Jatts who have subverted the law in their own favour so far. While the movement has encountered deeply entrenched vested interests and prejudices among the haves, it has grown from its first successful auction at Benra, in Sangrur district 2008, and spread to many other villages since. In mid-August this year, the Zameen Prapti Sangharsh Committee (ZPSC), one of the coalitions of landless Dalit labourers spearheading this movement, launched the Dalit Mukti March as part of its continuing efforts at land reclamation under the law.
I joined the movement for a week in September. The march made its way through 300 villages across the districts of Malerkotla, Patiala and Sangrur, passing through areas that have seen both victory and tragedy. Earlier this month, the march reached its final destination in Barnala’s Sekha village, where the ZPSC had first joined this struggle, successfully wresting seven acres of land from upper-caste control back in 2014. Though the march did not see consistent mass participation throughout its journey, it received a warm welcome in most villages it passed through.
The history of the Dalit land rights movement in Punjab is marked by collectives of landless labourers struggling against the collusion of revenue officials, the police and Jatt landlords, prevailing against all odds despite boycotts, intimidation and violence. The Dalit Mukti March sought to mobilise the villagers to highlight these victories when they asserted their rights, to remind them of their strength in numbers, and to unite them against the caste hierarchies that have long been privileged over the law of the land. “The aim was to help our Dalit families realise that without land, there can be no subsistence,” said Mukesh Malaud, the ZPSC president. “We wanted to spread awareness about the importance of land in their lives. In this endeavour, we were successful, the people are ready to fight for their land.”
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AGRARIAN TENANCY was abolished in one radical sweep in the Malwa region of Punjab—the state’s largest political division, comprising 15 districts, and marked by sharp inequalities in land holdings—in the wake of the post-1947 Communist-led Mazhara movement. The Punjab Village Common Lands Regulation Act of 1961 mandated that one-third of the cultivable land proposed to be leased would be reserved for leasing by auction to members of the Schedule Caste only, and that such reservation would cease to have effect if the panchayat refused to confirm the auction, or if no person submitted a bid for the land on two different dates. As such, the panchayat was granted significant power and discretion in the implementation of the law.
As a consequence, in practice, only the Jatts and other tenant peasants became owners through those land reforms, and had their lives transformed through that upward mobility, in terms of both class and caste. The Dalits, who actually toiled as labourers on the land but did not formally hold tenancies to till the land, gained not even a straw. Their stake in the tenancies was not recognised at all. As before, they continued as labourers for the old landlords and the new tenants-turned-landowners. Their bondage to the lands of others continued, denying them the freedom to live off any land of their own, as free peasants would.
Not only were the Dalit labourers denied the land that the reforms promised to them, they were also bonded to their masters as “siris,” working on the land, from dawn till night, without the hope of a dignified wage. The sirisare predominantly from the Dalit communities of Ravidasis, who are also called Ramdasiyas, and the Mazhabis, at the lowest rung of the caste hierarchy. They are trapped in a medieval form of bonded labour that served tenant-peasants and landlords alike, persisting through the pre-colonial Jajmani mode and the colonially imposed Mahalwari land-tenure systems of Punjab that continued widely until the 1970s. Their fate was worse than the usual serfdom, not having even a patch to till for their subsistence. Earlier, they were paid in kind, at the time of harvest.
The new farming practices encouraged during the Green Revolution—with hybrid crops, increased mechanisation and a focus on food production—brought about some marked changes, according to some sections of the peasant and rural worker leadership. Rapid strides in the commercialisation of agriculture, since the 1970s, have cashified all transactions, making the payments to the siris appear as wages. But the bonded Dalit siris still remained a basic component of agrarian labour, right until machines took over their physical modes of labour, and by and by made them dispensable.
Yet, the practice has continued right into the 21st century, as Bahal Singh, an educated son of a siri, described. One report from 2007 estimated that there were still one lakh siris working as bonded labourers in the state, three-fourth of them Mazhabis. “Siris are still contracted annually,” said Amol Singh, a rural journalist in Patiala, “for a sum in excess of one lakh now, but their numbers have dwindled to a minuscule percentage of the village labour force.” Bahal Singh seconded him, and so did many others from his village, Benra. That averaged to a monthly salary of hardly Rs. 10,000 for physically slogging out in the open fields throughout the year, all the while taking utmost care to keep the landowner in good humour. Even small landowners behaved as if they were landlords, and constantly dictated terms to their workers. A cross section of speakers from the Dalit Mukti March brought forth these realities, time and again, at their public meetings.
Moreover, even as the commercialisation of agriculture since the 1970s brought about a number of socio-economic changes, the feudal domination of the landless Dalits by the landed upper castes continued unabated. It is an ingrained, structural domination, stemming from the fact of birth, merely by virtue of the caste-class hierarchy and discrimination, an unquestioned coercion and oppression. This social construct is integral to the Punjab countryside, and deprives those at the bottom, especially the women, of the dignity that landed individuals enjoy by birth. Although the scourge of untouchability here is not as overt as in other north Indian states, it is not uncommon for gurdwaras in the state to host separate langars—community meals—for the Dalits. More strikingly, the dead among the Dalits continue to be cremated on grounds that are clearly segregated. Every single village also has a distinct area, exclusively inhabited by the Dalits, known as the vedha.
With the current scale of mechanisation, wheat and paddy cultivation provides little work opportunities these days, hardly for a month or two in the year. “Cotton, vegetables, pulses, oilseeds, and any such further diversification of cropping patterns would be desirable,” said Mukesh Malaud, the ZPSC president. “Not only would crop diversification help in the sustainability of agriculture itself, as too much of reliance on just paddy and wheat to ensure the viability of farming has led to a massive depletion of soil nutrients and ground water, but such multi-cropping, entailing varied and multiple forms of labour in tending to the crops, would effectually generate more work opportunities for the landless.” But that happens to be a matter of futuristic, and only probable, farming policy, which is not currently an option for those deprived of land. Pertinently, the Bharatiya Kisan Union (Ekta) recently held an impressive demonstration at Chandigarh, the state capital, in favour of a policy to encourage the diversification of crops.
As a result of the prevailing agricultural practices, added another member of the ZPSC zonal committee, the landless Dalit labourers were compelled to look for work in the non-farm sectors, both near and far. They work as artisans or daily-wage labourers in construction and other unorganised sectors, from brick-making to masonry, painting walls and polishing tiles, welding and fitting, to shuttering and denting. If no such opportunity presented itself, a considerable number also relied on government schemes such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. “Joining the ranks of this new class of rural workers are also other poor peasants, from the backward and upper castes, lakhs of whom have lost their lands to moneylenders, over the decades, amid the vagaries of a crisis-ridden commercial agriculture,” explained Jagmohan Singh, the general secretary of a faction of the Bharatiya Kisan Union (Ekta-Dakaunda).
Satnam Singh was a young and enthusiastic member of the Dalit Mukti March who had joined the movement one year ago. He unabashedly admitted to swaying towards the rightist Khalistani movement, before embracing the leftist ideals of his father and twin brother, Beant Singh. The brothers were now both full-time activists of the ZPSC. Satnam spoke passionately of the plight of Dalit labourers in Punjab, as well as the unfortunate irony of their demeaning social status, given the Sikh faith’s egalitarian ideals and the defiance of various obnoxious practices of a caste-ridden society by Guru Nanak, Guru Govind Singh, and particularly the last Guru’s lieutenant and flag-bearer, Banda Singh Bahadur.
Banda Singh Bahadur’s portrait adorned the front of the first tractor in the Dalit Mukti March. Bahadur is perhaps the most revered historical figure among the Dalits of Punjab. His brief five-year stint leading the Sikh community, in early 18th century, is remembered by Dalits in particular as the reform period, when peasants and all toiling sections were sought to be freed from the shackles of the reigning oppressive, feudalistic autocracies. Satnam presented these insights into Sikh history, which were also propagated during the Dalit Mukti March. He spoke of the faith’s sacred text, the Guru Vaani, full of social compassion and rationality, and the radical verses of Nanak, Kabir and Ravidas. Given that the community still recites these verses, Satnam rued the abject failure of the Sikh as well as other north Indian societies to create even a semblance of Ravidas’ utopia, Beghampura: a classless, casteless world without sorrow.
Yet, it was that same spirit of revolutionary social reform that led Bhagat Singh—venerated as “Shaheed-e-azam,” or “The Great Martyr”—and his comrades to pursue their radical vision of a society free of exploitation of man by man, free of communal strife. Their revolutionary ideals have continued to enlighten an array of student and youth collectives across generations, motivating them to integrate with the rural masses, both the landowning and landless peasants, so as to organise their struggles and unions. Thus it was that Naujawan Bharat Sabha, founded originally by Bhagat Singh and his comrades, became the precursor for various peasant mass organisations in the state today: the Bharatiya Kisan Union (Ekta – Ugarahan); the Kirti Kisan Union; the Bharatiya Kisan Union (Ekta – Dakaunda); the Bharatiya Kisan Union (Krantikari); and the Krantikari Kisan Union—all primarily comprising the Jatt peasantry. The historic role of these unions in leading a year-long agitation that encircled Delhi, through the COVID-19 pandemic, and ultimately forcing the central government to withdraw the farm laws, was rooted in Punjab’s evolution from the rise of Sikhism to the revolutionary national movement.
In the same vein, it gave spring to the organisations of landless workers, most of whom were Dalits, such as Punjab Khet Mazdoor Union (PKMU), Pendu (meaning rural) Mazdoor Union (PMU), Krantikari Pendu Mazdoor Union (KPMU) and the latest formation, ZPSC.
Inheriting a common revolutionary ideological legacy, these two branches of organisations of the agrarian masses represent disparate class and sectional interests across the countryside of the Malwa, Doaba and Majha regions of Punjab. They remain committed in principle to an alliance of the peasants and workers, and to the egalitarian tenets within Sikh traditions, as opposed to the dominant elites who have all along controlled the official organs of the state and its polity while serving exploitative feudal and corporate interests.
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IT IS THE PROMISE of these ideals, and the motivated cadre of these organisations that seek to fulfil them, that has formed the basis of the Dalit land rights movement in Punjab. It has empowered organisations like the PKMU, KPMU and the ZPSC to lead landless Dalit labourers to exercise and assert their right for their own land, despite the agrarian crises in which the landowning peasantry finds itself increasingly entrapped, with the rise of commercialisation and corporatisation of cultivation.
In 2008, a group of young Dalit men from the village of Benra, in Punjab’s Sangrur district, mobilised the community to come together under the banner of Krantikari Pendu Mazdoor Union, and submit a bid for an eight-acre piece of shamlat land being auctioned by the village panchayat. Among the leaders of the KPMU was 24-year-old Bahal Singh, who had seen his father enslaved as a Siri all his life. “I was guided by the Chinese novel, Hurricane, by Chou Li-Po, and the Soviet film and novel, Virigin Soil Upturned, by Mikhail Sholokhov, depicting the revolutionary land reform movements in the respective countries, from the mid 1940s and 1930s,” Bahal said.
He explained how he patiently motivated the 250 landless Dalit families in his village, out of a total of 1,000 families—the remaining 750 constituting the landed peasantry. “I used to regularly go out to the houses of my neighbours, participate in their daily labour, talk with them about everything that bothered and concerned their lives,” Bahal said. This helped him understand “their aspirations as a community, an exploited and oppressed class and caste, and then plan and carry out the auction.” He added that any such action would be taken “keeping in view the huge vested interests of the landlords and rich peasants in maintaining the status quo, while at the same time manoeuvring through the mutual conflicts among the landless, who would sometimes squabble and bicker among themselves, even while being united over the struggle against a common enemy.”
This act of asserting their right to the land, challenging the Jatt Sikh caste dominance in doing so, was nothing short of radical and historic. After six months of confrontation with the Benra Gram Sabha, and persistent efforts to keep the Dalits united as a collective force, the collective succeeded in securing the lease for the land. Moreover, they faced no competitive bids at the auction, which led to the annual rent drastically falling from several lakhs per acre to just about Rs 20,000. Yet, the land was too small in comparison to the huge number of families that would share it. This led to a practical decision to cultivate not the usual food grains that Punjab is known for, but fodder crops, and to manage the cultivation in the form of a collective, through a village committee.
More significantly, perhaps, the story of KPMU and the Dalits from Benra set a precedent by demonstrating the power and possibility of collective action. It was a small revolutionary spark that ignited a long-term resolve for the assertion of land rights, and the dignity that came with the possession of land. The movement generated widespread interest in the forgotten cause of land reforms.
Inspired by the KPMU’s movement, in 2014, a group of activists from the Punjab Students Union formed a collective by the name of the Zameen Prapati Sangharsh Committee in Sekha, a village in Barnala district. The ZPSC launched a similar movement to claim Nazool land that they are entitled to under law. Like the panchayati shamlat deh, Nazool lands refer to state-owned lands that are not administered as state property. In Punjab, under the Nazool Lands (Transfer) Rules of 1956, any such land that has not been appropriated by the state for any other purpose must be leased out to members of Scheduled Castes and Backward Castes for cultivation. In practice, however, as in the case of the panchayat lands, the Nazool lands were leased out to upper-caste farmers through a Dalit proxy candidate.
In Sekha, the ZPSC’s movement was to claim seven acres of Nazool land. The Dalit workers and activists first occupied the land, held protests outside the local government offices, and eventually claimed rightful possession over it by securing the lease on the land through an auction. But they had to brave stiff opposition from the powerful landlords of the area and the police that had scant regard for the law. “Of the 12 Dalit families that laid claim over the Nazool land, only four gathered the courage to fight it out at first,” said Mukesh Malaud, the ZPSC president, as he reminisced over the struggle they waged, initially under the banner of Naujawan Bharat Sabha. “But after tasting success, more and more families came out, from village to village.”
In fact, in 2014 itself, the state witnessed multiple other important victories in different Dalit land reclamation movements. In perhaps the most significant movement of the year, given the sheer size of the land under contention, 143 Dalit families from Balad Kalan, another village in Sangrur, endured police violence, intimidation by locals and revenue officials, and even activists arrested for up to two months, to secure the lease for 121 acres of panchayati land. In Matoi, a village in Malerkotla district, which used to fall within Sangrur, eight Dalit female college students formed the Ekta Club and persisted through two failed auctions until they ultimately won 3.4 acres of land.
In his book, Sandhu notes another instance from that year, from Sangrur’s Baupur village, where 105 Dalits united to claim 27 acres of land, prompting a social and economic boycott by the local Jatts. “The upper castes cut off the water supply to the Dalit part of the village, fields and sheds,” Sandhu writes. “They announced over public loudspeakers that anyone employing a Dalit farm labourer would be penalised. They stopped Dalits from selling vegetables in the village, forced them to close their small shops and forbade Dalit children’s entry to the village school and hospital. Yet, the Dalits persisted and got the land and have begun cultivating it.”
More struggles followed across the Malwa region in the years to come. Researchers have estimated that over 250 acres of shamlat land came to be occupied by Dalit collectives during the 2014–15 land movements. According to Ish Mishra, a professor at Delhi University who was part of an activist coalition called JanHastakshep, which conducted a fact-finding mission on these land movements of Punjab, there were at least 65 such agitations in the Malwa region as of 2016, and Dalit collectives had been successful in 16 villages in Sangrur itself.
Two years after the ZPSC launched its movement, in October 2016, an incensed mob of Jatts unleashed a bloody feudal retribution in Jhaloor, in southern Sangrur, while the local police effectively served as accomplices. The Jatts attacked unarmed Dalit women and men who were returning from a protest at the nearby town of Lehra, challenging a fraudulent auction held by local landlords over a panchayat land reserved for the Dalit community. Gurdev Kaur, a 72-year-old, bed-ridden mother of a ZPSC leader, Balwinder Singh, was killed in the vicious assault. Within weeks, however, all the peasant mass organisations active in those parts came out in support of the ZPSC, and further physical threat to the Dalit community was averted. Widespread support—a specific possibility in Punjab on account of its strong democratic, secular and socialist-oriented farmers unions—thus proved to be a protective shield in the immediate aftermath of gruesome violence against the landless Dalits.
In the ensuing years, cultivable panchayati lands have been won in village after village by different Dalit collectives. In Malerkotla’s Tolewal village, a ZPSC stronghold, instead of leasing out Dalits’ land in auctions every few years, a Dalit sarpanch named Beant Singh simply arranged an auction, at a gram sabha meeting in 2018-19, to lease out the same land for a period of 33 years in one go. According to Jagtar, a zonal committee member of the ZSPC, the rationale behind the 33 years’ lease was that the land was to be cultivated for a non-profit purpose, with the collective consent of the Dalits of the village. The annual ritual for auction was therefore redundant and unwarranted. The matter, however, remains embroiled in a dispute over the issue raised by a prominent upper caste landlord—often referred to as Chaudhary—of the area, following an altercation and a criminal case registered as a result. Feudal elements adopt a variety of devious ploys to subvert rational, progressive reforms.
Baljeet Singh, the Sangrur district president of the KPMU, reports that his organisation has waged struggles for panchayati land in favour of the Dalits, in about 50 villages, so far, with a success rate of 80 percent. “A few of the successes have occurred in Patiala and Mansa districts too,” he added. Yet, the struggle continues to face extreme difficulties. Baljeet recounted a relatively recent incident, back from 2018-2019, from Mimsa, one more of Sangrur’s many villages that have witnessed the land movement, where a rich Jatt peasant from a neighbouring village fielded a dummy candidate from a Scheduled Caste to obtain a seven-acre plot at a rent of Rs 5 lakhs per acre. According to Baljeet, however, the average lease rent in the area was Rs. 20,000 per acre, as settled upon by nearly a dozen villages in the vicinity. The KPMU contested the fraudulent lease at Mimsa, threatening more militant forms of direct action—such as burning the standing crop on the illegitimately occupied lands and forcefully take possession of them—to stake claim over the land on behalf of the landless Dalits. Finally, the administration rescinded the fraudulent lease and prepared to hand over the plot to the collective.
The next year, however, the situation changed all of a sudden, Baljeet continued. Local goons, backed by the administration and the local police, cornered Baljeet and his associate, Manjeet Singh—who is also a KPMU activist—and beat them severely. Baljeet suffered multiple fractures in his arms and legs from the assault, and Manjeet lost consciousness in the assault. The assailants then carried the duo to the sarpanch’s house, where they were threatened and intimidated. The sarpanch summoned the police and implicated them in a false molestation case. While the police were carrying the injured duo away, without any action yet initiated against their assailants themselves, agitated residents of that and a neighbouring village got wind of the terrible fight and intervened in large numbers, also carrying along their traditional weapons.
Baljeet and Manjeet were eventually freed from the police, admitted for medical treatment at the local hospital, and finally a counter-complaint was registered against their assailants. The ZPSC and the KPMU then got together, along with other prominent peasant mass organisations, garnered wider support than ever before to secure the Mimsa lease for one-third panchayati land to the landless Dalits, at the concessional rent of Rs 20,000 per acre.
Yet, as these movements have shown, despite the unprecedented advances made, there is still no assurance that Dalit blood will not have to be spilled for the basic dignity of holding a bit of community land.
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THIS SEPTEMBER, fresh efforts were afoot among the unseen rural workers, hopeful that the experiences of their land struggles would pave the way for a wider implementation of the allotment of land to Dalits, at least across the Malwa region.
The ZPSC march for the emancipation of the Dalits remained a sombre affair through the broader highways and streets, but once it turns into the vedha lanes and by-lanes, the warmth of welcome is unmistakable. Often the Ramdasiyas would welcome the marchers with colourful garlands and cups of tea. Wherever they would need to halt for the night, arrangements for meals and a community space—often a Ravidas temple—would be made available for rest and washing up,
The Dalit Mukti March is not simply about continuing the land-rights movement. Rather, the ZPSC presented a ten-point agenda encapsulating their immediate programme for future action. The redistribution of land is topmost on the agenda. The upper limit of a unitary family holding, for fertile agricultural land with good irrigation facilities, is sought to be reduced from the 1972 ceiling of 17.5 acres to just 10 acres, considering the enhanced productivity and profitability since the Green Revolution. The movement calls for redistribution among the poor and landless peasants, on a priority basis, particularly for the Dalits. It seeks waivers on all loans, inclusive of those advanced by usurious, private, micro-finance companies. Urgent regularisation of decently sized housing plots is also a pressing demand, as is raising the minimum wage to Rs. 1,000 per day. And of course, Nazool and panchayati lands are sought to be pursued, for economic succour and for the dignity of holding one’s own land.
“We found that there was a more positive response than we had expected,” Malaud said. “One reason for this is that the rural workers were looking for a union or collective of this sort. The farmers are organised to support each other, but the labourers were not. So they also wanted to be organised, to wield the power that comes with an organised collective.” In fact, the labourers across these villages recognised that their struggle for land and dignity would require supportive movements across the state. “In many of the villages we went to, some villagers told us that they were ready to travel to other villages to support them,” Malaud said. “Some could understand that in order to bring about a tangible change, it would be necessary for us, as an organisation, to garner support for a wider movement across villages on the question of land.”
The ZPSC president also noted that while mobilising the villagers, in addition to identifying villages where collective bids for panchayati lands were yet to be made in an organised fashion, there was also a special focus on identifying big landowners of those areas. “In or around almost every village, there are big landlords who own up above 1o0–150 acres of land, far in excess of the land ceiling law,” Malaud said. “We have identified most of them.” According to Malaud, the next challenge to be taken up in the course of the ongoing struggle is the redistribution of the excessive lands held by the landlord class. “The way you have to prepare fields to cultivate the crops, our march too has prepared the ground for such struggles in the future. There are miles to go before we could reap the fruits of the land struggles that have only just begun.”
Late one September night in a Ravidas temple, at the end of a work day, young actors from the Dalit Mukti March enacted a partly improvised play, “Tainu Ki Dard Na Aya?” [Did you not feel the pain?]
“Nothing feels good anymore. Even the sun above feels toxic these days.”
“Work, work, work. From early dawn till late at night, not a moment to rest, no time even for the wife and husband to engage in banter, not to speak of love-talk.”
Having pocketed a full maize stalk from a big landlord’s field, a hungry child tries to hides the corn while counting the pods as if they were pearls. When his tears have dried, his mother explains: “Maize stalks though ripe for harvest are not to be picked up by us, even if we may have tended the crop with utmost care. They belong to someone else, don’t they?”
Her question sets him thinking. “Do the stars also belong to someone?”
“No, the stars don’t belong to anyone; they belong to all the people on earth.”
“If that is so about the stars, that is, they don’t belong to anyone in particular, then why is it that maize stalks belong to someone and not to everyone on earth? Isn’t the growth of plants as natural as the appearance of stars in a dark sky?”
The difference, yet unknown to the child, lay in the fact that crops are cultivated on patches of land in the earth below our feet, whereas the stars abound in the free sky above us. These patches of cultivable land have been deprived of the earth’s natural property. In their natural state, they both belong to us all. But now, the patches of land have become somebody’s private property.
At the heart of this lies our civilisational struggle, for the ownership of land, and for a semblance of dignity. The dark-skinned rural workers are not a landlord’s chattel any more. The bonded labourers or Siris may have shrunk to a minuscule minority. The British rule has been replaced by an electoral republic, a democracy in form, at the least, if merely that.
But how much have things really changed in essence?