Otro poemita

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

–Separation. By W. S. Merwin. found this summer near a mountain.

Parha jatra, and politics

Ravindra Bhagat, the political successor and son of former Member of Legislative Assembly from Mandar Karamchand Bhagat rides a wooden horse as the parha raja at the Bero jatra.

The parha jatra, a congregation of 5/7/12/21 villages which form a parha, has been celebrated in Oraon and Munda villages since long. But what was traditionally a religious congregation has also become a rallying point and an occasion for political leaders to assert clout.
In 1967, Congress MLA Karamchand Bhagat supported and oganized the parha jatra in Bero for the first time. At the time, the police had imposed a curfew after six adivasis of the area were killed in police firing. Bhagat supported the village parhass efforts to organize the jatra to defy the curfew. Since Bhagat first supported it in Bero, it has been organized at the Bero market in Ranchi every 3rd June. Bhagat, who later joined the RJD, died a few years back and this year’s jatra was organized by his son Ravindra Bhagat.

Paika dancers wait at the parha jatra at Baridih, two kms from Bero. On June 3, Congress, BJP, RJD leaders attended the jatra at Baridih organized by Vishvanath Bhagat. Photo by Anumeha Yadav

In 1989, Karamchand Bhagat’s political rival former Jharkhand Mukti Morcha MLA Vishvanath Bhagat started organizing the same parha jatra at Baridih, in a ground two kms from Bero, notes anthropologist Alpa Shah in her 2010 book on Jharkhand. (In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism, and. Insurgency in Jharkhand, Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

As the villagers celebrate, the head of the parha , the parha raja and the parha dewans ride wooden horses and elephants supported on sticks by their supporters. In Bero Karamchand Bhagat started use of political flags at the jatra and political leaders occupied the place of the parha rajas in jatra, something that Vishvanath criticised him for. In Baridih, only children of the parha rajas appointed by the village occupy these seats at the center of the processions even now.

Bero and Baridih are now the site of the two biggest pahra jatra in Jharkhand. Villagers come from 30-40 kms away to attend the jatra which has the atmosphere of a carnival with stalls selling snacks, toys, ferris wheel rides.

Parha rajas arrive on a wooded elephants carried by villagers at Baridih. Photo Anumeha Yadav

Jharkhand Special Police Officers become the target of Maoists

In July 2011, when the Supreme Court asked the Chhattisgarh government to disband the Salwa Judum and to desist from using SPOs in any manner in countering Maoist activities, the recruitment of SPOs in Jharkhand too was paused briefly.

It was resumed in November after a Bench of Justice Altamas Kabir and S.S. Nijjar said the July order applied only to Chhattisgarh. The process of recruitment has since continued. Jharkhand has a sanctioned strength of 6,400 SPOs, though officials put the current number at 3,000.

“Ranchi and Khunti witness high levels of retribution killings because of the presence of Maoists- breakaway factions like People’s Liberation Front of India, Village Republican Guard of India here. Some SPOs begin to play off one group against the other,” said a senior police official.

Late at night on April 30, worshippers in the Raja Rani temple in Naurhi village in Adki, 40 km from Ranchi, were still singing, chanting celebrating the new temple in their village. At midnight a group of CPI (Maoists) entered the temple and made straight to the Durga temple, where Dilip Acharya, the oldest of the three brothers who built the temple, lay asleep on the floor. They shot Acharya in his sleep and used the prayer-microphone to address the panic-stricken crowd. A few Maoists then went outside the temple and after a short chase, shot Laxmikant Manjhi, Naurhi’s postmaster and Dilip Acharya’s childhood friend.

“It will be the rest of us next,” said Dilip’s younger brother Randeep Acharya a tall man in his early 40s, anxiously pacing the room in his two-storey house on the outskirts of Khunti. “For years we helped the police fight the Maoists but now things seem difficult because the police have abandoned us,” said Randeep who, like Dilip, worked as a Special Police Officer (SPO) for Jharkhand police till 2012.

Read the full report in The Hindu here.

Adivasis’ dangerous journey into the urban jungle

Last month two 14-year-old adivasi girls, who had migrated from Khunti district to work in Delhi as domestic help, were found dead in mysterious circumstances, both within two days of each other.

On April 19, Jyoti Mariyam Hora died soon after she was brought to the Madan Mohan Malviya Hospital in Delhi’s Malviya Nagar. Two days later, Dayamani Guriya, who had studied with Jyoti till class VI and had migrated to Delhi with her, died in mysterious circumstances at the Ranchi railway station when she was being sent back to her village in Torpa in Khunti with police’s intervention.

The Delhi Police have arrested one Chandumani, who had brought the two girls to Delhi. “We are waiting for a second autopsy report to verify if Dayamani was poisoned. Jyoti’s family members have left Khunti accompanied by a police team to bring Jyoti’s body back,” said Superintendent of Police, Khunti, M. Tamilvanan.

The two incidents are the tip of the crisis unfolding in several adivasi homes across Jharkhand, where hardly a week goes by without reports of children and youth, especially girls and women, missing or rescued from metropolitan cities.

There are 14 children from villages of Murhu block alone in Khunti. In March, Miti Purti (name changed) of Kotha Toli, Khunti, returned from Delhi with a debilitating skin infection, earning Rs. 27,000 after working seven years in Delhi. Mani Dondray, 15, worked in Delhi for seven months but had to return after she contracted TB and became severely underweight.

Sumi who fled from the house she worked at in Delhi and returned to Jharkhand in November 2012. Photo by Anumeha Yadav

Missing children

On a clear evening in March, as dusk fell, Dayakishore Tirkey, a tall farmer in his late 40s, waited patiently for his turn to speak to police officials at the Mahuatarnd police station. Two days back, he had got word for the for the first time since, three years ago, his 15-year-old daughter Supriya had left their home in Guera village in Jharkhand’s Latehar district to find work in Delhi.

“We got information from Delhi about a girl who is from Guera village. Her name is different from her given name but we made her talk to Dayakishore on the phone and they both recognised each other. Now we will arrange for him to go to Delhi to identify and get her back,” said Mahuatarnd Station House Officer (SHO) Anil Kumar Singh.

This is the third instance since January where the SHO has had to act on information from Delhi about adivasi girls reported missing and found or rescued through police raids at placement agencies’ offices in Delhi. “The adivasi girls educated in missionary schools are well-educated, but the poorer families’ children in government schools frequently drop out by class VI or VII and leave to work in cities. These adivasi families do not have the tradition of keeping in touch with or keeping watch over their daughters. The police have to routinely bring them back and try to get them their unpaid wages from placement agencies in Delhi,” he said.

Tirkey, who owns a small plot of land in Guera, says he worked a few years as a tailor in the army. “When Supriya asked me if she could go to Delhi with Dominica Minj, a woman from the nearby village, I had said no. I have worked in Delhi, Rajasthan and U.P. and know what cities are like. But she told her mother and left,” he spoke outside the police station.

The next morning, he left for Latehar, the district headquarters 140 km away, from where he would board a train to Delhi with a change of clothes and Rs. 210 — all the money he could manage.

More mysterious deaths

The same week that Tirkey boarded a train to Delhi, in Chekma, the adjoining village Manju Lakda, in her early 20s, came home to receive her younger sister Shanti’s body sent in an ambulance from Delhi.

“My brother, who is studying in Uttarakhand, youngest sister, who also worked as a domestic help in Delhi, and Sunita the younger sister of Dominica Minj who had first taken my sister to Delhi four years — brought Shanti’s body back. Dominica and Shanti called and tried to mislead me on the phone. At first they told us the wrong hospital’s name and to the police who had come to the hospital after my sister died they said they did not know whose body it is,” she recalled. “It took my brother and sister two days to find Shanti’s body in the mortuary. They saw marks of vomit-like substance on her face,” said Manju who is training to be Auxiliary Nurse Midwife (ANM) in Visakhapatnam. The family is still awaiting the final autopsy report from Maulana Azad Medical College, Delhi, to make sense of Shanti’s mysterious death.

A mobile phone — which the family has put in a plastic bag and hung on a tall stick at their door to be able to receive better phone signal — rings and Manju gets up to answer it. “The phone does not always work but Shanti would call once in three months or so. She said she got Rs. 3,000 as wages but I am not sure if she got the salary or the placement agency. She had left after she finished IX with Dominica from our village. Two years back she called and said she was unwell and we should come to Daltonganj station to receive her. She had contracted TB in Delhi. She stayed home a year. My husband works for the mission here and we got her fully treated. Then she left for Delhi again with her younger sister and worked in a house in Kashmiri Gate,” says Manju’s mother Sabhani Khaka. The family says Dominca Minj has threatened them for pursuing the case legally. “She is close to the parties [splinter Maoist groups active in Latehar] and says she will get our family members abducted,” said Shanti’s kin.

Minj, who was in Chekma to visit her father, denied the allegations. “I had taken seven girls including Shanti once to a placement agency run by Mahendra Singh in Naraina Vihar in Delhi. I got Rs. 6,000 per girl. But the girls get money too and wanted to go on their own,” she said. No complaint or FIR has been registered yet in Latehar.

Read the full report in The Hindu here.

Caste and the Maoists

On March 29, in one of the worst setbacks the Maoists have suffered in Jharkhand in recent months, cadres of the Tritiya Prastuti Committee (TPC), a splinter group of the banned CPI (Maoist), killed 10 Maoists after a gun battle that lasted over 10 hours at Lakarmanda village, 17 km from Kunda, where the Maoists had stopped en route to Gaya. The TPC took 25 Maoists hostage for four days in the Sarengdah and Kunda panchayats in Chatra district and released them after sending off photos to the press of the captured Maoists.

“We kept the hostages in a village school. We have released 12 cadres and some of their families came to take them from Chatra and Bihar. We kept 13 back. This is our area and the Maoists cannot enter it,” said a close aide of TPC founder Brajesh Ganju in Sarengdah. Another member said they had reports that the police had since arrested two of the 12 Maoists released by the TPC on Tuesday. But the police denied the claim.

“The Maoists are ugravaadi [militants]. The TPC has resolved to finish off Maoist militancy here. We have no enmity with the police or paramilitary forces, we will support them against Maoists,” said Mr. Ganju’s aide.

In a statement, the Maoists alleged that the police and their “vigilante group” TPC had cooperated in carrying out the operation. “We resolve to avenge the death of the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army martyrs,” Bihar Jharkhand North Chhattisgarh Special Area Committee spokesperson Gopal said, calling a Bihar-Jharkhand bandh for April 6 and 7.

Caste clashes

The TPC was founded in 2001 in Chatra by Brajesh Ganju, a Dalit, who had left the Maoists Communist Centre (MCC), citing the dominance of Yadavs in the party leadership and discrimination against Dalits. The TPC, which has cadres from Dalit communities including Ganju, Turi and Bokta, is active in parts of Chatra, Palamu, Latehar, Ranchi and Hazaribagh districts in Jharkhand and parts of West Bengal.

“Caste is not the main factor anymore. Initially the feeling was that gains and funds were going to one caste group though everyone worked equally hard. But we have cadres from all castes, including Yadavs,” said a supporter in Chatra, a Dalit, who has helped the group with logistics since its inception and now works as a contractor building the panchayat bhavan building in the area.

While officials had denied taking TPC support in the operation against Maoists in Chatra, deep inside the forest at Lakarmanda in Kunda eyewitnesses said they watched TPC men handing bodies of the Maoists to the Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA) troopers who arrived in their village on Thursday morning.

Read the full story here

Even when you take to the woods,

We are children of our age,
it’s a political age.

All day long, all through the night
all affairs–yours, ours, theirs–
are political affairs.

Whether you like it or not,
your genes have political past,
your skin–a political cast,
your eyes–a political slant.

Whatever you say reverberates,
whatever you don’t say speak for itself–
so either way you’re talking politics.

Even when you take to the woods,
you’re taking political steps
on political grounds.

Apolitical poems are also political,
and above us shines the moon
no longer purely lunar.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
And though it troubles the digestion,
it’s a question, as always, of politics.

To acquire a political meaning
you don’t even have to be human.
Raw material will do,
or protein or crude oil,
or a conference table, whose shape
was quarrelled over for months:
should we arbitrate life and death
at a round table or a square one.

Meanwhile people perished,
animals died,
houses burned,
and the fields ran wild
just as in times immemorial
and less political.

–Children of Our Age
Wislawa Szymborska saying it is not all so political but I don’t feel as sure.

When public health schemes turn anaemic

Since 2010 when the central government discontinued the supply of medical kits containing Iron Folic Acid, vitamin A, zinc tablets and Oral Rehydration Solution packets under National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) to states, village anganwadis and health centers have turned anaemic pregnant women and adoloscent girls away.

These are essential for reducing anaemia and birth defects which affect 69.5 percent women and girls between 15 and 49 and over 70 percent of all children below five in Jharkhand – the highest levels of anaemia according to National Family Health Survey 2 and 3 done in 1999 and 2006.

“There are eight pregnant women and several adolescent girls in the village but we do not have any stocks of tablets,” says Rukmini Devi, the anganwadi sevika in Bhandara. Photo by Manob Chowdhury

Over six lakhs, or nearly 12 percent, of children below six years of age in Jharkhand suffer from severe malnutrition. Children born underweight due to anaemia among women is a significant factor. Under a central scheme, 100 IFA tablets are to be given all pregnant women and weekly IFA supplements are to be provided to all adolescent girls between 16 and 19 years of age. Recently, adolescent boys have also been included in the scheme.

“District civil surgeons were asked to procure this but some bought expensive non-generic IFA tablets and exhausted funds. A month back the tender process was completed and now those will soon be supplied to all districts,” said Dr Praveen Chandra, Director NRHM in Ranchi. In 2011, former health minister Bhanu Pratap Shahi, former health secretary Pradeep Kumar and other department officers were named as accused in a Rs 130-crore NRHM scam related to purchase of medicines. The CBI is now investigating the case.

The state Social Welfare, Women and Child Development (SWWCD) website shows a budget of Rs 2.53 crores for purchase of “medicine kits” but officials in Ranchi say this meant only for purchase of first-aid. The department launched the Rs 70 crores Jeevan Asha program last month with focus on reducing malnutrition but this too does not have a component especially for IFA tablets.

At Khunti

More than two years after she gave birth to her youngest daughter, Shanti Oraon, an adivasi farmer in Bhandara village in Khunti district has been unable to resume working in the fields. “She has breathing trouble, and could not start walking even after she turned two and a half years old. I must stay at home with her all the time,” she says of her infant daughter lying wrapped in a bedsheet on the floor. Across the road from Shanti Oraon’s house, Pooja Devi watches her one-year-old play with a plastic bangle in her mouth. “She weighed less than three kgs when she was born. She falls ill often even now,” she says.

Bhandara lies a little over 30 kms from Ranchi, the state capital, and is on the outskirts of Khunti’s district center and market. Despite good connectivity with roads and easy accessibility, Bhandara and the adjoining villages Belahatu and Chikor have not received supplies of IFA since 2009.

Shanti Oraon recounts that during her four pregnancies she received IFA tablets, each costs less than 20 paise, only before the birth of her second child more than four years ago but none before the birth of three of her children. “There are eight pregnant women and several adolescent girls in the village but we do not have any stocks of tablets to give them,” said Rukmini Devi, the anganwadi sevika in Bhandara as she prepared a meal of rice and soyabean nuggets for the seven children below six years of age who turned up for lunch that afternoon from among the 89 enrolled as per the anganwadi charts.

“Over 3/4thd of girls between 15 and 19 are not in schools so there must be focus on how to reach them. In our surveys we have found that even when pregnant women get IFA tablets there are beliefs that these tablets can make your child darker – because the iron tablets can make the stool darker. Encouraging women to take tablets will require regular counseling,” said Job Zachariah, Head UNICEF Jharkhand.

Read the full story in The Hindu here.