The RTI Story: Power to the People

By Aruna Roy and MKSS Collection

Aruna Roy resigned from the IAS in 1975 to work with peasants and workers in rural Rajasthan. In 1990 she helped co-found the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS). The MKSS struggles in the mid 90s for wages and other rights gave birth to the now celebrated Right to Information movement. Aruna continues to be a part of many democratic struggles and campaigns.
This book is a collective history that tells the story of how ordinary people can come together and prevail against great odds, to make democracy more meaningful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roli Books
• Release date: May 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9788193704912

Book preview

THE

RTI

STORY

Aruna Roy resigned from the IAS in 1975 to work with peasants and workers in rural Rajasthan. In 1990 she helped co-found the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS). The MKSS struggles in the mid-90s for wages and other rights gave birth to the now celebrated Right to Information movement. Aruna continues to be a part of many democratic struggles and campaigns.

This book is a collective history that tells the story of how ordinary people can come together and prevail against great odds, to make democracy more meaningful.

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Dedication

This narrative is dedicated to the many who have paid with their lives, for combating corruption and the arbitrary use of power, by claiming the right to know.

Tribute

This book is a tribute to the large collective, from whose action, determination, memory and records a narrative has emerged. The stories, anecdotes and the common sense of its logic in the pages to come, including the many edited out – which remain anonymous for the time being, because of prosaic things like word limits and the number of pages – are its real authors. We are mere scribes.

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Devdungri: The Beginning

CHAPTER TWO

Sohangarh and the Struggle for Land

CHAPTER THREE

The Concept and Birth of the MKSS

CHAPTER FOUR

The First Hunger Strike, 1990

CHAPTER FIVE

The Bhim Minimum Wages Sammelan

CHAPTER SIX

The Second Hunger Strike, 1991 – A Watershed

CHAPTER SEVEN

Exposing the Myth of the Free and Open Market

CHAPTER EIGHT

Articulating the Demand for Transparency

CHAPTER NINE

MKSS and Public Hearings

CHAPTER TEN

Political Promises and Accountability

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Hamara Paisa Hamara Hisab: Beawar and Jaipur Dharnas, 1996

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Formation of the NCPRI and the Making of the Law

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Process and the Campaign Travel: The Public Hearings

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Rajasthan Divisional Dharnas

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Dharna in Jaipur: May–August, 1997

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

NCPRI and the State Laws

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Second Set of Jan Sunwais

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Rajasthan State Act – An Intermediate Success

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Challenge of Elections

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Public Hearings in Umarwas

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Janawad Jan Sunwai

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Government Enquiry Endorses Janawad Public Hearings

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

NCPRI Convention, Beawar 2001

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Post-Janawad and the Response of the Government of Rajasthan

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Jan Niti Abhiyan

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Freedom of Information Bill, 2002

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Friends and Colleagues in Delhi

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Second NCPRI, 2004

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

RTI Law 2005 and the NAC

CHAPTER THIRTY

RTI Amendments, 2006

In Conclusion

Notes

ANNEXURE I

The Beawar Declaration

ANNEXURE II

The Freedom of Information Bill, 2000

Credits

Index

Foreword

To know is to understand. To understand is to be at peace or – embattled.

To be in ignorance is to stay in the dark. To be in the dark is to stagnate, a condition which the human mind is not meant to be in. Knowledge is fuel, intelligence is energy. The two together, knowledge and intelligence, fuel and energy, race with time, keep step with every condition, every change, every challenge around it. In this talent, or skill, lies the human being’s faculty for survival, for progress and happiness.

For an individual to be in ignorance is to let her or his intelligence run to seed. It is to let the human potential in herself or himself to atrophy. Worse, it is to imperil others dependent on the individual. If such be the dire result of an individual’s ignorance, what of a collectivity of people, a whole peoplehood? For a citizenry to remain in the dark about its selfhood is to forfeit its collective destiny to slavery – the slavery of unknowing.

The struggle for our freedom came from a many-faceted struggle but, chiefly from a struggle against ignorance – of the slavery that British rule meant. Books like Dadabhai Naoroji’s Poverty and Un-British Rule and Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj and several journals like Gandhi’s own Harijan and Young India, Tilak’s Kesari (Marathi), Gokhale’s Mahratta (English), Aurobindo’s Bande Mataram (Bangla), Maulana Azad’s Al Hilal (Urdu), Subramania Bharati’s Vijaya and Bala Bharati (both Tamil) and Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi’s Pratap (Hindi), among others, lifted the veil of India’s unknowing of its political and social bondage. Our leaders were, thus, our teachers, leading us from ignorance to intelligence, from indolence to action, from apathy to energy. And, ultimately, from slavery to freedom.

India’s independence moved us out of the valley of political thraldom and stood us, face to face, overnight, with the realities of our own multiple ills, our enervations and injustices, and the vice-like grip of several hegemonisms which two persons above all others recognized all too well – Mahatma Gandhi and Babasaheb Dr. B.R. Ambedkar.

Even in the few months that were given to him after 15 August 1947, Gandhi strove, tirelessly, sleeplessly, to make provincial governments and the new central government accountable for assuring human rights to riot victims, especially women, getting administrations to provide shelter and supply minimum rations and clothing to the dispossessed. Seeing men, women and children who had left or been driven out of their homes in Delhi unprotected from the rain and the winter’s cold, Gandhi advised the administration on where and to whom blankets needed to be given and if raincoats were hard to find, to provide them stacks of newspapers to spread on the ground so that the women and children among them would not have to lie on the bare and wet earth. All this nudging of the administration he did as an ‘ordinary citizen’.

Babasaheb’s detailed and far-seeing crafting of fundamental rights guaranteeing our rights and privileges as citizens in the constitution and provisions in it for the accounting and audit of public funds were designed to open up our newly won freedom to public view, public experiencing. They were to save us from ourselves, help our lungs take in a new breath of our newly free air. The Constitution did not make these rights absolute or un-bridled but it did clothe them with what, speaking in the Constituent Assembly on 4 November 1948, Dr. Ambedkar called ‘Constitutional morality’. This was a new and novel concept. The authorities of the state, he said, were empowered but their powers derived from the constitution and the laws and they were open to censure for all their public acts. He thus gave ‘morality’ a political dimension.

Ambedkar clearly had in mind the possibility that independent India would have and would exercise with verve its political rights, but the common man and woman would lag behind in the claiming of social and economic rights, which are the ethical dividend of citizenship. In this claiming our experience – the experience of ordinary citizens without political clout or economic sinews – has been a glimmering but delusional mirage. ‘One citizen, one vote’ is an invaluable asset but is no substitute whatsoever to the retrieval of basic rights and entitlements – the privilege of a republican peoplehood. A vote is a vote; life is life. Hegemonies, oligarchies, cartels, caste and community cults from the past have crept out of the debris of the departing Raj and slid right into exposed cracks and joints in free India’s body politic. And how they thrive there! Parasiting on its liberal masonry, they have enfeebled and all but destroyed it.

The governments that administer India through their multitude of beneficent laws have shown themselves to be – as they should be – creative and liberal in their ideals. They are in fact spectacularly so. But they are at the same time perversely rigid in their practices. They are progressive in concept, regressive in the actuality of execution. And despite the noble-mindedness of our administrations, several administrators – in high, middling and ‘low’ positions – have patented an ability to so distort entitlements, manipulate rights and hijack prerogatives as to make a mockery of all planning, a parody of Swaraj. Ignorance, illiteracy, the innate docility of our people before the high seats of office, render them open to exploitation, deceit and plain robbery. Our post-Independence laws and plans can be said to have been made by the learned honest for the unlettered innocent with sharp middlemen entrusted with their implementation. Result: dismay, disappointment, dejection.

And that is where – on the dust-laden street of revived spirits, gutsy agitations, arduous marches – for a new championing of rightful claims of rightful rights, this book takes its place, says what it says and does what it does. It gives us the story of how a lifeline came to be thrown to its claustrophobic polity, its suffocating republicanism and its malnutritioned democracy. In other words, to its ‘constitutional morality’. How and why the uniquely inspirational Aruna Roy and her associates Nikhil Dey, Shankar Singh, his wife Anshi and others in their steadily growing team started the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan in Rajasthan’s rocky interior in 1990 is the start of the book’s ‘storyline’. It takes the reader through a series of defiant campaigns, stubborn resistances, touch-and-go negotiations, hard resolves, privation, persecution, and dangers beyond the ordinary, towards dispelling ignorance, sharpening understanding of the laws and entitlements, strengthening resolves and the plain guts that are needed to waken somnolent administrators from daytime slumbering. It is also the story of unexpected support, often from sagacious members of the very bureaucracy that was ‘under attack’, from intellectuals, writers, other NGOs, and from the hinterland of enlightened Indian opinion.

The stark simplicity of Aruna’s life in Devdungri village, the severe yet spontaneous austerity with which she and her team lived and worked, not only affected the thinking and living of the village and its environs, it made their mission known to the world beyond in a way that recalled Gandhi’s Phoenix, Kochrab, Sabarmati and Sevagram dwellings. The experience of very ‘ordinary’ persons, as real as they are unknown, described in this book, came to be known as little epics in heroism.

MKSS’s campaign for an act that would confer and protect ordinary citizens’ right to basic information on what is their legitimate due and in the public interest has been in the public’s awareness. And yet a connected account of the stages of the campaign gathering momentum, catalysing other campaigns, and then culminating in 2005 in the RTI Act, eluded us. That is now with us, in this narrative. But the book is more, much more than a chronicle of successive events. It is a testament of the willpower, determination and resolve that comes from a people knowing that their cause is true and just, that it is not just about their ‘claims’ as individuals but about the veracity and indeed the necessity, in terms of social justice, of claiming that which is legitimate. It is a manifesto of truth-seeking, truth-telling and truth-living. Its author is no individual, no institution. Its author is the true word.

The RTI Act has been true to its mandate, faithful to its promise. From a ration shop in a hamlet to the president’s residence in Delhi, it has done what it should be doing. Like any other law, it has had its saboteurs, abusers. A redemptive law should be judged by its successes, but be ready to be questioned for its failings. An Act that brings about accountability should not be coy when it is itself called to account. The Act has come, like all Acts come, from the wisdom of the Indian parliament. Curiously, it is in its birthplace, its own cradle, the Hon’ble Parliament, that the Act seems to have found some of its most vociferous detractors. They have their reasons. Sections of the political class and of the bureaucracy have also developed methods to tiptoe round provisions of the Act. They have their skills. This weakens the impact of the Act. There is another ‘problem’. The Act’s workforce, namely, the personnel in the information commissions, reflect all the diversity of our population. Our information commissions and their secretariats have had in their personnel from the many active to not-a-few slothful, from the many dedicated to the not-so-few sceptical. And they include, one might add, some fearful and some rather compromised. ‘Compromise’ does not need explaining. But all this does not dishearten the true harbingers of the Act who remain prepared to test its working against its experience. And there has been a great blessing: our first chief information commissioner, Wajahat Habibullah, has been the RTI establishment’s pride. He has, through his principled and discerning rulings, established a great standard which has been, in the main, followed diligently.

Behind the RTI story lies one hugely dismaying fact: the lives of RTI activists and campaigners are at risk. As many as sixty of them have lost their lives. They are martyrs to the cause of the good state, of public accountability, constitutional morality. We honour them. But should such courage be met in our country by murder? It is a national scandal, shame and tragedy that they have been killed. Just as we mourn the loss of brave soldiers protecting our nation’s territorial integrity, we mourn the loss of brave soldiers protecting our constitutional integrity. The tragedy is that one is killed by bullets from across the border, and the other by one of our own.

Yet, I believe that despite its many travails, the RTI Act’s widening impact will grow, deepen and expand. Its detractors and saboteurs may win a few battles for ignorance and obfuscation in the short term; they cannot in the long term, for thanks to Aruna Roy and her pioneering team, and RTI catalysts like S.P. Gupta, the people of India know now, more than ever before, what it is to have and what it is to deploy the fuel of knowledge and the energy of intelligence.

– Gopalkrishna Gandhi

Acknowledgements

In activism, documentation is often considered irrelevant, because the immediate absorbs all attention. The importance of keeping records for posterity, for learning, referencing or writing, is seldom a matter of priority. It is a task that is marginalized and seen at best as a mundane necessity. People who do so are often taken for granted and its relevance is seldom recognized.

This is to acknowledge those who have done so for the MKSS and the NCPRI. Were it not for a group of such people, the writing of this book – a collective labour of love – would have been much more difficult, even impossible. The writing of the chronicle has also been sourced from varied experiences and people who have been observers and participants for shorter periods of time in this long journey.

We would like to thank Kavita (Srivastava) and her office in her father’s home in Jaipur, particularly for beginning the process of creating documentary support. The documentation office in Aruna’s home in Tilonia has continually borne the burden of this extra work with grace. It played a significant role in providing the space and isolation required for sorting out miles of files and innumerable boxes of clippings, writings and collating them. A series of young people worked with dedication over the years and organized the documents, a vital support to all struggles and campaigns. Though they are too many to list, we must mention Sunita Vaishnav and Hansa Kanwar, who set it up, followed by Suraj Kanwar, Samundara Chaudhary, Pushpa Kanwar, Nilofar Khan, Mukesh Chaudhari, Swathi Dhanesh, Laxman Singh and Ratan Lal, among the many who came and went. Shankar Singh, Sowmya Kidambi and Kheema Ram transferred and maintained records in the MKSS, before their transfer to the documentation office. The RTI Manch (Kamal Tak and Mukesh Goswami) also kept and transferred documents from Jaipur. A very important and special acknowledgement to Shekhar Singh and his home in Delhi, which became an institution in itself. It provided space, and Shekhar offered his huge storehouse of documents and information to help understand the legal formulations facilitating and recording the robust debates and discussions around each formulation. Through this entire process he taught us the immense value of keeping papers, documents and records in an organized fashion to support public action. This narrative owes him special appreciation and thanks.

The principal members of this writing collective were Laxman Singh and Ankita Anand. Laxman’s knowledge of the RTI campaign and his quiet and persistent attention to detail were invaluable. He brought together a team responsible for collating material, sifting through all the written Hindi material, patiently assisting the process. He checked, referenced, footnoted and carefully looked at the annexures and the document, before it went to the publisher. He says he realized that he was threading together what he calls ‘the marvellous anecdotes and stories from the MKSS experience into a book’. Ankita has been the persuasive force behind this effort and an ever-active link between the publisher and the authors. Her extraordinary and cheerful support was backed by her experience with the RTI, the NCPRI, of which she had been secretary, and her work with Penguin Books India. She read through chapters many times over, and accommodated the vagaries of time and place for important editorial sessions. She was our internal reviewer and timekeeper, pushing us to make time to write. She has also been a part of the writing, editing, and reviewing collective.

We would like to thank Mamta Jaitley and Renuka Pamecha of Ujala Chadi and Vividha Features, who have been fellow travellers in documentation and dissemination. The late Ajit Bhattacharjea said that this was a movement where the roles of the journalist and the activist overlapped. As the director of the Press Institute of India he facilitated the publication of the journal Transparency, edited by Preeti Sampat in English, Aar Paar, edited by Bharat Dogra in Hindi, and provided space in the important journal Vidhura. We have drawn upon late Prabhash Joshi’s editorials and op-eds in Jansatta, Kuldip Nayyar’s regular syndicated columns, and late Nikhil Chakravarty’s Mainstream for promoting the idea of a critique of the RTI movement. The prolific writings of Bharat Dogra are peppered with stories from the RTI struggles. These writings empowered us as they became the source material for a history of the movement. Rajni Bakshi describes the embryonic stage of this movement by making us a chapter of her book Bapu Kuti. Harsh Mander and his many publications, including Unheard Voices, and an account he wrote in the early days of the MKSS and the RTI movement, carried information about the people’s journey towards achieving the right to information. Many mainstream dailies in English and Hindi and their special reports have served as source material in the book. We also referred to and wrote for Raj Drishti, a publication by the late Sri Prakash, a friend and contributor to the shaping of the campaign. Newspaper reports and comments formed an important part of the source material, and we would like to thank the late Prakash Kardelay for the campaign and support of the RTI in Pune. The rest of the innumerable sources used are part of the story and referenced for the reader.

We drew extensively from Diamond India, edited by Bhanwar Meghwanshi, a bi-monthly magazine published by the School for Democracy – a collection of comments and articles. It was almost like a diary of MKSS events. Bhanwar’s persistence made authors of us all, and forced the literate activist to write. The flavour and details of many experiences would have been lost without this important publication. We have referred to and quoted from Nirantar, a daily edited and published by Ramprasad Kumawat from Beawar. This collection of editorials during April–May 1996 offer the best analysis of the beginnings of the RTI movement, and of the forty-day dharna that turned the local struggle into a national movement. All these have been important source materials for PhDs and books related to the RTI. This narrative has drawn substantially from the PhD thesis of Suchi Pande, who was very often a part of this narrative. Her research remained a constant point of reference to check the veracity of individual and collective narratives of this chronicle. Suchi also shared all her material with the team – including oral recordings of many prominent members of the struggle and campaign.

The photographs taken by Mohan, Ramlal, Bhurji, Ashok Sain and many others have been used in this book. We have also referred to films of Jan Madhyam – a forty-minute and shorter fifteen-minute version called Hamara Paisa (our money, our accounts). We would like to acknowledge Anurag Singh, who was always there at critical times, and Radhika Kaul Batra’s film on Janawad, Accounts and Accountability. The rough footage, shot at different times by Mohan, Ramlal and our late friend and comrade Bhurji (SWRC) was extremely useful.

Amit Sharma readily translated the Hindi into English. Manini Shekher, Amrita Johri and Anjali Bhardwaj helped edit specific chapters. Shankar Singh, Nikhil Dey and Ramkaran of RMKM helped from time to time with locating important documents. Lal Singh, Narayan Singh, Kalu Ram, Sowmya Kidambi, Mohan Ram, and Chunni Singh delved into their memory and their papers to correct and enrich factual and other details.

The final edit team included Dr. S. Anandalakshmy, who went through the whole MS, and Siddharth, Nikhil Dey, Praavita Kashyap, Rakshita Swamy, Ira Anjali Anwar and Nachiket Udupa, who helped Ankita look at specific chapters. Bhanwar Meghwanshi helped with reading through pieces sent to him to make sure that they were correct. Vinay Jain helped with all graphic designing and a constant critique, so helpful in finalizing the document.

A special thanks to Sanskriti and its beautiful campus, and to Shri O.P. Jain, whose generosity of spirit and affectionate care facilitated the finalization of the manuscript.

Introduction

The RTI has been a campaign blessed with the success of evolving into a genuine and vibrant people’s movement. Many more arduously fought struggles have not been favoured with the fortuitous circumstances, such as those that enabled the passage of the RTI. It is a legislation that has arguably changed the contours of democratic governance in India. Even fewer legislations have been so popular as to help shape and strengthen a movement. The MKSS had the privilege to initiate and be part of the struggle that evolved into a powerful movement across India for the right to know.

As we write this introduction, we want to acknowledge some of the thinkers and writers who strengthened our resolve to put this chronicle together. Kosambi, the great Indian historian, understood history in ‘terms of the dynamics of socio-economic formations rather than just a chronological narration of episodes or the feats of a few great men – kings, warriors or saints’. Howard Zinn’s perspective, and a book called Let Us Now praise Famous Men, a volume dedicated to the ordinary people in the US who fought the great depression between the late 1920s and early ’40s, reassured us that we were not alone in thinking that history was made by the unseen. Harsh Mander’s book Unheard Voices reminded us that history is not only the construct of ‘great’ people. Vijaydan Detha’s Batanri Phulwari, a magnificent collection and retelling of Rajasthani folk stories, chronicled the popular, collective commentary of people down the annals of history. It is a history of political understanding through fables that live with people though generations.

These are the recordings of events and narratives in that tradition, culled from the voices of people. Often such stories only feed into the research of scholars and become a footnote to documented history, largely unacknowledged and forgotten. The dominant narrative is always from the perspective of the ruler and single individuals. One had hoped that democracy would set it right. But the people who are the primary contributors to the discourse always remain on the fringes.

The RTI narrative is a celebration of ordinary people and their immense contribution to strengthening the pillars of democratic justice in modern India.

This collation attempts to capture the spirit, the humour, the hands-on feeling of action and the somewhat more methodical nature of reflection. It implicitly argues that action and reflection are categories that arise out of real life, where the two are often intertwined and inseparable. You can indeed think with your hands and feet, and act with your mind. These are people’s stories which shaped ideas, and a legal tool to address corruption and the arbitrary use of power; two overpowering deterrents in accessing the people’s right to live. The slogan: ‘The right to know, the right to live’ was crafted from their lives. Denial of justice often arises from the suppression of the truth and of information, keeping people away from access to food, work, health, justice, education, housing and the right to live with dignity. Corruption is the tangible manifestation of mis-governance and the arbitrary use of power.

Popular narratives are often set aside for the more scholarly efforts that follow a certain method in formulation and statement. In this narrative, people’s experiences and theoretical understanding complement each other. Like all history, the story of the people who shaped the RTI in its initial years takes off from many points through multiple narratives. Some are oral and others are from written recollections. The causal sequence unravels how people come together for a single purpose, no matter how different the articulation and starting points. The players are from different ‘sectors’, who analysed and acted to change the nature of their immediate engagement with democratic institutions and governance. They all came to the conclusion separately that corruption and injustice could be controlled only if there was access to information as a right. This is the story of their coming together to shape that right.

The ordinary Indian citizen understands the Right to Information law. A 2016 report said that since 2005, a total of 1.75 crore RTI applications have been filed by users. Figures are often red herrings. But in this case it reflects continual vigilance and the citizen’s responsibility to demand accountability from the state. In today’s India, the RTI has made its niche as a law that has made it possible for every citizen to use it to access every other right. It has evolved as a tool universally applicable that is being used by a very wide spectrum of the Indian citizenry. Esoteric concepts like sovereignty have got defined in action. Being an enabling law to realize other constitutional and democratic rights, it has been aptly defined as a ‘transformatory’ legislation.

We offer this to our readers as both a story and an exercise in building theory through practice. It articulates the implicit argument that participatory democracy can be crafted to be constructive, inclusive and just. Its story celebrates pluralism and participation as important foundations of a democracy. It is a campaign that has been rooted in the complexities of Indian democratic processes while carrying the simple straightforward message of transparency to achieve its objective. This people’s campaign has added to the lexicon of governance and its understanding by looking at ways in which people could engage with policy and implementation.

This collective history empowers young readers to understand their capabilities and possible roles in shaping governance. It offers some ways in which we can actually deal with conflicts in democratic processes between the citizen and the elected representative, between worker and scholar, between action and reflection, between individuals and collectives. Perhaps it will make us realize and recall the strength of the national movement that gave us Independence, and the constitution we then gave ourselves. The story offers hope that justice and equality need not remain in the tomes of legal guarantees but can – with judicious application – win some battles within the democratic and constitutional paradigm.

We have been extremely privileged to be members of the struggle, campaign and movement for the RTI. We hope that this chronicle has managed to bring together the diverse sets of voices, worries, concerns, songs, slogans, advocacy, struggle, reflection, campaigning, and the joy of collective action that helped build the movement.

The challenges of collective expression have been many. Activists move all the time and proof reading was very difficult. Notwithstanding these almost insurmountable hurdles, we hope we have been able to capture some of the energy and zest of the campaigns we were all part of.

Aruna Roy & the MKSS

Rajasthan

June 2017

CHAPTER ONE

Devdungri: The Beginning

For many of us, it began on the dusty tracks by the bamboo shrubs, in a mud house in Devdungri in 1987, three years before MKSS was created. The hut was a shelter, an assertion, a symbol, a silent witness to the events and discussions that shaped the debate on the right to know. Ajit Bhattacharjea, former editor of the Indian Express , who joined the group of protestors in Beawar to demand the RTI in 1996, writes:

Devdungri, a typical village in the heartland of Rajasthan, nestles on the slope of a spur of the bleak, rock-strewn Aravalli range, with a tiny Dev temple on its crest. The soil is dark and arid; water is precious and scarce, drawn from deep wells and preserved in ponds dug from the stony soil. The landscape is harsh but strangely evocative, relieved by patches of yellow grain fields, each surrounded by stone fencing making geometrical patterns in the dun landscape. They represent a long history of back-breaking toil to extract a livelihood from the stony earth.¹

In a village, life is basic; boundaries between home and workplace are smudged. Important conversations and arguments happen while chopping wood, cooking, sweeping, and eating. They take place in half-broken sentences interrupted by a neighbour, loud thinking of tentative alternatives in the clutter of serving food, disagreements that need discussions and resolutions, in the middle of washing vessels. In these continuing discussions lie the seeds of critical insight.

Rajasthan is beautiful. In the middle of dry browns and dusty haze, there lies spectacular beauty. People who live in central Rajasthan are surrounded by the Aravallis – the oldest mountain range in India. Someone interested in discovering ancient relics can still find fossils and fascinating reminders of very old times. Now they are being quarried and entire hills are being broken down, for building and construction. This can be seen on the Jaipur–Delhi highway.

We – Nikhil Dey, Shankar Singh, his wife Anshi and I – began our work in Devdungri, when we moved into Haggu and Jait Singh’s home in the hamlet of Chokkavadia in 1987.

The region still bears the scars of feudal rule. Life is hard, cultivable land scarce, and occasional drought makes it even harder. Most of those dependent on its produce go to bed hungry. Though the era of the feudal maharaja’s rule is history, social inequity and administrative injustice still prevail. Amidst all this, the traditional culture of the region stays alive in the upright bearing of its people, their colourful clothes, engaging songs, fascinating myths, dialects and their laughter-interrupted conversations – evidence of a sustained vitality. The desire and potential for change persist.

In 1987, forty years after India attained independence, three individuals from very different backgrounds chose to work and live in Devdungri. They were Aruna Roy, who had resigned from the Indian Administrative Service, Shankar Singh, a far-seeing local gifted with rare communication skills and Nikhil Dey, son of an Air Marshal of the Indian Air Force, recently returned from college in America, disgusted with its wasteful lifestyle. The stone and mud hut they rented, approached by a rough path from the main Ajmer–Bhim highway, still stands. They lived like their neighbours, sleeping on the ground, drawing water from a well, carrying buckets on their heads, cooking chapatti and dal on a choolah [stove], washing their clothes and utensils. They enlarged a goat pen adjoining the hut, into a kitchen and bathing area. The toilet was outside.²

They came from different backgrounds and experiences. Aruna was the eldest and Nikhil the youngest. Aruna had worked for seven years as a civil servant in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), after teaching English literature in her alma mater, Indraprastha College for Women in Delhi. She had resigned from the Indian administrative services in 1975 to join a rural voluntary organization, Social Work and Research Centre (SWRC) to work with the rural poor in Ajmer district in Rajasthan. After nine years in SWRC, Aruna left in 1983 to live and work in a village, to enable the people there to access basic political and democratic rights.

When Aruna and Shankar met, they made friends as they shared a common concern about exploitation, poverty and inequality in villages. Shankar began his work with adult literacy. Like many concerned rural youth he had an innate understanding of rural politics. His maturity enabled him to place every personal problem in the larger political context. His inimitable communication skills helped him transform his perception into many modes of expression. Aruna and Shankar became friends. She was fascinated by his great gift as a communicator. There was never a dull moment when Shankar was around. The laughter and well-being he generated, even when he was being critical, increased his popularity. There was an ongoing debate between them on a number of issues. It included the huge divide between them on the way they saw gender, and also the subtle inequalities of caste and religion in the highly hierarchical society that is India. They quibbled on semantics, on theatre technology, on themes for plays – popularity alone could not be the judge of good theatre; applause can never compensate or justify debunking principles and values of equality or justice. Work became exciting for both of them.

Shankar and Aruna worked together when the first strike on minimum wages was organized by Aruna’s friend Naurti in Harmara panchayat, Ajmer district, in 1981. He came armed with his puppets and his humour, to soften the antagonism of a strike. Their friendship ran an interesting course. Nikhil met them in Rajasthan in 1983. He was twenty. He had dropped out of an undergraduate programme at the last minute in the US after a brilliant scholastic career. His baffled parents could not understand why an intelligent, straightforward and ‘good’ student should drop out of college. His motivation was the growing disconnect he felt between his environment in the US and his obsessive concern with helping his own people. He wanted to become a part of people’s politics and he chose to come back to India. Nikhil was attracted to Shankar’s humour and his extraordinary gifts and wanted to learn more from him and Aruna, with whom he had made friends. All three of them discovered they had the same dreams of living and working.

They went to Jhabhua in Madhya Pradesh (MP) looking for an organization and a context to start work in rural India. It did not work out for a variety of reasons, and they continued their search. Their first requirement was in place: a compatible set of friends who shared political ideologies, principles, and lifestyle values. They agreed that people needed to understand the role of democratic institutions, and their rights as citizens. They were also clear that the organization and its structure should evolve with the people. In India this could be political work outside the party system, much in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi, Jayaprakash Narayan and many others. Freedom was more than a change in the colour of the rulers. Freedom from hunger, untouchability, poverty and violence required sustained public action to change traditional social discriminatory practices. They believed that people’s mobilization would help realize constitutional rights shaped by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. They finally decided to work in Devdungri, which was close to Shankar’s village, Lotiyana. Devdungri, though 35 kilometres away, was still dotted with his relations and his community; it suited Anshi, Shankar’s wife, who wanted to live in her own area and be comfortable with the social milieu.

The poor needed work to earn a decent living, get equal wages, schooling, health facilities and all the rest that others take for granted. They were equals under the law. But everywhere they were treated unequally with disdain: by the government, the political system, and by a society divided by caste. They dreamt of a world with justice and equality. What began as a tentative journey still continues for Shankar, Anshi, Nikhil, and Aruna.

It is not very easy to find a place to rent, or even buy, in a village community. Shankar went looking for a place to stay. Haggu, Shankar’s cousin, allowed them to move into her unoccupied hut, which used to be her home. The normally difficult entry into a tight-knit community was achieved with