RTI activist Aruna Roy on her memoir, journey of Indian activism, and cost of blood money

The Personal is Political is activist Aruna Roy’s memoir as it claims on the cover. But it’s also so much more. It is the voyage of a country, the tales of its ordinary people and their struggles, and the evolving political-social consciousness of a growing nation. It’s also a journey that the reader takes with this almost midnight’s child – as she calls herself, born a year before Independence. 

Through the book, you can trace the events that shaped India as well as how activism evolved in the country since 1947. By the end of it, we meet an activist and humanist who doesn’t shy away from asking uncomfortable questions. In a conversation with independent journalist Shefali Martins, the civil servant-turned-activist speaks about the book and the various issues it touches upon. Excerpts:

 What are your thoughts on the title, “The Personal is Political,” a seminal feminist slogan? How in this time, when we are all trying to be visibly as apolitical as possible, it is important to understand the idea of the political itself?

The slogan was created by the women of the 1960s. I learnt the true meaning of this slogan from my women friends in the village who may not have followed English but taught me the depth of this slogan. Because I am a woman, I believe my personal is political. But what about the men, their vulnerabilities, and their problems? Patriarchy does not only oppress women, it also oppresses men because they become victims of a thought pattern they cannot deny. We believe that we have the right of choice. We can choose what we wear, whom we marry or not, where we go. But our right to choice is restricted by the political. The right to decide is also decided by the political. For example, you get the right to parental property in the Hindu undivided family because of a law. Your right to that property is political. Similarly, when they pass certain laws, they restrict you, tell you whom you can marry or cannot marry. So the personal is political. And the political is very personal. 

Talking about the political being personal, how far do you believe this is true especially for women, particularly in rural and marginalised communities? How have you seen political structures and decisions impact the personal lives of women in these contexts, and what implications does this have for their empowerment and activism?

We barely have 10 percent female MPs in parliament today. We women, as a class, are not visible enough in places of power. Remarkable women parliamentarians have struggled for our collective rights and brought in the Dowry Act, the Sharda Act, and other empowering laws. But we don't even know their names. So in a sense, we are a truly marginalised community in conventional politics.

Women in the middle class had to fight to get out of the house and work but all my friends in the village have worked. They are strong women. We think of them as marginalised and weaker than we are. Many years ago, women who were college professors joined us in a meeting in Jaipur and began to tell rural women about the demerits of child and early marriage and other social customs. Among them was a friend of mine, Mangi, a brilliant woman from the Dalit community who questioned them on the Dowry Act and asked how many of them had neither given nor taken dowry. There was a pin drop silence following this because everyone was a victim. So, who’s marginalised? My question is to invert the whole thing. 

In this very context, I would like to quote a title of a section in this book which you call, “the myth of the uneducated rural woman”. What is this myth?

My women’s politics was defined by my friends who struggled for food, work and shelter and questioned inequality across boundaries. Like my friend Naurti, a Dalit wage worker who has been my mentor for 50 years. These women set my agenda for political action, struggled against feudal sati, violence and rape, and struggled with the system for wages and work. While conducting a programme on legal literacy, I told the women that there is something called a minimum wage (Rs 7 per day at that time), which they were entitled to if they were an agricultural or a construction labourer employed by the government of Rajasthan. Naurti absorbed it and, at that time, 500 of them were working on a farming site not being paid the minimum wage. So, she mobilised them and it was historic. It was the first time in Rajasthan that women-led mobilisation of workers was taken up as a litigation, as a PIL in the Supreme Court. The BPO was suspended, the sarpanch was suspended and removed. The government had to change a law because of Naurti. 

You’ve written, “I didn’t have the skill for unskilled work”. How does this whole skilled-unskilled conversation pan out? How did you feel you were not skilled enough for unskilled work even though you were an IAS officer. 

First things first, the IAS officer has just passed the exam, and passing exams is not a confirmation of your knowledge. Who decides what a skill is? I am powerful, so I have decided that my skill is the most important one. I give the least value to the thing I can’t do at all, which is what: labour, unskilled labour. So, having met so many people who work in the field, I thought, I espouse their cause, and enrolled myself for two weeks as a labourer. I went on the first day and they gave me the easier task of shovelling. When they filled 10 tagadis, I was still shovelling the first one. I then said, I will lift the full tagadi on my head and drop it where needed. I could not even lift that tagadi/ It was 20 kilos of mud, and when you don’t know how to lift the tagadi, you bend down and lift it straight, which is what I did and I geared my back forever. You have to first balance it on your knee, lift it from there and then take it onto your head. I then asked them to give me stones to lift, and as soon as they put a stone on my head, I stumbled along and dropped the stone. 

If you can’t call this work as skilled work, you are doing injustice to millions of women in this country. Literacy is only a skill, like cycling, like using the computer, like many other things. So in a sense, we have to define not only our work as women, we have to define its dignity and its value. If we don’t, we are lost.

When you write about your experiences of the Indian Administrative Services, you’ve mentioned that the word services is part of the term IAS. Many young people aspire to be in the IAS for the power and the privilege. How can today’s youth understand career in terms of service?   

I think the IAS is an overestimated service. And we don’t measure ourselves, we see how the world measures us. As women, we must shoot that whole presumption down. We’ll give worth to what we are doing because we find it worthy. And in a male’s world where power is only in the chair, IAS is very attractive. 

When I was a trainee collector in Tamil Nadu, no one recognised me. And no one would have even looked at me if it hadn’t been for the karamchari in front of me with a red nameplate which said revenue department in a big brass badge. That badge proclaimed he was from the collector’s office. And I was behind him, so they saluted me. It’s the revenue peon’s badge which gives me dignity.

I do think we need an administrative service because no country functions without a bureaucracy. But we need them to be transparent and accountable. That’s why the Right to Information law is crucial. Even today, though the RTI law has been weakened, between 60 to 80 lakh people use it every year. A collector was asked in Bhopal by a chaiwala, why is your car going so many times when you’re not in the car. The collector was furious and rang up one of my colleagues in Delhi and asked, “Do I have to answer this question?” So the colleague said, “Yes, you have to show your log book.” His car was actually running his domestic chores which are not the job of the sarkari vehicle. So, seeking information makes power more equitable. 

Talking about equity, the RTI has been a people’s movement. But, how is it also a feminist movement? And what are the qualities of a feminist movement? 

In every movement that we organised, there were 70 percent women and 30 percent men. Men came to arbitrate, represent, do the law, but who sustained the struggle for 11 years? The women. 

The whole pandal was a place of joy, even though we were struggling. We ate, we cooked, we debated, we struggled, we sang, we danced, we engaged, we advocated, we arbitrated. So, the spirit of that struggle was the spirit of feminism. I claim that it’s feminism because we think laterally, we think in multiple ways and we think with complexity. Sushila, my friend, brought the famous slogan, “hamara paisa, hamara hisaab”. She went with us to Delhi at the first presentation of the law in 1997. Two ex-prime ministers were there with judges, ex-judges and many other people. One reporter asked her, “What are you doing here? How educated are you?” She said, “I’ve studied up to class 4.” The reporter condescendingly remarked, “The judges and prime ministers are here and they are not able to do it and you will bring the RTI?” Sushila replied, “When I send my son to the market with Rs 10, I ask him for accounts. This government is spending millions on my name. Won’t I ask them for an account?”  

There is a new currency that you have mentioned in the book, which is blood money. And when you’re talking about your work with the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, you say that development can be at the cost of blood money. What is the cost of this blood money?

I’ll just give one small example. In Rajasthan, we do a lot of mining of granite, marble, zinc, mica, Kota stone etc. This mining leads to a deadly disease called silicosis. This dust settles in the lungs. The people who own the mines don’t give any protection or health guarantees. A 30-year-old man looks like a 70-year-old. The whole family depends on him, and then when he dies due to the disease, his young son also goes there because poverty doesn’t give him a choice. Do we ever stop to think why it happens? We are so advanced technologically. Instead of planning all kinds of exploitative means, why don’t we look at other building materials? We have fought with the government and now have a silicosis policy. But what about the economic value? So that’s one kind of blood money.

There are ample literary devices and nuances of the book. There are references from Tagore, Blake, Yeats, Rushdie and even Hamletian procrastination. How does the literature student Aruna Roy find expression here through her book? 

I have never stopped being a literature student. I studied for five years in Indraprastha College and I didn’t study because I wanted to pass an exam. The student of literature has to study politics, has to study philosophy, has to study sociology. Literature is about life. And, what is life? If you read Dickens, then you have to know about the condition of the chimney sweepers and the poverty in Victorian England. If you read Jane Austen or Shakespeare or anybody, you have to understand the social conditions under which they lived. And I love reading. One word takes me to Shakespeare, one to Samuel Johnson, Ishamul or Rushdie. Some other word takes me somewhere else. Because those are powerful words. And words are important for politics, for activists. Sushila’s slogan was powerful. Because through those few words, she brought a whole political condition to you. As a literature student, I feel enriched in my activism. 

The written word is one thing. In your book, you speak about Rajasthan’s rich oral tradition. Your book is also very conversational. So, what about the conversationality of the written word and the whole idea of the oral tradition in activism? 

When we were doing 53 days of dharna in Jaipur, we had Galku Ma, an old woman, with us. Every single day, there were 100 cops surrounding us on all sides. Each day, Galku Ma would tell us a story about a crow, an eagle, a vulture, a fox, a jackal. And there was a moral in every story that she didn’t speak of openly. But she used to say it through that story and everyone knew whom did the jackal or the fox refer to. So, in a way, the spoken word is as powerful or even more powerful than the written word. 

There is a folktale told by the great exponent of Rajasthani oral literature Vijaydan Detha. A king used to ask offenders to choose their own punishment: either they eat a 100 onions or get beaten on the head a 100 times by a slipper. One offender chose to eat onions because he thought he would be embarrassed to be beaten in front of everyone. When he had eaten about 10 onions, his mouth started burning, his nose and eyes started watering. He now said, I will eat shoes. So, they began to beat him on the head. When they beat him about eight or nine times, his skull was like pulp. So, he said, no, I will eat an onion. In this way, he ate 100 onions and 100 shoes. 

Now, is this a choice? Did the king really give them a choice? Does the election really give us a choice? Any number of theoretical arguments people don’t understand, but with this story they understand in a minute.

The title of the book has the word political in it but you call the Constitution a cultural document. Why should we look at the Constitution as a cultural document?

When we sat down to write the Indian Constitution, India had just had a bloodbath. The challenge was how to look at this culture which is holistic but was made divisive. How to come together under a common law that will deal with justice, equality, and fraternity; the right to worship, and also say the state should be secular. This was one of the basic decisions taken by the Constitution. If that is not a cultural document, what is? We are all culturally relevant. How do we tell people that we are one unless we have a Constitution that reinforces it. That we, the people of India, give unto ourselves this Constitution. Where we say that we will pledge ourselves to fraternity, to equality and to justice regardless of creed, regardless of gender, and other variables that play into us, our language. It is extremely important therefore that the Constitution be seen as our primary cultural document. It binds us to the idea of India, the concept of India and the future dreams of India. 

Finally, who is an activist? 

What comes to our mind when we see injustice being done to someone, when an auto rickshaw driver asks for more money, when a TTE throws someone out, when someone is being beaten up because they belong to a different religion or a different caste? What do we feel? We feel anger. We feel that it’s unjust. Everyone does. So, an activist is the one who acts on that feeling. We take that feeling and go home. The whole idea of this is to act. The power in the services that we were talking about comes from sitting alone in one chair. But here in public action, we are with others. So what gives us the courage in activism is the other.  

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