From the day in 1987 when he was pushed around by a mob of rowdy youth and barred from a small Karnataka village due to his work empowering Dalit bonded labourers, Kiran Kamal Prasad, founder of Jeevika (a member of Bandhua 1947), has been one of the most ardent advocates for the millions of Indians caught in caste-based slavery. In a recent meeting at the Jeevika office in Bangalore, I asked him to trace the beginnings of his long battle against bonded labour.
“This was the outcome of a personal search for me,” says Kiran, when I ask how he started working on this issue in the first place. “I wanted to get involved with marginalized people. I come from a farming family near Udupi, and I used to talk with the workers.”
Later, he joined the Jesuits, and learnt from their thinking on the transformation of social structures and preferential options for the poor – which, in the Indian context, is largely made up of traditionally disadvantaged groups such as Dalits and tribals, “I realised that to bring about change in people’s lives, it was important to empower them to lead, to tackle their own problems,” he says.”
Having worked with tribal groups in Uttara Kannada in the early 1980s, and fought to get them recognised as Scheduled Tribes by the government, he then moved to the Anekal taluk in 1985. Dalits make up about 80 per cent of the population and Kiran worked largely among the youth, offering training and support.
The Karnataka government at that time was holding its first ever elections for local government bodies, the prototype of what ultimately became panchayati raj institutions. When the polls were announced, Kiran organised groups of youth to go around the area, spreading awareness about the process. “We were only educating Dalits to put up their candidates, but the landlords wanted to push me out of the village,” remembers Kiran. Their biggest objection? He was encouraging the Dalits to wear pants and shirts, something that was customarily allowed only to the upper castes.
There was a social boycott of the Dalits, preventing them from shopping at village shops or graze their cattle on common land, in a bid to eject Kiran. Harassment increased through the summer of 1987, with a Dalit haystack getting burned, finally forcing the Social Welfare Minister to hold a “peace meeting” in the village. Kiran was asked to leave the village for at least two months. “I was mobbed by a group of youth, preventing me from entering the Dalit section of the village, physically pushed by rowdies,” he says. “Finally, I was given one sharp kick. For me, that was a baptism into the reality of Dalits.”
However, it was a perceptive Superintendent of Police investigating the situation, who opened his eyes to the real problem. “She asked me how many bonded labourers were in the village. I had never worked on this issue, but I put my youth group on to it, and they found 40 bonded labourers in the space of one week. When I gave her the list, she said: ‘Now I know why they are against you.’ She recognised that their vested economic interests were threatened, and that was the real reason why the upper caste landlords were against me.”
Kiran found that the Karnataka government’s official position was that bonded labour had already been eradicated in the state, with some 65,000 labourers released in the years after the Bonded Labour System Abolition Act, 1976 was passed. “I realised that the best way to counter that government mindset was to present them with hard data,” he says. “So I went around the whole taluk and did a survey with the help of my youth group. We drew up a questionnaire and covered 300 villages. We identified 700 bonded labourers in that taluk alone… We started organising them into unions and gave them education and empowerment, ultimately leading to their freedom from bondage.”
Around the same time, his friend and noted Kannada poet G.S. Siddalingaiah was elected to the Karnataka Assembly. In 1990, Kiran asked him to raise the issue of bonded labour in the Assembly, sparking off a chain of events that ultimately led to a partial change in the government’s attitude.
His early experience, therefore, led to the formation of a two-fold model that Kiran – and Jeevika – has followed right from inception till the present day in their work against bonded labour: “On the one hand, we are advocating and lobbying with the government at the highest level using carefully collected hard data and statistics. On the other hand, we are educating and empowering bonded labourers and vulnerable communities at the grassroot level,” he says.
Coming next: The conclusion of the interview with Kiran, discussing his current work in Karnataka, including the fight against bonded labour within the wider context of the caste system, and the movement to amend the Rules of the Bonded Labour System Abolition Act, 1976.
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Priscilla Jebaraj is the spokesperson of the Bandhua 1947 Campaign. She is a gold medalist from Asian College of Journalism and has served for many years as a journalist with the Hindu.
6 May 2014: The Taluk level training on conducting survey on bonded labour to Govt. Officials in Raybhag (Chikkodi Subdivision) of Belgaum District. Inaugurated by Tahsildar Sri. Shivanand. P. Sagar. Nearly 90 govt officials present in the training.
Inaugurated by Mahanagara palike Special Officer – S.H. Naregal. Nearly 80 govt officials present in the training.
Bandhua 1947 