In memory of Nagaraju on Ambedkar Jayanti

Caste, Representation, Land, Industry

Dalel Benbabaali NALSAR Law University, Hyderabad, 14 April 2015

I would like to dedicate this lecture to the memory of Nagaraju Koppula who died two days ago of
cancer, while he was treated in Hyderabad. He was an exemplary Dalit journalist who struggled all his
life to reach where he reached professionally. He got a job in The New Indian Express and was
passionate about reporting. For someone who studied in Telugu medium till graduation, he was able
to acquire very quickly amazing skills for writing in English, and made a name for himself in
journalism, a field where Dalits are severely underrepresented.
When I met Nagaraju for the first time 8 months ago, he told me his story. Hes from a place near
Bhadrachalam, in Khammam district of Telangana, which is where I am doing fieldwork for my
research. His family settled in Sarapaka village to work as casual labour in ITC paper factory. ITC used
to be Imperial Tobacco Company during British rule, and now it stands for Indian Tobacco
Company. Its a big private corporation that manufactures not only cigarettes, but paper, packaging,
agribusiness products, and it also has a chain of luxury hotels. ITC paper factory is located on the
banks of the Godavari river where it releases its effluents. While Nagarajus father went missing, his
mother worked in ITC even as she was pregnant with Nagaraju, but then her contract was terminated
and she had to do daily wage labour in agriculture to bring up alone her 5 children, Nagaraju being
the only one who pursued higher studies.
Its a painful irony that the newspaper for which Nagaraju was working also terminated his contract
as soon as they came to know about his cancer. Even before that, they apparently refused to grant
him medical leave when he was feeling unwell. He thought that he had tuberculosis, but when he
could finally take leave, he was diagnosed with lung cancer at a very advanced stage. At that time the
doctors gave him only six months to live. He survived for two years. His journalist friends across
castes as well as Dalit activists are now agitating against what they perceive as a case of caste
discrimination by the management of the newspaper. I think this fight is important, but if we really
want justice for Nagaraju, we should also try to determine the causes that led to his lung cancer,
given the fact that he was only 30 when he got sick, that he was leading a healthy life, and never
smoked.
Its not without reasons that I mentioned the paper factory where his mother was working. Nagaraju
lived in a Dalit colony just opposite ITC factory for more than 20 years. I have no way to prove a
causal relation here, apart from the fact that during my fieldwork in that area I did hear about other
cases of cancers and lung diseases around the factory. Its now up to his lawyer friends to file a Public
Interest Litigation about ITC if they want to investigate the link between industrial pollution and
Nagarajus death. Its important to determine responsibilities, not only for him. If there is a public
health hazard, people have the right to know. Of course ITC has powerful political supports, notably
in the person of Arun Jaitley, the BJP Finance Minister in the Union Government, who worked as a
corporate lawyer for the company. I think the tobacco lobby still has good days ahead.

The village I am based in for my study of caste relations is just a few kilometers away from Sarapaka,
Nagarajus native place. Its a village dominated by Kammas, the powerful landowning caste on
whom I did my doctoral research when I was in coastal Andhra. While my PhD was focused on the
control mechanisms developed by dominant groups, my postdoctoral research aims at looking at
power relations from the bottom-up, with a focus on 2 oppressed groups: the Madigas (the Dalit
caste to which Nagaraju belongs), and the Koyas, who are the main Adivasi group of Bhadrachalam
tribal belt. The aim is to compare Dalits and Adivasis in relation to more powerful groups, and to
understand the strategies they develop to resist or subvert the processes of domination.
Before I go into the details of what Ive found so far, I would like to make a more personal account of
my encounter with caste in India since I came to this country. In fact I had no intention to research on
India. I did my Masters in Geography about Syria and wanted to continue in the Middle East because
I can speak Arabic, as a person born in France from Algerian parents. But in 2003, after the American
invasion of Iraq where I wanted to go, I had to change my plans and I applied for a French teacher job
in India.
When I came here for the first time 12 years ago, I was completely ignorant of caste. I had just heard
about the two extremes of the caste hierarchy: Brahmins and Untouchables. I didnt know that
Untouchables were now called Dalits, and tribals called Adivasis. I knew about Gandhi, but I had
never heard about Ambedkar. In fact, before I came to know about Dalits and Adivasis, I first heard
the administrative classification: SCs and STs. The reason is that I spent my first year in India in
Mussoorie Academy of Administration, where I was teaching French. There everyone was using
acronyms, like IAS (Indian Administrative Service), IPS (Indian Police Service), IFS (Indian Foreign
Service), SCs (Scheduled Castes), STs (Scheduled Tribes), OBCs (Other Backward Classes)
Interestingly, the first time I heard about Ambedkar in Mussoorie Academy was when a group of
Dalit IAS officer trainees wanted to celebrate his birth anniversary, a day like today, and there was a
heated argument about upper caste officers who were not willing to attend the ceremony. I heard
people criticizing them by saying that Ambedkar is not only a Dalit leader but also the father of the
Indian Constitution, and therefore all Indians should be celebrating his anniversary, not only Dalits. I
think this boycott of Ambedkar Jayanti by some upper caste officers was one the rare incidents of
open casteism I witnessed in the Academy, since casteism is generally more subtle and not easy to
grasp for an outsider.
Ironically, today Ambedkarites face the opposite problem, which is the appropriation of Ambedkar by
people and political parties who have absolutely nothing to do with his ideas, like the Hindu
nationalists. Ambedkar was a fierce critique of Hinduism as he traced back the origins of caste to this
religion. Though he was born a Hindu, he refused to die one, and converted to Buddhism. Its difficult
to imagine how Hindutva followers of the RSS are now trying to claim the legacy of such a radical
thinker. One explanation might be that theyve never read Ambedkar.
I started becoming familiar with his thoughts after meeting a Dalit lawyer in Guntur district where I
was doing my PhD fieldwork. She asked me to accompany her to Chundur where a trial was going on
against the dominant Reddis accused of killing Dalits in that village in 1991. I guess she wanted me to
hear a first-hand account of what caste atrocities mean. I did hear that account from a survivor of the
massacre called Dhanraj. I have never forgotten his spine-chilling words which I wrote down as my

advocate friend was translating, as my Telugu was very poor at that time, and I would like to quote
him now:
"The Reddis of Chundur always hated me because I was an assertive Mala. Once I had a fight with one of them
who swore that he would kill me. But he was suffering from polio and was half paralysed, so he couldn't do
anything. On 6 August 1991, the police came to the Dalit hamlet to warn us that the Reddis were planning an
attack against us, and asked us to run away towards the paddy fields. It was a trap. The Reddis had bribed the
police to tell us so, and were waiting for us in the fields, armed with axes. Pushed by my survival instinct, I could
run for 4 hours under the hot sun. When the Reddis finally caught me, they had already massacred 5 Dalits. I
had seen them do so. They started beating me up. After long minutes of torture, I pleaded them for water as it
was unbearably hot. That's when they urinated in my mouth. Then they started digging a pit and told me that
they were going to bury me alive. But they didn't want to do it themselves; they wanted the polio-affected
Reddy to do it, as he had always wanted to kill me. Because of his disease, he had stayed back in the village, so
my attackers went to bring him, leaving me under the surveillance of one of them. Since they had already
broken my legs with axes, they knew I couldn't run away, so even the guy who was supposed to keep an eye on
me went away to sit under the shade of a tree. I managed to roll down till the canal and let myself fall in it. The
rapid flow took me away, and I was rescued by Mala women who covered me in a sari and put me in the train
to Tenali. There, I was admitted to the hospital. I was saved."

In 2007, the Chundur special court sentenced 21 Reddis to life imprisonment and 35 to one year
imprisonment. But last year, in April 2014, a division bench of the Andhra Pradesh High Court,
headed by Justice Narasimha Reddy, cancelled the sentence for "lack of evidence". I purposefully
insisted on the surname of the judge not to miss the fact that he also was a Reddy. As students of
law, you must be aware of the importance of a fair caste representation in every field, precisely to
avoid this kind of systemic biases and prejudices.
We need more Dalit judges. We also need more Dalit journalists. To come back to Nagaraju, hes one
of the very few Madigas, and I think the first one, who managed to get a job in an English newspaper.
A few years ago, there was a survey on caste in Indian media made by CSDS, which showed that
Dalits and Adivasis, who constitute one fourth of the Indian population, had zero representation in
the key posts in newspapers and TV channels in the country, while Hindu upper caste men, who are
just 8% of the total population of India, hold over 70% of the decision-making posts and therefore
decide on editorial policies across the news spectrum. At the national level, its mostly Brahmins, but
at the regional level, the media are controlled by the dominant castes like Reddis and Kammas in
Andhra Pradesh and Telangana: for example, Ramoji Rao is a Kamma who owns both the Telugu
newspaper Eenadu and the multilingual channel ETV.
Why does this matter? Because it affects the content and the way in which social issues are reported.
Take the Karamchedu massacre of 1985 where the perpetrators were Kamma landlords and the
victims Madiga agricultural labourers. You cant expect Kamma-owned media to report objectively
about these atrocities, especially at a time when the Chief Minister himself was a Kamma (it was
NTR, Chandrababu Naidus father-in-law and founder of the Telugu Desam Party). You also cant
expect an administration dominated by upper castes to deal effectively with those situations. The
only thing the District Collector did at that time was to distribute food coupons to the Karamchedu
survivors. Thats why you also need Dalit IAS officers and the role of caste-based reservations, that
Ambedkar inscribed in the Constitution, is to ensure that. That doesnt mean that administrators
should be working for the advancement of their own communities, but a fair representation of all
sections of society is important to prevent bureaucratic partiality.
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You rarely see people who oppose reservations fighting for better government education which
would give equal opportunities to all. You cant oppose reservations and put your kids in elite
English-medium private schools where the vast majority of the population can never afford to go.
You cant oppose reservations and then pay huge capitation fees to buy a seat in corporate
engineering colleges. In Andhra those colleges are completely dominated by Kammas who have
transformed higher education into a big business.
Kamma domination in various fields of Andhra Pradesh economy and society was one important
reason behind the demand for a separate Telangana state. In fact Ambedkar in his time was not in
favour of linguistic States precisely because he knew that it would serve the interests of the
dominant castes. The creation of Telangana somehow broke Kamma hegemony, or at least confined
it to the residual Andhra Pradesh State, but there is a sense of betrayal among Dalits and Adivasis
who supported the Telangana movement. They are now under the domination of the local
landowning castes, the Velamas and the Reddis, who are not only overrepresented in the Telangana
Legislative Assembly, but also control the economy.
In the tribal area where I am conducting my new research project, 7 mandals have been transferred
from Telangana to Andhra Pradesh because they will be submerged by the Polavaram dam. Since
irrigation from this dam will only benefit coastal Andhra, this administrative move was meant to
avoid political opposition from the Telangana government, which would have had to deal with the
rehabilitation and resettlement of the populations displaced by the submergence, without getting
any benefit from the dam. The transfer was made unilaterally through the very first ordinance that
the Prime Minister Modi passed just after coming to power, as might have been planned with his ally
Chandrababu Naidu. But its also true that KCR, the Telangana Chief Minister, has given up those 7
tribal mandals without much protest, probably in exchange for Hyderabad that the Andhra Chief
Minister Naidu has accepted to leave since he now has grand plans for a new capital in his own State.
Displacement due to Polavaram dam will affect more than 300,000 people, mostly Adivasis and Dalits
who, as usual, pay the price for development without benefitting from it. The Adivasis living there
are Konda Reddis, who are categorised as Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group since their population
is dangerously decreasing, but also Koyas, and Gutti Koyas, who are displaced Adivasis from
Chhattisgarh, many of whom victims of the Salwa Judum militia that was created to crush the
Maoists.
Ive spent some time researching on the Gutti Koya issue in Telangana, but to understand their story
fully, one needs to go to their villages back in Chhattisgarh, which was not possible for me at that
particular point. So I am now focusing on the local Koyas, as well as the Dalits living in tribal areas. All
the Madigas in the village I am studying are landless, whereas the Koyas do own some land, even if
no more than 5 acres per household. This is a Scheduled Area where tribal land is protected by the
Constitution. The Land Transfer Regulation, also known as 1/1970 Act, prevents non-tribals from
buying land in this area. But in my case study, Kammas and Reddis, who are just 12% of the village
population, possess 53% of the land, which they bought before the protective law was enacted.
The entire village is controlled by one extremely wealthy Mr. Rao, a 90-year-old Kamma landlord and
political leader who settled in this village in the 1940s. For 35 years, he monopolized the sarpanch
seat, and his authority could not be challenged because there were no panchayat elections. Even
now that the village posts are reserved for ST candidates, the Koyas who want to get elected have to
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support the Telugu Desam Party as he tells them to. Rao owns 150 acres of land, which is 30 times
more than the average Koya. His son works as a neurosurgeon in the United States where he owns 6
hospitals and a private jet to fly between them. Rao is so influential that the villagers need to
approach him if they want to work as casual labour in ITC paper factory, but he will help only those
who submit to his diktats and vote for the TDP.
When I speak of help here, its only about getting casual work, since permanent jobs in ITC are out
of reach for most of the villagers. Ive been told that these days one has to pay up to 10 lakhs to get a
permanent job in the factory. The management and the unions put the blame on each other
regarding this corruption. The unions say that the money goes to the management, and the
management says that the unions take the money and in exchange recommend people for jobs.
What is happening, most probably, is that this money doesnt go directly to the pockets of the
managers, but they turn a blind eye on the corruption of the unions in exchange for social peace. By
letting them take money, they ensure that there will be no strikes and no demand for wage rise. So
this whole idea that industrialisation creates employment has to be qualified by showing what kind
of employment, for whom, and at which cost.
What Ive found out so far in my comparison between Adivasis and Dalits in the village near the
factory, is that the Koyas are somehow more autonomous and therefore able to resist the Kamma
landlords domination, because they own some forest land which sustain their livelihood through
shifting cultivation. They vote for whomever they want, they dont need to obey Raos instructions
because they are not working for him as farm coolies and they are not interested in ITC jobs. They
say that it stinks inside the factory (and its true, the foul smell that comes out of the chimneys
reaches even Bhadrachalam). The Madigas, because they are landless, are much more dependent on
the Kamma landlord for daily wage labour in his fields as well as casual labour in the paper factory.
As coolies in agriculture they earn 150 rupees per day, and in industry they get 200, but they have to
pay the autorickshaw 50 Rs up and down to go to the factory, so its the same. The correlation
between caste and class is particularly strong here. Its difficult to subvert caste oppression when you
are trapped in such exploitative class relations, and vice-versa.
The main problem faced by the Koyas is that their lands are now under the threat of the factorys
expansion. The Telangana Chief Minister has recently sanctioned an extension worth 3000 crores for
ITC. The company wants to expand this particular unit for 2 reasons: the availability of water and coal
near Bhadrachalam (with the Godavari river and the Singareni mines), but also the fact that there has
been no strike in this factory for the last 30 years, unlike in its West Bengal unit where the workers
are much more combative. Its not that the workers here are particularly submissive, its just that
social peace can be bought, as I have explained earlier.
ITC is using tribal land to grow eucalyptus trees that provide wood to make paper, even though
eucalyptus plantations are ecologically unsustainable. The company is now facing a case in the High
Court because it has illegally encroached 100 acres of forest land for eucalyptus plantations. Those
100 acres of forest were given to ITC under Chandrababu Naidus regime, ignoring the law against
tribal land alienation. Its a bitter irony that the same Chief Minister now targets small woodcutters
to the extent of allowing extra-judicial killings, as it happened last week in Chittoor district, when
thousands of acres of forest are offered to industries and mining companies, at the cost of Adivasi
livelihoods including the 4000 hectares of reserve forest that will be submerged by Polavaram dam.
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One positive development is that there are now Koya lawyers in Bhadrachalam who are actively
fighting for the implementation of the Land Transfer Regulation to protect tribal land rights in the
Scheduled Areas. Again you see the importance of representation for Adivasis and Dalits. Of course
there are many people across castes, even across borders, who have taken up their cause, but they
should be considered as allies, not as representatives. Those allies are important to build solidarities
beyond particular identities, and I am sure Ambedkar would have agreed with the words of the
Australian Aboriginal artist Lilla Watson: "If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your
time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work
together". I also strongly believe that nobody is free until all are free, and that "We are all
Untouchable until no one is", which is the slogan of a recent campaign for Dalit rights.