We should all be Jignesh Mevani

Mevani after he was granted bail by a court in Kokrajhar on Saturday. Pic/ANI

The grant of bail to Vadgam MLA Jignesh Mevani has not had Gujarat's Dalits forget the message the Bharatiya Janata Party sought to convey to them through his arrest, and so, at the time of writing this piece on May 1, the 62nd foundation day of Gujarat, Dalits in over 1,100 villages were preparing to switch off electric lights between 9 pm and 9.15 pm, to protest the patently illegal arrest of Jignesh by the Assam Police.

They were then to assemble together at a spot and read out, in the light of a kerosene lamp or candle, the Preamble of the Constitution, thus establishing a connection, even if fleeting, with the 2019-20 protest against the new citizenship law. Those 1,000 Dalit-ian Shaheen Baghs were to also take a pledge to abide by the Constitution, imbibe the constitutional values of liberty, equality and fraternity, and not be manipulated by caste and communal politics.

India's culture of dissent is not dead yet.

The architect of the May 1 protest is Navsarjan Trust founder Martin Macwan, whose mission has been to empower Dalits by skilling them and raising their consciousness about the systemic oppression of which they are principal victims. Not for Macwan the hurly-burly of street politics. But he organised the protest because he felt the arrest of Jignesh was designed to challenge the Dalit identity.

Gandhi's 1932 fast, Macwan said to me, compelled Dr Ambedkar to give up his demand for a separate electorate and accept reserved constituencies, which have produced Dalit representatives loyal to their parties, not to their community. Jignesh is an exception; his arrest was to tell Dalits that outspokenness and assertion have a high cost.

True, the two tweets for which Jignesh was arrested used intemperate language. One of them can be faulted for accusing Prime Minister Narendra Modi of revering Godse, for there is no evidence that Modi has extolled the assassin of Gandhi, although his party colleagues have repeatedly done so. Nevertheless, his two tweets appealed for peace and criticised the machinations of those undermining social harmony. And anyway, Jignesh's tweets pale in comparison to Hindutva leaders' hate speeches including call for the genocide of Muslims.

Outspokenness is Jignesh's trait. On July 31, 2016, when he called for a mahasammelan on the flogging of Dalits in Una, the Ahmedabad Police declared the meeting illegal as prior permission had not been taken for it. Jignesh shot back, "If Modi can ask people to do yoga at public places, why do we need permission?" Jignesh took to doing yoga then and there.

That mahasammelan decided to organise a protest march from Ahmedabad to Una, and Jignesh hogged national media headlines. The march united Dalit subcastes. His ideological steadfastness is in contrast to Hardik Patel and Alpesh Thakor, the other young Turks of the 2017 elections. Veteran journalist Rathin Das says Jignesh is the only Gujarati politician who, as of now, cannot be bought out.

It is bewildering why the BJP has gunned for Jignesh, for the Scheduled Castes are just 7 per cent of Gujarat's population. Their impact on the electoral battles in Gujarat is limited. But it is a mistake to classify Jignesh as just an SC leader; his politics combines caste and class, perhaps an outcome of his association with civil society leaders like the late lawyer Mukul Sinha. But no less significant was the impact Khedu Mora Re, Rakesh Sharma's 2007 documentary on the suicide of Gujarat farmers, had on Jignesh.

He accompanied Bharatsinh Jhala, a Right to Information activist, to meet the families of farmers who had committed suicide. Jignesh realised that certain socio-economic problems were common to both Dalits and the poor of other communities, even though the former's suffering was more acute. This realisation, Jhala said to me, was why Jignesh organised extensive media coverage for a poor, deaf-and-dumb non-Dalit girl who was, in 2010, raped by three Dalits - and helped get her justice.

Jignesh's popularity grew because of his campaign for grant of five acres of land to every landless Dalit family. He used the RTI Act to find out who were officially allocated land deemed to be in excess of the ceiling limit but whose possession was still with the landlords. This information facilitated the transfer of land to its legal owners, particularly in Kutch district. Jignesh's caste-class politics saw social activists, privileged by caste, campaigning for him in Vadgam, from where he stood, and won, as an independent candidate in 2017.

His MLA innings has been exemplary. He sought to skill Vadgam's women to stitch reusable sanitary pads for their use. He secured the high court's permission to divert his MLA fund for building an oxygen plant in Vadgam, which also generated the highest number of jobs under MGNREGA in Banaskantha district last year. The oxygen plant was inaugurated by Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Buddhist priests!

The BJP has gunned for Jignesh because he embodies the Constitutional idea of the ideal Indian, one who is more than just a sum of his identities and wedded to the values of liberty, equality and fraternity. It is this Indian the BJP fears. Let us all be Jignesh Mevani.

The writer is a senior journalist.
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