Gujarat: How Dalit women are fighting hard to retain a 36-acre plot in Dholka

Makwana’s crime? Not only is she a Dalit and a woman but she also runs a farmers’ cooperative comprised entirely of Dalit women. For over three decades, they have been fighting against all odds to retain their ownership of a 36-acre plot of agricultural land in Dholka.

The Darbars may be categorised as backward castes but in the ‘social order’ they rank several notches higher than Dalits. To the men who threatened Makwana that’s all that matters.

Positioned higher in the social order, they see nothing inappropriate, let alone criminal, about demanding that the septuagenarian and her Jai Bheem Mahila Kheti Mandal (JBMKM) vacate the plot they transformed from a wasteland into a fertile agricultural land through 36 years of relentless hard work.

Chasing a 'mad dream'

This caste ‘privilege’ dates back ages. The Darbars have long been the dominant caste group in Vautha because of their large numbers in this village of 2,500-odd families. For generations, Vautha’s 70 Dalit families had lived at one end of the village and earned a livelihood by skinning dead animals and manual scavenging.

It was this decades-old ‘system’ that Makwana shook up in 1989 when she mobilised 50 other Dalit women of Vautha to form the JBMKM.

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Priti Vaghela, a former member of Navsarjan Trust, Gujarat’s oldest Dalit rights organisation, which helped to form the JBMKM told The Federal, “Dalits of Vautha belong to the Valmiki sub-group, which is considered lowest in the social hierarchy even among the Dalits. In Vautha, Dalits are particularly vulnerable as the men are not earning much and are forcing the women into manual scavenging.”

Vaghela recalled that prior to 1989, Dalit women of Vautha would be forced to clean open latrines used by upper caste women because the Dalit men didn’t earn enough to run a household.

“At first, we thought we should form a collective of Dalit men to cultivate the land but most Dalit men backed off after being attacked by Darbar men. That’s when we encouraged their wives to get into farming. Over the years, sun or rain, they toiled for hours and stood tall against all atrocities by the Darbars,” explained Vaghela.

Together, the 51 Dalit women that came together to form the JBMKM took a 36-acre plot, then a notified wasteland, from the local municipal body.

Over the next decade, while locals, including their own family members, and the administration scoffed at their mad dream to become self-reliant farmers, Makwana and her comrades quietly toiled away nurturing the ‘wasteland’ they could call their own.

By 2000, the JBMKM had achieved what many believed was impossible. The wasteland was now not only cultivable but was producing two crops a year. The yield was not just enough to meet their daily needs but there was also sufficient surplus to sell in the market and earn a modest income for the collective.

In many ways, the JBMKM gave Vautha a new identity. The village known to Gujaratis largely for the Vautha Mela, an annual animal fair the village hosts along the Saptsangam, the confluence of the Vatrak and Sabarmati rivers, had become synonymous with this Dalit women’s farming collective.

Troubles begin

Then the troubles began – threats from castes higher in the social hierarchy, land grab attempts and even pressures from the administration to return the plot the women had ‘acquired’ without any official documentation to establish their ownership. Since then, fending off caste bullies and even government officials who storm in at their whim and fancy demanding that she and the other Dalit women farmers give up the land, has become part of Makwana’s daily chores.

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“This is not the first time the Darbars have threatened us to vacate the land we have cultivated for years with our blood and sweat. Thankfully, no one was hurt this time. They just swung around some furniture and punctured the tyre of the tractor we own. This happens every time during harvest season. They also try to destroy the crops but we have always managed to ward them off,” Makwana told The Federal.

Last month, things had taken a nasty, although not unfamiliar, turn.

Fending off caste bullies and government officials, who storm in at their whim and fancy demanding that Makwana and other Dalit women farmers give up the land, has become a daily affair

The Darbars arrived with a posse of policemen from the local thana, shared Makwana. “The police tried to intimidate us and said we will be arrested under the Gujarat Land Grabbing (Prohibition) Act, 2020,” she said. The Act criminalizes land grabbing and involves 10 to 14 years of imprisonment along with a fine in case of a conviction.

“We told them that we will give our lives but we won’t give up this land,” added the JBMKM founder.

Fruits of hard labour

Makwana claimed that it was purely the hard work and determination of the women in her collective that transformed the 36-acre wasteland plot into a sprawling agricultural field that today yields groundnut, castor and cotton crops. The sale of crops helps the JBMKM to register annual earnings of around Rs 8 lakh annually.

“I still remember the first time I hit the wasteland with my spade. It was completely infested with gando baval (prosopis julifora, a thorny invasive wild shrub that is difficult to clear out as it regenerates if even a tiny root is left inside the earth; its pods are also toxic for livestock). For the initial few years, we did not have support of our families either. It took us 10 years to make this land cultivable. In the year 2000, we sold our first yield and by 2004 we bought a tractor as the land had started yielding two crops a year. That is when the Darbars began making trouble; now everyone wants a piece of it,” Makwana recalled.

Fending of attacks

The JBMKM chief said the first violent attack on her collective by Darbar men happened during the harvest season in 2011 “in the presence of the local police”. Undeterred, the women farmers staged a roadblock as the Darbar men, under the protection of the police, tried to take away the harvest.

“We took their sickles, gathered the harvest and loaded it on the tractor. It took us twelve hours… the men watched us from a distance,” 63-year-old Mangiben, Makwana’s comrade in the JBMKM told The Federal. She alleged that men from Vautha’s dominant castes, as well as the local police, 'have been threatening to evict' them since then, on charges that will be filed under the Gujarat Land Grabbing Act.

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“This land has changed our lives. We each take daily wages of Rs 200 a day for our work and each member also gets 80 to 100 kilogram of grain every year. We sell the rest of the yield in the market. The income from the land is our primary source of livelihood. We have also been able to hire other Dalit women and help them make a living,” shared Mangiben.

For the JBMKM, the year 2017 was a turning point.

Brief reprieve

Recognising the resilience and resolve of Makwana and her comrades, senior BJP leader and then Gujarat minister, Dholka MLA Bhupendrasinh Chudasama, sent letters to local revenue officers recommending that the ownership title of the 36-acre plot, farmed by the JBMKM since 1989, be formally be transferred to the collective.

Makwana and Vautha’s Dalit women farmers had waited for this moment for nearly three decades. The happiness, however, was short-lived.

Despite Chudasama’s recommendation, the process of transferring the title ownership remained stuck in bureaucratic red tape. By May 2020, Chudasama was fighting political challenges of his own. The Gujarat High Court had invalidated Chudasama’s 2017 election from Dholka and though the Supreme Court stayed the order within days, the leader’s political clout was on the decline.

In the 2022 Assembly polls, the BJP benched Chudasama and fielded Kiritsinh Dhabi, instead, from Dholka.

Dual battle

Makwana and her group have repeatedly filed petitions with the state government, as well as the courts, urging them to grant them ownership of the land, under the Gujarat government’s Santhani scheme of 1960.

The scheme allows the state to distribute state-owned wasteland and farm land acquired through the Gujarat Agricultural Land Ceiling Act, 1960, to landless or marginal farmers, agricultural labourers and farmers’ cooperatives from the marginal and backward classes.

“We are fighting two cases – one is a petition to hand over the 36 acres to the JBMKM and the other is a case that was slapped on us under the Gujarat Land Grabbing Prohibition Act. Lawyers were provided by Narvsarjan Trust to fight both the cases,” said Makwana.

For the last 10 years, she admitted that she has been running between administrative offices at the taluka level in Dholka, the Collectorate in Ahmedabad city, and the Secretariat in Gandhinagar – but to no avail.

Not giving up

Makwana was around 40 years old when she founded the JBMKM. She has now spent 36 years fighting the troika of gender disparity, caste hierarchy and an apathetic administration. Yet, her resolve to fight on remains as determined today as it was in 1989 when she first picked up the shovel.

“We are getting old. We are not sure what will happen to the ongoing cases and whether we will get ownership of the land in our lifetime but we are not giving up,” Makwana said.