Changaliwala rises against oppression

Vishav Bharti in Changaliwala (Sangrur)

You talk about men? They don’t spare even bezubaan pigeons and bulls!” He raises his right hand, but it helplessly hangs down from his forearm where his name is tattooed in Gurmukhi. This is the broken arm of Gurtej Singh, Jagmail Singh’s elder brother. Two years before they killed Jagmail, they came for Gurtej. They thrashed him till his arm was broken and before leaving, threw him in an under-construction septic tank to die. His only fault, Gurtej claims, was that he questioned Rinku (one of the four accused in the Jagmail murder case) and his gang of falsely implicating his younger brother Bachitar Singh (who was acquitted after spending a year in jail as undertrial) in the murder of a sadhu, who was allegedly killed as his dera was on their land.

Gurtej survived but could not afford surgery. And his hanging arm became another footnote in the six-decade-old tale in which every victim — even birds and animals — is killed with even more brutality than the other. The one constant throughout is Gurvinder Singh, the oppressor.

Gurvinder’s clan is part of Lehra area’s folklore, but it is Jagmail’s brutal murder that has brought their tales of atrocities to the fore. From a 15-year-old-boy to men in their seventies and eighties, everybody talks of what Gurvinder did to Bachan Singh. It is still fresh in public memory.

Both Bachan and Gurvinder developed rivalry. One evening, Gurvinder shot at him, brought the injured Bachan to his farm and started chopping him alive and fed him to his pet dogs, piece by piece. His skeleton was found a few days later from a nearby drain and the victim’s family left the village. “Bachan’s son was my classmate,” says Namdev Bhutal, an activist of the Association for Democratic Rights, who lives in the nearby Bhutal village.

Feudal subjugation

According to Namdev, for centuries, this area has seen strong feudal oppression. “The people broadly fell into three categories: Sardars, Jats and Dalits. Sardars were given huge chunks of land for their loyalty to the British Empire or the princely states. Dalits were the biggest victims at the hands of Sardars as their demand for higher wages and proper food was taken as a challenge to their authority.”

Most of the Sardars of the area would act as police touts. “Gurvinder was the kingpin of all the touts. He would tip off the police on almost everything, from poor villagers distilling illicit liquor to movement of the Naxalites. He would figure as the police witness in almost every case of the area,” he says.

Proximity with the police gave his clan the confidence that they were above the law. Not just men, they were brutal to animals too. Namdev says once Gurvinder shoved the barrel of a gun in a stray bull’s rectum and fired. “He just wanted to see what kind of death the bull will die!” Six decades later, almost everybody narrates this story too.

Dalit children and women were not valued any better. Bikkar Singh, who hails from the neighbouring village of Khokar Kalan, joins in with another story. “In our younger days, we used to take our livestock for grazing to the area close to Gurvinder’s fields. His henchmen would often forcefully take ‘inside’ the Dalit women who used to come for collecting saag or fodder from the nearby fields. They would unleash the dogs on our livestock to shoo us away. The terror was such that neither the rape victims nor the witnesses would say a word.”

Even children would fall victim. Almost everybody shares how Gurvinder or his children would punish the palis (child labourers engaged to take care of livestock) by forcefully feeding them cattle dung or tying them under a tokra (basket) and place heavy roller mill boulders on them.

Effects of Naxal uprising

On one side Gurvinder’s brutality was at its peak, and on the other the ‘land to the tiller’ slogan given in West Bengal’s small village of Naxalbari had swayed a section of Lehra youth in the late 1960s.

Shamsher Singh Sheri, who hailed from Khokar Kalan, also grew up listening to the tales of terror of the Sardars of Changaliwala. The story goes that Sheri’s squad ambushed Gurvinder on the evening of April 4, 1971, on the banks of a drain located between Lehra and Changaliwala.

Jagjit Bhutal, a retired employee from the cooperation department and now a social activist with Lok Chetna Manch who hails from a nearby village, recalls how Gurvinder always carried a gun but couldn’t muster the courage to open fire on the young men armed with traditional weapons. Thus, the two-decade-long free reign of brutality was brought to an end when the squad escaped in the dark with Gurvinder’s .12 bore gun chanting, “Down with feudalism.”

“But Sheri paid a heavy price. His land was attached, his house was reduced to a heap of bricks and his brothers and wife were tortured for weeks as he was responsible for depriving the state of an ‘important asset’. Sheri never returned home. Almost four decades later, it was only his body wrapped in a red flag which came back. When he died of cerebral malaria in 2005, he was a member of Polit Bureau — the highest decision-making body of the banned CPI (Maoist),” says Jagjit.

Sheri and Gurvinder’s stories run parallel here. The only difference is that on October 30 every year, students, peasants and Dalits gather around Sheri’s memorial in Khokar Kalan and sing in unison:

Sheri varge sher, dhartiyae jamdi rahin…

(O Mother Earth, keep giving birth to warriors 

like Sheri…)

***

Turnaround, which wasn’t

For many years following Gurvinder’s killing, there was peace in the area.

His son refrained from indulging in oppressive activities. But by the 1980s, the influence of Naxalites declined significantly. “The seeds of Jagmail’s murder lie in the setback to the battles of justice. Though now only a residue of feudalism is left in the area, in the present era, they yield power from big political leaders,” says Bhutal.

Like in the present case, Gurvinder’s grandson Amarjit and great-grandson Rinku (both accused in Jagmail’s murder case) were considered close to former Chief Minister Rajinder Kaur Bhattal. Gurvinder was the brother of Bhattal’s father-in-law.

The activists have publicly alleged that Bhattal’s nephew Henry was shielding them. It was only when they laid siege to Bhattal’s home in Lehra that the government agreed to demands of the protesters. However, Bhattal has denied the accusation and claimed that she had herself called the police to ensure justice was done. 

If Gurvinder’s misdeeds still resonate among the older generation, the younger ones have witnessed the brutality of his next generations. Villagers say the terror was such that dogs were not allowed to bark outside Amarjit’s home, beggars were not supposed to knock on his door, and the landless couldn’t dare enter their fields to collect fodder or saag. His son Rinku would play vulgar songs at full volume on the tractor and would move around the vehra (Dalit settlement).

Once, claim the villagers, an old nomad woman who had settled temporarily on the village outskirts entered their fields to collect saag. Amarjit hit her with a stick so hard that her pelvic bone broke. “She was brought back on a rehri,” says Bikkar Singh. They silently left the village.

Quite recently, a sadhu begging for atta was allegedly locked by Rinku inside his house and ‘taught a lesson’. The sadhu ran for his life. “Later, a boy from the village gave a lift to the sadhu on his bike and got him a bus ticket to a nearby town,” says one Bhola Singh.

Dalits were not even allowed to compete with them in kabootarbaazi, says Harbans Singh, a Dalit from Changaliwala who is fond of pigeon races. “My pigeons would perform better than theirs. One day I found that 26 of my pigeons were poisoned. I was later told it was Rinku’s act,” he adds.

Almost five decades after Gurvinder’s death, it seems Dalits are opening up about the atrocities of the family for the first time. Everybody has a new tale to tell. While waiting for Jagmail’s body, we overhear two men sitting in the yard of a village library in the vehra named after 19th century anti-caste reformist Jyotirao Phule. “Had there been no organisations (radical Left rural workers’ outfits), the murder of Jagmail would also have been buried in the village itself without much fuss,” one man tells the other, who agrees, “Azaadi dawa ditti ehna mundiyan ne.”

It was the Zameen Prapti Sangharsh Committee which first raised the issue of Jagmail and refused to cremate his body. The committee has seen many clashes over the issue of Dalit rights to one-third share in common village land. It has often ended up in bloody conflicts. “Any assertion against feudal oppression, whether for land or for wages, yields bloodshed,” says Mukesh Malaud, president of the committee.

As the police start making way, sirens can be heard. An ambulance carrying Jagmail’s body enters the library yard. The wails grow louder, as do the slogans. In the shadow of red-blue flags, Jagmail’s torso starts on its final journey on the dusty serpentine lanes of the village, with Dalit men, women and university students as part of the procession. They raise slogans of “Mazdoor ekta zindabad”, “Jaati hinsa band karo”...

Alongside the caravan, Gurtej also moves, his broken forearm goes up in the air, his fist waves along with the rhythm of slogans.