In Haryana, Jat rage over reservations is spreading like wildfire

Protests by Jat agitators demanding reservations in public employment intensified and spread to more parts of Haryana as well as Delhi, enclosed by Haryana on three sides. A week into the agitation, protesters continued to block road and railways on Saturday. The army was deployed in eight districts, including in Rohtak where soldiers had to enter the affected areas using helicopters after protesters dug up several roads, news agencies reported.

Angry protesters set fire to public buildings, including a railway station building in Jind and a petrol pump in Rohtak. Protesters threw stones at the house of agriculture minister OP Dhankar. A day earlier they had tried to break into the house of state finance minister Abhimanyu Sindhu. Both political leaders belong to the Jat community and agitators blame them for failing to bring legislation for Jats to be included in the other backward classes category.

Political rivalries

A few kilometres off Rohtak Road, in Bahadurgarh in Jhajjar district, Jats dismissed Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar's announcement that the government had accepted their demands calling it “a delaying tactic.”

“We have heard similar vague promises so many times the past 18 months,” said Ravi Rathi, a young man leaning against a broken tree trunk being used by the group to block the entrance to Parnala village. “Successive governments have promised us the same, but taken no action after the announcements,” added a man standing next to him, also in his 20s.

The young men, more than 30 in number, had occupied a narrow road over a nallah flowing on the village outskirts. Besides blocking the road with tree trunks, they had strewn thorny kikar branches on the road to allowing no vehicles on the road, except for medical emergencies.

The village mukhiya Rajesh Rathi who stood with the men said the government had left them with no option but to resort to intensifying their agitation. He blamed Bharatiya Janata Party's Member of Parliament from Kurukshetra Raj Kumar Saini for instigating the violence with his provocative speeches.

Saini, a first-time member of parliament who also belongs to another backward class, has formed the “OBC Brigade”, a loose coalition of members of other backward class communities who maintain that including traditionally dominant communities like the Jats in this list will dilute the benefits of reservations for other communities. He has threatened to resign from his parliament seat over this issue.

“Saini has been abusing Jats at public functions,” claimed the village mukhiya (chief) Rathi. “In early February, our leaders raised the issue of how BJP had failed where Congress had tried to deliver on Jat reservations," Rathi said. "Saini had retorted with 'Jat atankwadi hain, Jat bawle hain (Jats are terrorists, Jats are insane). So now, the young boys have responded with a 'we will show you what terror means,'” Rathi concluded.

A little farther away, on Rohtak road which the protesters had blocked by lining it with construction material and blue billboards of the Delhi Metro, Yogesh Dalal, clad in a sports jersey tried to make his way to Tikri a border village, pushing his motorcycle on the blockaded, deserted road.

Dalal a head constable in Delhi police and a Jat himself, said he supported the community's agitation. “Farming is finished, and there is high inflation. Jats struggle to get government jobs because they lack the benefit of reservations,” Dalal said. He too laid the blame on Saini for the protests turning violent, claiming that in some instances Saini men had led violent attacks for which Jats were detained.

Crises in villages

Besides political competition with other castes, older members of the community spoke of the economic desperation that had gripped most farm households in the area. In Bahadurgarh's Parnala village, for instance, of the over 800 households most had to sell their farmland at a pittance when the government acquired land for Bahadurgarh Modern Industrial Estate set up by the state government in the 1960s. The industrial estate, on the edge of the village, holds over 1,300 units now, including factories producing footwear, pharmaceuticals, steel sheets, glass. But since nearly all the factories prefer to employ migrants whom they view as more pliant than local workers, the Rs 3,000 crore business generated in the industrial estate per year offers hardly any livelihood opportunities for local residents.

In Parnala, villagers estimated that around 40% households are dependent on only farming, while others supplement their income by running shops for cycle repairs, groceries, or by working as truck drivers and helpers. The farmers lamented the crop losses due to successive droughts and weather disturbances of the last two years. Around the village, the standing carrot crop was going to waste in fields after the prices crashed this season.

Rohtash Rathi, a middle-aged mild-mannered man, stood in support while dozens of young men climbed on top of stranded buses and shouted Jat agitation slogans. He said that this year he was uncertain whether he and his wife were even going to earn the equivalent of Haryana's monthly minimum wage of Rs 7,600 for a year of work in the fields.

Rathi owns half acre land and leases another two acres paying Rs 58,000 annually to a Punjabi land owner, he said. “Last summer we had sown basmati, investing Rs 22,000 per acre. But the rains failed and we suffered a loss, earning Rs 17,000 per acre for the paddy crop,” said Rathi. “The government announced a low support price of Rs 1,200 per quintal, then two months later, when farmers had sold their crop, it hiked the rate to Rs 3,000 per quintal, allowing traders to hoard and profit,” he alleged.

Rathi has two sons, both of whom study in the government school in Parnala. With unremunerative farm prices, he supports the family leasing out his tractor for Rs 400 per acre tilled, and by selling buffalo milk earning upto Rs 240-300 a day for a few months after calving. Rathi's immediate worry was that his standing wheat crop was stunted because of a less cold winter and shortfall in rains, and he had spent Rs 18,000 per acre on it already.

Land capital versus industrial capital

Rathi as well as several other villagers dismissed the charge that the Jats, who already dominate the politics in Haryana had little business complaining of having little say in the government. Sunil Kumar, a farmer from Barai village in Rohtak who had reached Jhajjar to take part in the protests said that while “50 Jat families dominated state politics, thousands of others languished.”

The farmers pointed out that they had struggled for a response from the state and local administration to get any issues addressed through previous smaller protests, such as over their demands for higher minimum support prices for crops. They said a case in point was the industrial pollution from Bahadurgarh factories.

“The water and soil have turned saline with industrial pollution. If an acre took 6 hours of running a tubewell to irrigate, it now takes 30 hours,” said Ashok Rathi, a farmer from Parnala. Rathi said since two years, the villagers had been making representations to the district administration and demonstrating against the effect of the waste from factories. “The glass factories burn oil waste to melt glass instead of cleaner fuel like gas. When we complained to local officials, the factory owner called us and told us: 'Complain to whoever you want, the oil waste helps us cut costs and we will continue to use it',” recounted Rathi.

Even the well-off farmers in Haryana, who represent land capital, seemed to be struggling in dealing with a far more powerful industrial capital. “The factories refuse to hire our children locally, and the government will take no action against industries for their illegalities,” said Balwan Singh, an elderly farmer. “Between the two, we can only try to take on the government.”