An activist's restless dialogue

Patriarchy, misogyny, and many other social ills that confronted IAS-turned activist Aruna Roy are recorded with painful honesty, in all their nuance, in her memoir

The Personal is Political: An Activist’s Memoir

Author: Aruna Roy

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 304

Price: Rs 599

The world is cruel, unjust, unequal. You are an activist and you want to change it. How do you do this? And how do you proceed, with the vehicle that you’ve created, to set things right after it has outlived its usefulness  —not because the world has become a better place but because the vehicle has become a deadweight?

This is among the many questions that this book raises. It is a tormented, restless dialogue of the author with herself about a life she left behind and the one she embraced. Aruna Roy, a Tamilian, resigned from the IAS in 1975 and left Delhi for Tilonia, a village in Rajasthan’s Ajmer district, to join a non-profit NGO to work for the rural poor. She is candid about the challenges she faced initially and the things she had to learn to be able to communicate, especially with women. What a life of working in villages taught her is that “the so-called vulnerable, oppressed, marginalised and deprived never lost their affection, humour, common sense, wisdom and sense of fun even in the direst of circumstances.”

This book is more about the political than the personal. It is organised in a somewhat haphazard manner, not always linear, because it reports her response to situations into which she has been pitchforked — or has voluntarily walked into. For instance, she describes with sensitivity, her encounter with the trauma of transgender people who “beginning with toilets and questionnaires, are denied identity and existence”. This segues into the question of gender: The way women see it and the way institutions see it. Informed by her later rural experiences with handling gender issues, she says women do relate to larger ideologies and issues but they tend to start with the personal and go to the political. When it comes to their body and its physical abuse, their responses are the same. But so many issues still divide them: Caste, class, religion, inequality…and then gender difference becomes a “subsidiary issue”. She relates this to her days in the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration: Becoming an IAS officer does not materially change misogyny, patriarchy and “boyish-group sexual behaviour modified by a veneer of politeness”. She does note, however, that there were many exceptions.

In India but in Rajasthan particularly, the issue of sati (1987) was an exceptionally complex one after a Rajput woman, Roop Kanwar, immolated herself in Deorala, “choosing” to be burnt alive on the funeral pyre of her dead husband. She was 18. Her brother-in-law lit the pyre, so her “choice” is a moot question. Ms Roy’s book records the debates at a group meeting: Rajput women were divided: Some joined their husbands in supporting sati while others believed Roop Kanwar was burnt to death. So, what was it? State complicity in murder, or the celebration of sat: the power of truth and faith that led all rural women in the group to believe that if a woman was “pure” she could spontaneously ignite the pyre? No consensus emerged at the meeting and uneasy ambiguity remains both in society and among social scientists. Sati temples in Deorala and elsewhere still come up with funding; and many social scientists argue that Sati puja as a religious event and glorification of sati as a practice are two different things. But are they?

These and other nuances that confronted her as an activist are recorded with painful honesty. As a civil servant she was trained to ensure the status quo. But the status quo recognises injustice only dimly. Transparency is a forbidden word. And corruption feeds on opacity combined with a sense of entitlement. Ms Roy and her associates were responsible for Jan Sunwai in Rajasthan that eventually emerged as the statutory Right to Information Act in 2005. People had the right to know how resources had been allocated, to whom and in what manner. This alone would shine the light on cosy caste deals and state collaboration.

Ms Roy also discusses the idea and the politics behind the employment guarantees scheme and the imperative need to ensure the poor get work and wages. Noting that the well-off want infrastructure while the poor want livelihood, she says the demand for work and wage employment in public works is a “matter of life and death” in a place like Rajasthan. Thus was formed the Mazdoor Kisan Sangharsh Samiti (MKSS), a political group but not a political party. Much later, India Against Corruption (IAC) debated a similar set of dilemmas and existential challenges before the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) was created.

From a family where the children would fight to solve the Statesman crossword, Ms Roy moved to the fields of Rajasthan where she laboured (somewhat unsuccessfully, she notes wryly) to understand for herself the definition of “unskilled labour”. She could not master the use of the genti pawda, a pickaxe with two sharp ends and a shovel, and then lifting soil and stones on her head, ending up damaging her back forever. In the process she made lifelong friends and companions. The Magsaysay award is incidental.

This is a book to be mulled over, chewed slowly and savoured: Not just for the foreword by Gopalkrishna Gandhi but for the searing honesty with which Ms Roy writes about her life. The defining quote is one that she cites from Lao Tzu: “What, then, is the definition of a good leader?

“Go to the people. Live with them. Learn from them. Love them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have. But with the best leaders, when the work is done, the task accomplished, the people will say: ‘we have done this ourselves’”.