Cong, Bjp Battle It Out In Anands Dairy Units Too

A couple of decades ago, DD Desai was a member of Parliament. He hailed from Khera district, known across the country for its daily co-operatives and their highly successful Amul brand. One day he registered himself as a member of his villages Dairy Co-operative Society, a unit of the Khera Milk Producers Union and, in a few months, got it to nominate him to become a director of the board.

His nomination was rejected on technical grounds, but Desai was not the first -nor the last-politician to try and take over a successful cooperative and use its vast network of voters, often right across a constituency, as his political base. The Khera district co-operative milk producers union alone had 552,626 members, according to its last annual report, accounting for more than three million families.

 

Vasantdada Patil and other Maharashtra Congress leaders have, over the years. successfully married a career in cooperatives with one in politics. Right here in these elections, says Jitendra Patel-vice-chairman of the dairy cooperative soicety of Napad Talpad village near here-the village unit of the vast cooperative is proving to be an excellent base for him to campaign for the BJP.

The Anand union began with a Congress leadership, its first head being Tribhuvandas Patel, a close associate of Sardar Patel, who also hailed from a village eight km from here. In the last few years, there has been a tussle between the BJP, the Shankersinh Vaghela-led Rashtriya Janata Party and the Congress for control. Each party tries to get its men elected to chair the 900 village units, since they elect the unions board, four ot its 12 members every year.

One thing that is unlikely to change, however, is the dominance of the powerful and resourceful Patel community. Indeed, acknowledges Verghese Kurien, its first general manger, the entire board of the union comprised entirely of Patels for a long time. There are now seven Patels, seven Kshatriyas, two Brahmins and ex-officio, the district registrar. The number of Kshatriyas in Khera and Anand districts is estimated at double the number of Patels.

In Amul, Congress-BJP manoeuvres go on, says Ahmedbhai F Rathore, deputy chairman of the Napad Vanta panchayat, but if you want to work in Amul, you have to get born in a Patel home. That is no doubt an exaggeration. And Rathore acknowledges that its because Patels run it, that Amul does so well.

While many Patels may have benefited from Amul, the cooperative has done little to improve the lot of the scheduled castes, generally the really poor of Anand and Khera. These castes dont have any finance to buy cattle, says KR Makwana, 68, of Napad Talpad village, and so cant even become members. So they do not benefit from such union asistance like the free medicines provided through the Tribhuvandas Foundation, a sister ortanisation.

Not a single one of the hundred scheduled caste families there owns any land, says Makwana. Not only that, the Patel-dominated panchayat has declared the half acre plot adjoing the place these families use for their leather factory as panchayat land. They had started using the plot as a plantation three years ago, selling the timber for about Rs 20,000 every year, he says, when the panchayat stepped in.

They behaved like a cooperative dividing the money among all the families that use the factory. Ironically, the Patels, who have benefited tremendously from the milk cooperative, were averse to the plantation cooperative of Makwanas.

Jayantibhai Makwana, 29, sees Amul too as a Patel fief. He worked for six years in the butter factory, he says, but was laid off because Bachubhai Patel, who had the contract to provide labourers, distributed identity cards on the first of every month, effectively keeping the labour on monthly contracts.

Kurien, who now chairs the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Markeying Federation, says : We are here in the milk business. We are not here to solve all the probles of India. But we ensure that nobody is prevented from becoming a member, on caste, creed, or community. Men and women queue up together to deliver milk and Brahmins get in behind scheduled caste members, he points out,. I think these are blows at the caste system.

He explains further that the reason most scheduled caste families - generally landless - do not own cattle is that normally, the number of buffaloes a farmer can keep depends on the amount of by products of his land he can use, since land is too scarce to produce enough food for human consumption and cattle feed too.

Amul apparently hasnt helped womens empowerment very much either, though Kurien says he would like to think women, who feed and look after the cattle, get the money earned. Jitendra Patel, however, avers that Patel women do not go to the milk collection centre in his village to sell the milk.

Only Kshatriya women do that, he adds.

Kurien says that cooperatives operated entirely by women are the best run because women are generally housebound. She doesnt develop an ambition to use the cooperative to become an MLA or an MP. He adds that his number two in the National Dairy Development board, managing director Amrita Patel, has brought a concern for women into focus in matters like employment and the provision of separate toilets at NDDB.

She forced him to get an executive womens toilet constructed after Sonia Gandhi had to be shown to a workers toilet during a visit. If Patel succeeds him, concerns might just expand to empowerment.