I am here today because I want to tell you a story.
Almost 24 years ago, I moved with my wife from Mumbai, the crowded, busy metropolis known to many of you as Bombay, to a small village called Dahisar. It was my uncle's village. We were committed to serve the poorest of the poor. At that time we did not know that there were Indian people who lived in slavery as bonded labourers. Soon we came to know that the village was not a homogeneous community. The indigenous peoples, the tribals, did not live in the village with the upper caste. They lived in hamlets in the forests. We learned that for small sums of money, loaned by the landlords, the tribals were bonded to serve, to serve for life, to serve for generation after generation.
Bonded labour is illegal in India, but these tribal people did not know this. Their masters knew it, but ignored the laws and the Constitution. In those days, and even today, the masters often had powerful friends in local and state government who helped them keep the bonded labourers and their families under control -- subjugated to a life of service. This criminal-political nexus is a major support for the illegal practice of bonded labour and the commission of innumerable brutalities on oppressed people.
Every day, in my uncle's village, the bonded labourers served their masters and every day they suffered inhuman bondage. Every day the masters through their speech and behaviour reaffirmed the sub-human existence of these bonded labourers. Every minute of every day these people lived believing that they were not free. They had no land, no homes, often no food, no clothes. Their children didn't go to school. For every step they took they had to seek permission, and always there was a palpable fear of the master. That is how their parents had lived, and their grandparents. The men inherited their father's debts and the women were tied first to the masters of their fathers and then the masters of their husbands. They taught themselves the virtue of silence before the master.
We started telling the tribals that they could become free. The masters, including my uncle's family, began treating us with animosity because we were openly challenging their system of bonded labour -- the tribals ran away when they saw us, because they thought we were the agents of the masters. Then, on Indias Independence Day, we organized a programme in the village and sang a song in which we described how the bonded labourers were not free even though the country was free, and how our goal was to see them free.
Soon thereafter, my own uncle and other masters beat us and threw out our meager possessions into the street. The news of this incident spread like wildfire in the tribal hamlets. That night, for the first time, the tribals came to us. They took us home and nursed our wounds. That night the tribals believed that we would be with them at all cost.
One day, four bonded labourers hid from their masters and managed to reach our home in Mumbai. They came and said they wanted to be free. We were in a big fix. What could we do? Where could we take them? We hit upon a plan to dramatise their freedom for them and told them that we would take them to a senior officer who would set them free. We phoned one of our friends who was a retired bureaucrat and told him what to do.
We brought the tribals to the apartment of our friend, which was on the eleventh floor of a high-rise building. It was the first time the tribals had ever been in an elevator. With our friend posing as an officer, we started the ceremony. He listened carefully to their story and then, using his power as a Government Official proclaimed, "You are now free. You need not work for the master anymore. And you need not repay the loan."
The tribals were overjoyed. From that moment they believed and they knew that they were free. They returned to the village as heroes and they declared they would never work for the masters. The embers of freedom in their hearts had started to glow and nothing could extinguish them now. They were free because they knew that they were free!
We started helping agricultural labourers and small farmers to organize themselves into a union that became known as Shramajeevi Sanghatana. The union supported the bonded laborers in their struggle for freedom. The strength of this collective bargaining would change their lives. Soon bonded labourers from village after village started coming to us asking to be set free. It was a sign that they were gaining confidence in the union. We began to use the law and the courts and also helped them to access the government's rehabilitation programmes. But the most important lesson we learned was that it was neither the laws nor the rehabilitation programs that had set them free. They were free because they thought they were free, and we created an atmosphere that made them think they were free.
We asked them: Do you want to be cattle tied to your master? The master will feed you twice each day, like he feeds his cattle. Do you want to be cattle or do you want to be human beings? The tribals learned to value freedom. They readied themselves to demand it, and they prepared to pay the price. They prepared to go to jail. They prepared to go hungry. They prepared to get organized and support fellow bonded laborers to change the course of their history. They found hope in their organization. They learned to assert their rights as citizens of a democracy.
From then on we seized every opportunity to make manifest that freedom. I remember when the bonded labourers decided to salute the national flag for the first time, on Independence Day in 1983. The masters came armed with sticks and created such an uproar that the ceremony could not be held.
The indignity of that day stayed with us the entire year, increasing our determination. The next year, the masters prevailed upon the district administration to pass orders preventing us from saluting the flag. As we moved ahead towards the flag, the police stood in front in a cordon. Imagine not being allowed to salute the national flag, to be degraded and denied this simple act of citizenship! That day we broke the cordon, and for the first time the bonded labourers saluted the national flag. We were arrested and went to jail. My wife went to the women's prison with our three-year-old-daughter. We remained in jail for ten days and refused to give bail, finally the government had to withdraw the case. It was an incomparable victory.
The former slaves raised their first slogan against the masters: "We bonded labourers are not cattle, we are human beings. We don't want charity, we demand our rights."
This slogan gave them strength to declare that they preferred starvation to slavery, even death to slavery. Abraham Lincoln once said, "Freedom lies in the hearts of the people." Yes, it lies in the hearts of the slaves, although they be covered with the ashes of indignity and hopelessness heaped on them by masters and rulers. Keeping our hearts courageous is not an easy task. When the masters in my uncle's village saw that freedom was taking hold they rose up to destroy it. They imposed a social boycott on the bonded labourers. This means that they were not given work in the fields, the shopkeepers did not sell to them, and they were not allowed to enter the village.
The greatest fear is of backlash by the master. The master is all-powerful. He has money. He knows the police. He knows the politicians. He has powerful friends. The master may even kill the labourer. Who will support the bonded labourer? Just as the hour before dawn is the darkest, the transition to freedom is the most difficult. Many of the worst fears may come true, and yet we must help the bonded labourer hold on to freedom.
During this unrest a woman said, "We shall eat bitter roots but we shall not touch the feet of the masters." This became another slogan repeated by the bonded labourers. When slaves rise in protest, when they raise their heads high and look straight into the eyes of the master and say, I shall die but not bend before you, that is the moment of power. Once they say this, no power on earth can keep them in shackles.
Freedom is an expensive thing, but that does not mean that any currency in the world can buy it. Only the bonded labourers can pay the price. They alone must gather courage from the depths of their being and say 'no'. Nothing else can set them free: For them there is no alternative employment, because they are enslaved. They do not have the leisure for adult education because they are starving. Savings and credit schemes require money, which they do not have. Buying them back from the master is disastrous, as it encourages the master to keep more slaves. The only answer to bonded labour is organizing the slaves to demand the freedom that is already theirs by law.
Our task as organisers is to help the yearning for freedom to bloom, like a bud. The bud is attacked from all sides by storms of violence, and gnawing inside are the worms of inner doubt. The fear of freedom is a very real fear. However inhuman the system, this is the life that the slave has been born into.
Let me tell you another story, the story of Keshav Nankar. To me, Keshav is a symbol of what the human spirit can achieve. As a boy he and his family fell into bondage for a small loan taken by his father. Keshav wanted to go to school but could not because his master wanted him to tend to the cattle. As a young man Keshav and his wife, who was also in bondage, worked more than 14 hours a day. He got only one break to eat; he was abused and kept hungry.
Twenty years ago, through our union, Shramjeevi Sanghatana, Keshav escaped from the horrors of this bonded labour. Today he serves as chairperson of the union, a union run by former bonded labourers. Its membership has risen to some 100,000. It has helped more than 6000 slaves gain their freedom, and many thousands more have been freed by masters who were afraid of the union. Who would have thought twenty years ago that Keshav would some day travel to London and tell his story to world leaders at the meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society? And there is no fear that Keshav's children will ever live in bondage.
I wish you could meet Anita Dhangda. She is the first bonded woman to be elected as a representative in a District government. Anita was born into a bonded family, and her father died young as a result of their hard lives. In 1989 Anita approached our union with the request to help free her family. We registered a formal complaint against the landlord. The landlord was powerful. He had the village under his control. He stopped all work and food for Anita and her family. We mobilized the surrounding villages, who confronted the landlord, and we succeeded. Anita and 22 of her family members gained their freedom.
Anita got involved in our union, and became interested in politics in Maharashtra state. Who could imagine that Anita Dhangda would fight against the candidate of the mafia politicians and get elected, this year, to the Zilla Parishad, the district-level unit of local government? No one could have imagined that the Chief Minister of Maharashtra would join a celebration in her honor. No one could have imagined she would appear in TV interviews and raise issues on the floor of the House. Her story is a credit to her and to the organization that worked to free her.
There are no short cuts to freeing slaves. Each and every slave has to be protected and encouraged. There is no magic wand at the single wave of which all will be free. The only way is to be with each person and support him or her in the long walk to freedom to change the systems that support and defend these crimes against our humanity. While the bonded labourer pays the price of freedom, we can share the path and sometimes the cost. Those of us who chose to pay that price have spent days in jail, have gone hungry and thirsty. The police bring charges against us. But we know that compared to the pain of the bonded labourer, our pain is small.
Along the way we have found people who will stand with the bonded labourers in their fight. At the height of the struggle we have been supported by lawyers, doctors, intellectuals, media persons, government officials and students. Among those people there were also those who belonged to the families or castes of the masters, who invited the anger of their own community to be with the bonded labourers in their struggle.
Our union is also a bridge that connects the struggle of the tribal bonded labourers in India to the struggle of communities and nations across the globe. During apartheid the members of Shramajeevi Sanghatana collected one rupee each and handed over twelve thousand rupees to the ANC. It was not the money that counted, but the spirit of solidarity, which says We are with you in your struggle. We understand how hard it is for you because it is so hard for us. And which says, no one is free till every one is free. Hundreds of our people danced with joy at the news of Nelson Mandela's release from South Africa's jail as if their own brother had been released. The spirit of freedom knows no geographical boundaries, no race or country. We are one with Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, who have become our heroes along with the heroes of the Indian Freedom Struggle.
Thus, Friends, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Unitarian Universalist Association for your support for our struggle against slavery. Through the Holdeen India Program you have been associated with us for nearly two decades. Although the Holdeen India Programme supported the movement against bonded labour financially, the real contribution cannot ever be measured in money. For two decades Ms. Kathy Sreedhar has been with us marching and working with us constantly. We have the knowledge that through her you all are with us.
Some of you have visited us; some of you know the former bonded labourers by name. This is most important, for the first thing a master takes away is a person's name. You are with us in our struggle. You have celebrated our victories with us. We have sung together the English and Marathi versions of "We Shall Overcome." You have brought many, many friends from many countries and cultures and introduced the freed bonded labourers to them as you would a member of your family. By doing all these things you restored to the bonded labourers what the masters, and generations of enslavement had taken away recognition of their inherent worth and dignity as human beings. You are far more precious to us than all the money in the world.
You and we together share a vision of the world where there will be no slavery or bondage. The work towards that vision is our service to God. God resides neither in temples, nor mosques, nor churches, nor synagogues but in the freeing of the oppressed human being. To work for freeing slaves is our worship of the living God.
I tried to capture in the words of a song the dream that all of us share, and I would like to end my speech with the translation of that song.
This is the dream of my life
May it come true
May the children of human beings
Live with human dignity
May no one sell their bodies
For a small piece of bread
And may my inner urge ever be
To destroy oppression.
May the flowers yet to bloom
Not be trampled underfoot
May every breath I take
Help new flowers to bloom.
May I never be weak, vulnerable
And powerless
May I find within myself
The strength to contain storms.
The night that has passed
Was the darkest
Let the emerging rays
Live in the huts of the poor.
May those who have no food
And no dignity, be my Gods.
And may every step I take today
Be in the service of that God.
This is my prayer
May it come true
May the children of human beings
Live with human dignity.
Zindabad!! Thank you.
