4

AS IF WE ARE EQUAL

Slaveholders on Emancipation

Now they pay us no respect; they behave as if we are equals.

—Radhesh (Interviewee 31)

Forests once covered huge swaths of Uttar Pradesh. The last few decades, however, have seen the ground cleared to make room for quarry work in support of India’s booming economy, industrial growth, and infrastructural expansion. This is true in Sonbarsa, where quarry work has long been practiced. Until very recently, quarry work and stonebreaking were done by hand—notably the hands of bonded laborers. These stonebreakers have been entrenched in debt bondage for generations, forced to work on land they do not own, secured through leases they do not control, in order to break rock they cannot sell. As members of the Kol caste, they are near the bottom of India’s discriminatory hierarchy.

Several years before my first visit to Sonbarsa, community organizers began working with local laborers from the village, and together they set out to secure a lease for the workers. In so doing, they defied the local elites who had always monopolized the leasing system. The villagers’ efforts to meet with community organizers in order to strategize a response to this abuse led to more maltreatment, which only deepened the villagers’ resolve. As one man put it, “on the basis of what they said and what we thought among ourselves, we started walking the path” (Bales 2012, 66). To everyone’s surprise the community organizers’ first meeting was packed. The reaction was immediate: goondas came with rifles, beating those in attendance. The workers responded, throwing broken rocks—the fruit of their labor—at the attackers. A member of the slaveholding class was killed in the melee that ensued. Eight villagers were jailed for the murder. The village was ransacked, then burned to the ground. At least one child died in the conflict.

The Sonbarsa uprising is the closest thing to a contemporary slave rebellion I have encountered in my work. This case, together with the historical record, suggests contemporary rebellions are short and violent confrontations that lead to either victory or repression. In Sonbarsa, community organizing and the uprising led to a victory—that is, local contractors and farmers released their claim to the laborers. Over the years, I have spoken with survivors of this confrontation as well as the community’s slaveholding caste. Gaining this access was not easy, and I spent many hours building rapport and answering questions in order to secure interviews. I filled additional hours discussing rainfall and genetically modified seed costs, relatively innocuous topics that allowed the conversation to meander to the point where landlords were willing to explain what had happened. In the end, it was clear: the brother of the deceased explained, “laborers got united and they killed a contractor, because they were saying we will now rule ourselves and won’t let the [debt bondage] system continue…we will struggle and then be free from our old debts…. Contractors lost five million rupees total [about 146,000 2012 USD]; that’s between two and three hundred thousand rupees each.”

Over the course of my conversations with farmers and contractors in this community, it was clear that there was a nearly uniform sense of resignation in the face of a landscape changed by new government policies and laborer intransigence. Sonbarsa’s path out of bonded labor might be rare, but the dominant caste’s ultimate response, and causal attribution, foreshadowed assessments that I heard again and again in my conversations with movement targets. Radhesh, the head of the family of the man who had been killed, explained to me:

In 2000 this fight came, and the laborers refused to repay their advances, 10,000, 20,000, and 50,000 each. There is a Harijan [Untouchability] Act here in Uttar Pradesh that says you cannot abuse another person. The administration is supporting the workers, who lodge false complaints that higher-caste people are abusing them, and then the police come and take them to jail. So the higher-caste people simply quit asking for the repayment of the loan. Now the laborers are breaking and selling stones on their own…. Earlier they respected us. Those people had no options, so we would take care of them when they got sick. They treated us like gods. But now that MNREGA came in, and other facilities from the administration, now the workers have become less and less respectful—they are more independent now…. The farmers got cheated. We are now stuck, being held back, while the lower class moves forward because of the many things given to them by the administration. They used to have small mud houses, but now they have concrete homes…. The past will never return again. Workers will never come back and work under us.

These themes—government policies, worker disrespect, and a sense of resignation—prevailed among the slaveholding caste in Sonbarsa. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA, a national employment program) had given “too much scope” and “space” to workers, who responded with lower-quality work. Yet, as Radhesh explained, “if I go to them and point out that they are not working hard they will get upset and leave me to work for some other farmer. And when they’ve done this they will say that they haven’t taken any advances, and they will simply refuse to repay me.”

Government programs, community-organizing efforts, and the uprising provide the conceptual space—cognitive liberation—necessary for workers to imagine walking away from a debt. The insult is not only economic; it is also personal and cultural. Radhesh says, “now they pay us no respect; they behave as if we are equals. Earlier, whenever I would arrive they would all stand and say Master, please sit here. But now they think It’s okay that we have fewer resources, and we work on your farms, but we are all human beings and we are equal.” He recalls that his bonded laborers left him after Sonbarsa: “since then they started behaving equally. The impact was very bad, because the administration has supported them, and provided them with security. So they’ve started feeling proud.” Faced with this scenario, Radhesh has decided to “just give up my land for sharecropping, as I have no other options.”¹

From a combination of interviews and secondary data, it is possible to piece together a picture in which concepts familiar to movement scholars—injustice frames (in the previous chapter), opportunities (in this chapter), as well as resources (in the next chapter)—might be mobilized to describe the collective action from the target’s perspective. The picture I paint is surely biased in favor of disempowered elites, that is, those perpetrators who are forced or willing to quit. And the stories disempowered elites tell are subject to bias rooted in misperception, deception, or a combination of the two. There are many responses to collective action, and in starting this chapter with a rebellion I hope to demonstrate that violent repression is real.

PERCEIVED GRIEVANCES AND INJUSTICE FRAMES

The slaveholding class in the previous chapter described the ideal social relations that are the benchmark against which subsequent social relations are judged. In every conversation with employers, bonded laborers were weighed on the scale and found wanting. Employers consistently reported being frustrated with worsening attitudes and declining behavior. These concerns are both sacred and profane. Employers are concerned with both the levels of commitment to a day’s work (quantitatively) but also with the levels of commitment to the landlord’s work as one’s own (qualitatively). Declining levels of respect were interpreted not only as obstacles to getting work done but as loose strands in the fabric of society, early indicators of a form of equality that was considered to be both inopportune as well as immoral.

This sense of loss pervaded landlords’ accounts of the ways landlord-laborer relations had changed in recent times:

To be born in the higher caste has become a bane. Even when we do well, we are blamed and our rights are withheld. And the lower-caste people rise in their lives, even when they have no merits. The politicians are using this as a tool to remain in power. We are a minority, and they are a majority. Even when they are wrong, they have their way because they are in [the] majority. We are being ignored. It’s a tactic to turn the landlords into workers…. The workers who bowed in front of us earlier now expect the same from us. Even when they do so now, they don’t like it in their hearts.

I will give you an example. A person worked for me for forty years and he was never denied anything. He was happy with me. We had a very warm relationship. He died here [in my house]. He had no children. He was a brother to me. We loved each other’s family. He didn’t leave my place for forty years. He didn’t work anywhere but at my place.

The loss feels relational, not economic.² The sense of betrayal was palpable, as this man strained to understand and explain such disloyalty, especially as he remembered these forty years of service. The dominant metaphor of the family—he was a brother to me—produces a scenario in which violations of behavioral expectations—by forming a union, for example—are interpreted as unfaithfulness rather than as strategic alignments based on economic self-interest or self-preservation. This is echoed by another employer, who remembers:

In the olden days, they used to accept [payment] in kind, grains and all. But nowadays, they are not accepting grains; they are only demanding money!…In those days, people used to work with such commitment. They would even work beyond their time. Maybe they should work from ten until five, sometimes they would work until six or even seven. But now people aren’t like that. If five is their time to go, they start looking at their watches…. In those days, it wasn’t like that, not because they didn’t have watches, but because they had in their hearts the commitment that if they work hard, and if their master really gets a good amount of grain, and that really helps their master, then even the laborer would benefit…. In the old days bonded laborers used to work as if it was their own work. By four-thirty in the morning they would already be up, cleaning everything. But nowadays they come by six in the morning, saying to their master, no, it’s not time to start yet.³

The idea that in the past workers would perform their duties as if it were their own work came up repeatedly. Another employer complained that laborers

never feel This work is ours, and we should do it…we should work hard, this is our own work, we are not working for the landlord, it is our work, they will not think like this. They think that they need money, and that is all. In the old times they would work truly, they would think this is our work—they had that fixed in their minds…. The old mindset was one of honesty. Now it is one of laziness.⁴

For employers, then, the benchmark is not a certain amount of work but a certain relational disposition to the work. The phrases this is our work, as if it was their own work, and they had in their hearts the commitment point to the disappearance of the bonded laborer into the work of the master. It is not just a matter of a day’s work well done but of a social posture vis-à-vis the landlord—“work from the heart for your real master, for god,” as the biblical author Paul has it.⁵ It may be tempting for an outsider to read these concerns as analogous to a simple decline in work ethic, the kind perhaps perceived by employers worldwide over the past few decades. Yet, the subtext here is of an ideal social relation that is embedded in the social norm of caste-based obligation, rather than an ideal economic relationship rooted in a particular economic outcome of profitability.

This may be seen in the same farmer’s concern not for his own profitability, or for his own well-being, but in his professed concern for the laborer: “They cannot protect themselves on their own! When they are working, if someone beats [the laborer], it is as if we ourselves are being beaten. So they cannot protect themselves. We have to protect them.” The abiding sense of paternalism within the caste mentality allows a bonded laborer’s emancipation to be seen as a risk to the laborers themselves. And so we see the perceived double cost of emancipation: it threatens workers even as it erodes society.

Many landlords fondly remembered the care and support provided to bonded laborers: “they used to stay here, even their children and wives…even food, clothes, and everything.”⁶ This care and respect was part of the larger framework of social relations provided by caste. The erosion of laborers’ dedication is thus a small betrayal, a failure to reciprocate or to recognize the landlord and his many perceived sacrifices. In those days, another landlord remembers:

They were more respectful. They had some sort of respect, and fear, and they used to stay away from us as a form of respect. But now we have become equals, as if we are the same…. This is a bad thing for society, if money is with us, they respect us, but if money is not there, then they don’t respect us. In the olden days, they used to respect according to the caste, but now, they respect according to money.⁷

This statement, and the oblique reference to untouchability—they used to stay away from us—underscore the salience of caste boundaries independent of wealth. Differences between people used to be clear, and respect was given in accordance with hierarchy rather than capital. This is clearly contrasted with an undesirable present—this is bad for society—in which respect only follows money. It is important to emphasize the sort of respect that has been lost—it is not the pleasantries of day-to-day life that have been dropped; it is instead a social fear and distance that comes with untouchability (Davenport and Trivedi 2013). Dalit workers are compelled to maintain a certain social and spatial distance from upper-caste community members, whether or not they are employers or wealthy. What has been lost is not just respect between people but the bonded laborer’s respect for the system as it has stood for generations.

Caste frequently serves as a backdrop for these conversations about the ideal past and the dissolute present. The requirements of caste ensured stability and a sense of unity, at least in the mind of the upper caste. “Earlier, the limits were fixed for every caste,” another employer told me:

They had certain places they could sit, and if everyone is sitting, certain castes would sit here and others would sit there. It’s no longer practiced now that people have started having the feeling of caste differentiation…. It’s not only because of caste, but it’s because some people get more money and increase their position, then they start wondering, why can’t I do things like that big person? So it creates distances within the community, and it makes groups of some people.⁸

For this respondent at least, earlier times were preferred for their order, stability, and a lack of greed and groupism. Society had a certain solidarity that encompassed the entire community; it is only with the self-assertion of the lower castes, and especially bonded laborers, that “casteism” and caste consciousness emerges. It is only with Dalit identity, therefore, that Brahmin identity is created—or so it is in the nostalgic memories of upper-caste landlords.

The old status quo is not only challenged but is being slowly replaced by a new status arrangement in which bonded laborers are independent social actors. For many farmers, especially, the laborer’s lack of internal commitment to their duty is evidenced by the fact that they must now be monitored. Previously, this was not necessary, as a laborer’s moral compass was, presumably, properly attuned to the master’s needs. Earlier work was “done on trust, even if the contractor wasn’t there, they would work. But now if the contractor goes away, they will stop working, and just sit and talk.”⁹ Talk is not in reference to pure laziness but may be read in light of the same landlord’s concern that “every home has a leader now.” The moral order has fragmented and narrowed to the point where it is not a caste or even a household that serves as the point of authority. It is instead a leader in every home, where individuals prioritize talk over duty—earlier, the work was on trust, he told me. The enforcement of old norms through appeals to ideal social relations is no longer possible. But the impact of idle talk is not limited to worker productivity; it also contains the threat of politics. A previously powerful employer,¹⁰ bemoaning his community’s decline, expressed that

in the olden days, soon after taking part in small jobs and all that, laborers used to work in their fields, they used to think of their work. But nowadays, it is not happening. They come out, after taking a bath or freshening up, they come to a particular center, have coffee or tea, and somewhere here or there they sit and talk about unnecessary things that are not relevant to them and their field…. A kind of enmity, ego, and hatred has developed today…. Whenever a farmer doesn’t have enough work, then they are deviating their minds to sit and talk about these things. But when they possess enough work in their fields, then this isn’t a problem…. People never used to gather for unnecessary talk and all. They used to go early in the morning to their fields for their work, and stay until ten in the evening. They used to work so hard.

This statement is made about workers more generally, but the threat can presumably come from any free laborers, including former bonded laborers—the threat of a world unstructured by caste. The threat comes from conversations about unnecessary things that are not related to their work. It is unnecessary talk—democratic discourse, no doubt—that deviates the mind and creates enmity, ego, and hatred. The leisure afforded by advancement beyond sheer survival is interpreted as laziness, and past desperation is mistaken for commitment. In this light, open space for open conversations only invites trouble.

The German sociologist Jürgen Habermas (1991) famously argued that it was the open square and the public sphere that gave democracy its vitality. People gathered to meet, discuss, plan, and persuade. Critics have suggested the square was not as open as Habermas imagined, and this is exactly what the current study emphasizes: the powerful wonder how the powerless could have so much time to sit around the public square to talk about useless and potentially dangerous things. Presumably, there are many good reasons for laborers to sit around and drink chai together, passing the time. The problem is not that they are talking in public but instead that they have decided to associate in any form. The problem is that the appearance of leisure undermines the imperative of the performance of labor.

Leisure activities—talking, idling, drinking—appear as vices, tangible manifestations of social decline. Elites are not only concerned with bonded laborers leaving their financial and social obligations but are very aware of their lower-caste laborers entering into new social roles and civic spaces. Presumably there is an analogy here regarding race and space in the United States. The wealthy have significantly more private venues for pursuing leisure and consuming drugs and alcohol. There are fewer venues available for those without the money necessary to access private spaces, so leisure time and consumption are performed in public spaces. This identical behavior in the “wrong” space is then treated as a criminal activity.¹¹

Landlords holding bonded laborers, whether in the past or present, are unanimous in expressing concern that the attitudes and behavior of their laborers have declined precipitously. Workers, they agreed, demanded more money, did less work, were less respectful, cared less for maintaining their traditional role and status, and were less appreciative and solicitous to their current and former masters. This drama was often explained—sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly—in terms of caste norms. Caste provides the raw material with which notions of ideal social relations are constructed, and a caste mentality is steeped in a paternalism that sees laborer challenges against injustice as attacks on cultural and moral norms. But why exactly were these things happening?

LABORER EMPOWERMENT AS INJUSTICE

The answer lies in new interpretations of the bonded-labor relationship—what movement scholars would consider to be the social construction of an injustice frame. As indicated in the previous chapter, an injustice frame is a “mode of interpretation that defines the actions of an authority system as unjust and simultaneously legitimates noncompliance” (Snow et al. 1986, 466). What emerges is an explanation that extends a step beyond general grievances and toward a particular causal attribution, as slaveholders try to sort out what is happening and how they feel about it and also try to understand why these things are happening and what may be done about it.

Landlords explained that workers had become “aware” and had subsequently refused to repay their debts.¹² The process of challenging indebtedness in a bonded-labor situation is, unsurprisingly, seen as a rupture in the ideal social relationship. In a fairly typical account, one landlord told me that laborers had changed: “Previously the workers would do whatever we told them to do, but nowadays, even if we tell the laborers to do something, they say they will only do it if we give them more money.”¹³ He explained why this was:

The government is giving special priority to SCST people [Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, or lower-caste communities]. For small things farmers will scold SCST people, and then those workers will go directly to the police station and lodge a complaint against the farmer. There are a few farmers, and even here I keep a few people on a yearly basis. I paid them 30,000 [rupees] every year and would keep them. But after only two or three months they never repaid me, they only lodged a complaint, saying that I had scolded [verbally abused] them, and that they had refused to repay me. This happened several times around here where the laborers are drunkards. That’s why farmers take loans! Farmers lose their money because of the laborers and then go to the government to take a loan.

For this respondent, insubordination is rooted in a combination of laborer weakness and government policies. Laborers are greedy for both money (only if we give them more money) and alcohol (this happens where the laborers are drunkards). The first problem is the laborer’s weakness, and the second issue is the government’s prioritization of the needs of lower-caste people. These two themes—labor decline and the preferentialism of government policies—surfaced repeatedly. Seventy-seven percent of respondents attributed their labor problems to the laborers themselves, such as demands for wages and/or increased wages, increased awareness and education, and a decreased work ethic. Nearly as many—72 percent—said their problems were related to government policies and practices, including job programs, food-aid programs, police corruption, and favoritism toward the lower castes.

These two sets of challenges—from laborers and the government—are causally related in the minds of the study’s respondents. In instance after instance, landlords, especially in the agricultural sector, made clear that at some level the government and its policies were responsible for the problems they experienced with laborers. These grievances are composed of three interconnected issues: (1) the passage or enforcement of pro-poor policies, (2) a decline in responsiveness from political parties and the police, and (3) broader issues related to education and migration. Taken together, these are interpreted as a threat to landlords, particularly those in the agricultural sector (Harriss, Jeyaranjan, and Nagaraj 2010).

DECLINING OPPORTUNITIES, INCREASING THREATS

The passage of new and enforcement of old pro-poor policies concerned landlords more than almost anything. These policies represent the most visible manifestation of their diminished status. Broad changes in public policies are interlaced with the perception that economic and cultural opportunities are disappearing as well. These programs work together in such a way that undermined farmers in particular. The first of these programs involves the sale of subsidized food in local shops through what is known as the Below Poverty Line Program (BPL). A central component of India’s food policy involves providing low-cost staples to the country’s poor, and these shops are a critical component of that policy. The program, which is more than half a century old, is plagued by corruption, which blocks funds from flowing to the laborers it is intended to benefit. Upper-caste community members are likely to control the establishments that sell subsidized food and are also likely to be related to those employing bonded laborers. Localized pressure from social movement groups has challenged these corrupt practices. In some cases, this pressure results in the transfer of the business to more ethical owners who are willing to provide food to laborers.

Social movement efforts to secure the actual implementation of the policy’s benefits have the practical effect of freeing workers from having to do anything for food. Bonded laborers, employers, and scholars agree on the factors that push the poor into debt bondage, and this list almost always includes an inability to feed one’s family. In-kind compensation in the form of grains is also critical in cases where an advance is needed subsidize a marriage or a sickness. A lump sum will be provided, but no subsequent money will be paid, only an allotment of grain as compensation for the laborer’s total productive capacity. This has the effect of sustaining the laborer’s family and increasing a sense of duty, obligation, and appreciation for the landlord. Therefore, the flow of subsidized grain from properly functioning BPL shops into a community undermines the landlord’s role as the sole provider of the sustenance necessary for survival and reduces the laborer’s dependency on the money-lending and labor-extracting landowner.

The second policy, and arguably the most critical, is MNREGA (the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act), passed in 2005. This nationwide program is designed to guarantee a minimum number of workdays and a guaranteed wage to those willing to do manual labor. The benefits are not insignificant. MNREGA should provide one hundred days of work per year for any individual who requests it. Compensation rates vary by state but tend to hover at between 120 to 140 rupees (two to three U.S. dollars) per day. The effects of this program are threefold. First, it creates employment competition with slaveholders. Second, it creates a nationwide expectation that a certain amount of money represents fair compensation for a day’s work. India has a minimum-wage law on the books, but it is rarely requested, paid, or enforced. Third, the program’s high profile ensures that it is relatively well known to laborers and employers alike. The program works alongside the provision of staple foods, so desperate laborers are no longer forced to turn to local elites for survival when an alternative employer has emerged to provide a fixed and public wage. Though the employment program is plagued with corruption, the mere possibility of a fixed daily wage has served as an important fulcrum for laborers as they challenge debt bondage. Historically, employers relied on laborers’ need for grain and a lack of reasonable alternatives in order to secure unpaid labor. These policies have the combined effect of raising costs and effectively constricting employers’ range of motion. In prior times, abusive landlords controlled both the rock and the hard place. Successful implementation of these programs erodes such mechanisms of social dominance.¹⁴

The third policy—the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe [Prevention of Atrocities] Act (SCST Act)—was passed in 1989 in order to abolish untouchability in all its forms, thereby facilitating the social inclusion of Dalits who have historically worked as manual scavengers, waste collectors, and bonded laborers. Corruption, a lack of political will, widespread denial about the nature and scope of the problem, and the centrality of caste to individual and group identity are all central to the SCST Act’s ineffectiveness. These obstacles to implementation, however, may be overridden by motivated advocates or empowered laborers. Employers are understandably concerned by any effort to use the SCST Act to draw attention to the caste dynamics at play in bonded labor. As one group of farmers complained to me,¹⁵ as if passage of MNREGA wasn’t enough:

Another law has been enacted. You can’t coerce them! You can’t say too much to them. If you do, the SCST Act will be charged against you. They are taking advantage of us. This is a political issue. [As for the police,] they understand, but they don’t do anything; they have restrictions…. This is all about casteism. Laborers will never be found guilty, the fault will always be held against you. They are stealing, but they won’t be accused of stealing; they will accuse you…. And there is one thing more: They receive compensation in the name of oppression…. They are paid in this way…. You are wealthy, you are eating and drinking. So when they trap you in the SCST Act you will also have to give them something.

As a result:

If there is a need, sometimes they take a loan. But we don’t get it back. Don’t expect it. If you expect it and ask for it back, then you will be charged with the SCST Act…. If you go to the police, the police will say to us, “Did you ask me before giving the money to him?” That’s the first question! Or, “Are you a moneylender? Do you have a license?” They will turn it back on you! That’s why if the laborers refuse to repay, we don’t go to them. If it’s gone, it’s gone. There is no hope.

The SCST Act, like the BPL program and MNREGA, is riddled with corruption and undermined by a lack of both political will and public support. If anything, caste-based discrimination and violence has increased, with little hope for large-scale transformations in public opinion nationally (Chidambaram 2010, Rai 2012). Yet the most significant issue is not whether these programs are properly implemented but instead whether they have created an opening, or latent opportunity, for laborers—indeed, the development scholars Anuradha Joshi and Mick Moore (2000) have similarly focused on the way that antipoverty programs may have an indirect effect through the creation of an enabling institutional environment for collective action.

The idea of, and access to, alternatives has created problems for employers who had relied on the fact that laborers lacked options or even the idea that other options existed. Now, one landlord in a focus group explained to me, “they are very lazy. Before, there weren’t all of these government schemes. So, they worked harder to feed their families.” Another landlord explained that MNREGA has affected workers such that “we are willing to pay the laborers whatever they want, but they don’t work the way they used to. They have become lazy, and the quality of their work has gone down.”¹⁶ He recalled when “around four or six years ago some of my employees asked for money instead of rice.” He explained that a government shop in the area had started providing staple BPL foodstuffs to his workers. No longer obligated to work for him for sustenance, they now demanded money.

And workers didn’t place individual demands; they instead “used to have their meetings, and they demanded an increase in the wages. They threatened to stall the work for the whole area unless their demands were met…. They are getting educated. There is a growing awareness among them. They are becoming smart; they are not foolish anymore.” The root of the problem is a combination of grassroots mobilization (movement-organized laborer’s meetings and threats to strike) and public policy (MNREGA wages and grain disbursement in BPL shops). These two factors are self-reinforcing, as mobilization leads to greater awareness of existing benefits and attempts to gain these benefits leads to greater awareness of corruption, which itself encourages additional collective action.¹⁷

The importance of something as simple as grain is underscored by another interviewee, who emphasized that, in the olden days, people had to work to survive.¹⁸ He clarified:

Now they don’t need to work to live, because the government is extending help in terms of providing rice, through fair-priced shops…. If the government hadn’t done all of these things, the people would still be listening to us today…. When people used to listen to us, life was good. We were running our lives very well. But now, since they’re not listening to us, even we hesitate to call them for work, and they hesitate to come to us for work. That’s why things are going this way.

Fair-priced shops may be contrasted with the company-store model, designed both to make a profit and undermine laborers’ financial independence.

The role of food in moderating desperation and reducing respect is detailed by another employer: “Earlier, they were paid with five kilos of grain, which is not much for the whole family to feed on. They thought it was too little, that it was insufficient, so they thought if they respect their masters they would get more grain. But now that the wages are fixed…they are automatically getting more, so it doesn’t matter if they treat the masters with respect.”¹⁹ Another explained, “some workers get their food from the government shops. In the government shops, they get the food at a lower price. So that’s why they say I don’t want to take your rice [as payment], I would like to take the money.”²⁰ For these employers, access to government programs makes laborers more demanding and in the process spoils rather than frees. Many insisted that newfound wages are spent on drugs, alcohol, and beedis—local smokes—rather than on food. Past payments in rice guaranteed that employers knew what laborers procured and what they would do with it—and they could control its flow when necessary. These programs are not specifically intended for bonded laborers, but for social movement organizations policies such as MNREGA, the SCST Act, and the BPL program are the fulcra they use to pry power away from exploitative local employers (Gupta 2010). Laborers are now accessing these things on their own, without asking or begging, without genuflection or shame. They no longer need to accept the landlord’s underwriting of weddings. This is seen as an affront, not an advancement.

INCREASING THREATS: POLITICS AND POLICE

Public policies are not the only problem employers face. In earlier times, they had, by their own accounts, relied on two relatively stable sources of support: political parties and local police. Yet, in conversation after conversation, interviewees expressed deep frustration and a sense of betrayal at the decline in responsiveness from these erstwhile allies.

Farmers had previously enjoyed considerable support from the party system, though a turn to identity-based party mobilization over the past two decades has undermined this arrangement. The rise of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva, championed by the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]) and the politicization of lower- and middle-caste identities²¹ were central to this process. These organic-seeming sets of affiliations proved to be more powerful and compelling than were identities based on geography (the rural village) or occupation (farming and agriculture). Previously salient rural identities were undermined by these new configurations. Balamuralidhar Posani (2009) argues:

The shared occupational identity as farmers might have brought rural India together in collective action for economic demands, but given India’s heterogeneity, farmers have multiple social identities involving caste, religion, and region…. Occupational interests may well be overshadowed by considerations like caste, region or religion.

Over the course of a series of elections in the mid- and late 1990s, political entrepreneurs and identity-based parties splintered the Indian party system. Congress’ share of seats in the lower house, the Lok Sabha, decreased precipitously, and the sheer number of parties increased dramatically (Chhibber 2001). It is here that we begin to see the BJP’s rise as a national force in favor of Hindutva—Hindu fundamentalism and cultural nationalism—and later, with the rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), the election of Mayawati as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populated state. Mayawati was the first member of the “untouchable” Dalit community to rise to chief minister, and the fact that she reached this post before she was forty, and did so representing a party that was only formed in the 1980s, is testimony to the rapid transformation of a previously stable political landscape.

Farmers and pro-farmer advocates were unable to mount a sufficient push for agriculturally supported parties, as more cultural and less occupational identities simply had more traction. Farmer’s movements were weak because they tend to not represent the full range of concerns from members across the caste spectrum. For example, they promoted issues such as lower input costs and higher sales prices for their goods while overlooking others, including the enforcement of minimum-wage laws (Posani 2009, Varshney 1995). The removal of the left-leaning BSP from power in Uttar Pradesh, over the course of my fieldwork, was met with reserved optimism by the farmers I spoke with. They often did not seem so sure they trusted the newly installed Samajwadi Party (SP), which had held power prior to the BSP and had a reputation for more Machiavellian political techniques. Better the devil they know, it seems.

Motivation and enthusiasm for all political parties—whether Congress, BJP, BSP, or SP—have faded, as promises to represent voters like these farmers have been replaced by the reality of pro-poor policies at a national level by the Congress Party or backpedaling by the SP. Under Mayawati’s thirteen-year tenure as chief minister, local and regional police faced increased pressure to follow through on caste-based rights violations, and local governing officials faced greater pressure to implement programs like MNREGA.

When respondents spoke of their community’s Dalit population, their near-universal concern was that “the government is granting them a lot of favors. They are getting the good roads now. We are paying tax for the land. We pay for filling the land. We have to pay to plow the field. What can we save after paying all this? The [government’s] attitude is partial toward them. There is partiality from the administration of the [Dalit] chief minister.”²² Government plans to reduce inequality were considered to be doing the opposite. Rather than empowering marginalized and untouchable laborers, government aid is considered by farmers to be a fundamentally unfair redistribution of wealth and resources from landholders to the landless.

This redistribution appeared to employers to be taking place at the same time as laborers had learned to take advantage of the system for their own gain: “The government gives grain to workers for nearly free. Just sitting around working in MNREGA for a day is 120 rupees. So they can get thirty-five kilos of grain for just sitting around.” Furthermore, “their children study in government school. They get scholarships, studying for free…. They themselves are not handicapped at all, but they are getting a handicap pension. They are not elderly, but they are getting an old-age pension.”²³ A farmer who had lost his laborers in the Sonbarsa insurrection was clear about this link when he described how MNREGA led to demands for more compensation and put workers in a “position to negotiate, otherwise they say We won’t come, go and do the work yourself!”²⁴

Employers are frustrated by national politics but also find challenges closer to home, as police, once a stable ally of upper-caste landholders, come under increased scrutiny. From the employers’ perspective, political transitions, especially the election of the BSP in Uttar Pradesh, undermined the police’s willingness to pursue justice in an unbiased manner. Police, in this account, had dealt honestly with conflicts between laborers and employers: “Earlier, there was no pressure from the administration on the police department, so they would honestly go around and ask everyone, and then find a fair compromise. But now they say they are forced to work like this, or else they will lose their jobs.”²⁵

Another employer describes how this connects to bonded labor: “Even if we give an advance, even a small one, like 500 [rupees], and we ask for help for two or three days, after a few days they get angry. If we scold them harshly, they will take us to the police station, saying, he’s scolded me in the name of caste, with bad words and so forth. So, what we’re doing is not giving large amounts, we only give small amounts.” The backdrop for all of this, the same respondent explained, is the fact that government, “any government, whether it’s Congress or another, provides the most benefits to the SCST community—houses, latrines, rooms, everything—and provides to them alone, and nothing to us.”²⁶

This combination of forces has the effect of increasing bonded laborers’ avenues of recourse should something go wrong while also undermining laborers’ vulnerability to indebtedness in the first place. As a result, they are far less likely to become indebted to local landlords and are perceived to have more ready access to legal solutions. Employers and landlords feel that laborer wage expectations are up, employer competition is up, and thus the price of labor is up, from nothing to something. For agricultural slaveholders, all of this is happening when the party system has stopped listening to them. No wonder they feel frustrated and threatened.

INCREASING THREATS: CITIES AND SCHOOLS

Name-brand government policies were not the only cause of labor problems. Economic development and urbanization were also blamed for the decline in laborers’ attitudes and behaviors. To many landlords, education and awareness go hand in hand:

The education is fast and the mode of information is fast; everything is fast. There’s a reason why the generation has come ahead, and even the laborers: if I go to the laborers, laborers have a cell phone! And if I scold the laborer, he will make a call! So, he’s that intelligent. He knows from television and other things what he has to do if something goes wrong.²⁷

This is in stark contrast to the past: “In those days, there was no education, and now people are getting educated, and going to nearby cities. There are also government schemes. People are not respecting their elders because of these things.”²⁸

The effect of education is pronounced, though most farmers readily admit that education for laborers is a mixed bag. There is a general sense that, as one farmer told me, “education is a good thing, but those who become educated don’t want to do agricultural work.”²⁹ Farmers are not only losing agricultural workers to education; they are also losing bonded laborers to growing political awareness. Across these responses, it is clear that education is not thought of as formal schooling alone but is also related to political awareness and conscientization: “Pressuring them to complete their tasks won’t work. They are aware.”³⁰

If education is awareness and not just schooling, then awareness comes not only from formal education but also from exposure to cities and new technologies. Cities change laborers’ expectations—“people are going to the city. Now people don’t want to work in agricultural land. They want to go sit in buildings and are getting more money there.”³¹ Perhaps rural employers would overlook this fact so long as laborers migrated to cities permanently.³²

But those who move freely between India’s rapidly expanding urban frontier and the country’s withering countryside bring with them new technologies, new ideas, and new demands. Exposure to cities creates “bad attitudes and jealousy” because “when they come back, their attitudes change. It’s normally seen to be this way. People always change. They go to the city, and come back changed…. Ninety percent of the people who go to the city come back with an attitude like I’m from the city.”³³ Education and cities have also combined with new forms of communication technology in ways favorable to laborers and unfavorable to employers. From the fear that “scolded laborers” will “make a call on cell phones,” it is reasonable to assume this same concern is braided in with awareness and cities.³⁴ In a focus-group discussion with a group of thirty workers who had recently escaped from a brick kiln, workers described their mounting concern when they discovered the body of a murdered worker in the ash of the previous season’s kiln works. When I asked how they contacted the social movement group to initiate an intervention, the group’s ad hoc leader pulled a battered Nokia from the folds of his traditional dhoti wrap. “I’d hidden this on the kiln site as soon as I realized something was wrong,” he explained. Mobile phones and education, new and old policies, and indifferent politicians represent the most salient issues landlords perceive. In the words of one frank farmer: “If the government hadn’t done all of this, the people would still be listening to us today.”³⁵

DIMINISHED RESOURCES

The removal of political and policy support and the increase in laborer demands come at the same time as interviewees at work in the agricultural sector face a number of broader economic threats. Socialist economic policies prevailed in India until 1991, when heavy borrowing and market fluctuations led to a balance-of-payments crisis. In that year, the fiscal deficit reached 9 percent, with farm subsidies contributing significantly to the crisis (Bhalla 2005, cited in Posani 2009, 35). The crisis was resolved through an International Monetary Fund and World Bank–brokered bailout, the World Bank’s biggest at the time (World Bank 1991, 1). The required structural-adjustment program devalued the rupee, raised interest rates, cut subsidies and support to publicly held businesses, and liberalized India’s trade policy (World Bank n.d.). The larger effect was India’s transition from import substitution, in which the state supported local production of industrial goods and subsidized agriculture, to an export-oriented approach in which the state leverages its comparative advantage on the global market.

Farmers were especially affected, as the adjustment program cut subsidies they had relied on. Seventy percent of Indians live in rural areas, with the majority of India’s labor force working in agriculture. With urbanization projected to grow at 3 percent annually, rural agriculture is likely to remain a critical social and economic sphere for the foreseeable future (Central Intelligence Agency 2013). Subsidy cuts, the rising price of raw materials—especially seeds, pesticides, and fertilizer—and the cost of fuel were all concerns expressed with consistency by employers involved in agriculture. While interviewees working in extractive industries were concerned about government programs and labor relations, they had benefited from strong and consistent growth in India’s commercial sectors, as market liberalization spurred rapid growth in the service and industrial sectors—both of which increased demand for raw materials of the sort produced in kilns and quarries.

Farmers, however, faced increased input costs at the same time as they experienced a major slowdown in economic growth. The World Bank reports that crop yields in India lag significantly behind countries like China, Vietnam, and Indonesia, and the current slowdown in agricultural growth is linked to a lack of research and development, stagnant technology, overregulation, a lack of credit for the rural poor, poor infrastructure, and corruption (Posani 2009, Radhakrishna 2008, Subramaniam and Subramaniam 2009). The slowdown had the effect of reducing real incomes, as the cost of consumer goods outstrips the market price for agricultural products (Mishra 2007).

This situation represents a significant reversal of fortunes for the agricultural sector, which had enjoyed significant subsidies and institutional support from the state during the Green Revolution. The removal of subsidies and support after liberalization exposed previously lucrative cash-crop production to the vagaries of the market and increased “intellectual rents” for genetically modified high-yield seeds (Venu Menon 2006, Government of India 2006). The central government’s support for farmers also declined after liberalization, and usurious middlemen willing to provide seeds at exorbitant rates of interest, with production put up as collateral and payment, filled this vacuum (Christian Aid 2005, Government of India 2007). In sum, the Green Revolution supported subsidies and closed markets that had the effect of encouraging cash-crop production. Market liberalization led to a reduction of subsidies and market restrictions, increasing price volatility and decreasing institutional and financial support. The loans required to smooth bumps in the market came at a significant cost, as the state ceded the lending environment to private, and often duplicitous, actors.

These trends are reflected in conversations with both advocacy groups and farmers alike. The founder of one organization explained to me that while their focus is on bonded laborers working in agriculture, the reality is that

the landlords, the farmers, have also been exploited! They are also an exploited group. Even before globalization, even after independence, in the modern economy, which is factory and industry centered…. The government invested heavily in the public sector: basic iron production, then big dams. And who benefitted? The industrialists!…Therefore, right from our Independence our economic policies have been favoring the industrialists, and the banking service sector. Not agriculture. The only exception was the Green Revolution, [which prioritized] production, fertilizer, and hybrids. That was promoting the capitalist farmer and not, by and large, the marginal and small farmers who should have been promoted.³⁶

Radhesh, who lost a family member in the Sonbarsa uprising, suggests, “farmers are having more problems because not every farmer is so well off that he can afford mechanized equipment. Smaller farmers are suffering, and getting by as best they can. Big farmers have harvests from harrows and other equipment, but the smaller farmers are losing out,” presumably because of their total reliance on manual labor. Other interviewees echo this sober assessment of the reality faced by small and medium-sized farmers. Questions about the future were often met with shrugs or silence. Many expressed a frustration similar to that of one farmer, who answered with a simple rhetorical question: “How can we dream?”³⁷ Another suggested he had a hard time conceptualizing reincarnation: “I don’t know what’s going on in this life—how can I say what will go on in the next?”³⁸ One landlord in the midst of a challenge from a movement group described:

There are no facilities; we have to pay double price for [fertilizer]. Even people who come for daily wages, we have to pay double for those people as well. And after the harvest, when we sell our produce, we don’t get the proper value from the government either. We are in a very bad situation, where we are having to take loans, and are not even able to pay them off. There are lots of people around here in the same situation who could not cope with it, and committed suicide by eating poison…. Not only here, all the farmers are suffering. And on top of that, the rain is not coming, and we have to go get the seeds in order to grow cotton. And for this we again have to pay double! So this is the farmer’s condition.³⁹

Farmers perceive their current circumstances and future options in stark terms, with a growing body of literature focused on the solid and sustained uptick in farmer suicides in the past two decades. K. Nagaraj estimated that there were 166,304 suicides between 1997 and 2006, and subsequent analysis suggests this trend continued in an upward fashion thereafter (Nagaraj 2008, Sainath 2010). There is little doubt that these conditions threaten all but the largest agricultural operations, those who increasingly rely on machines rather than manual labor. While the service and industrial sectors experience explosive growth in India’s new urban economies, conditions in villages and other rural environs have stagnated or declined, leading some to declare that the Indian village “is no longer a site where futures can be planned” (Gupta 2005, 752). New urban opportunities represent a draw to landless rural laborers who leave, thereby further restricting the labor market and placing an additional set of economic burdens on the farmer. Economic hardship is compounded as policies like MNREGA drive wages up. Changes in the broader cultural context, both as a result of direct movement activity as well as movements’ indirect effects, have the effect of decreasing laborers’ levels of commitment to caste-based deference.

In this way, exploitative employers in the agricultural and farming class are finding that the predominantly cultural form of power they had previously enjoyed now lacks political efficacy and currency, in that it is no longer useful outside of its intended context (Jodhka 2012). Caste’s value in the village has also gone down, so to speak, as it is forced to compete with outside factors: a tighter labor market, more educational opportunities, increased physical mobility, pervasive technology and better information, and new employment opportunities in local programs and in distant cities (Harriss, Jeyaranjan, and Nagaraj 2010, 59). Thus, while the “catalytic significance of land” might have been visible in the India of 1969, it is no longer as evident, particularly because it is a type of power that cannot be easily transferred into another form—one cannot translate caste status alone into economic opportunities in the credit- and cash-based market economy (Aggarwal 2012, 126).

At least one farmer—Kshantu, whom we met in the preceding chapter and will meet again—recognizes this, as he explained that while his farm is not making money, he is holding out to sell his land to a developer. Money from Bangalore has extended further and further into Karnataka’s interior, as the IT nouveau riche seek out the nostalgic village of yore. Once again, we find a nostalgia for another world, but, this time, held by globally connected urbanites working in India’s Silicon Valley and desperate for a piece of “the real India.” Yet it is very few who may launder power or trade in their old form of power for a new form. Most current and former slaveholders engaged in agriculture find themselves with diminished resources, no allies, and a set of difficult decisions.

ATTRIBUTIONS OF THREATS AND OPPORTUNITIES

Here again we can turn to social movement theory to help us make sense of the declining opportunities and increasing threats faced by most interviewees. A general sensitivity to the broader cultural, economic, and political context, especially during times of change, suggests that threats and opportunities play a significant role in shaping the way targets experience mobilization. Political-process theorists argued that movements take place in a larger firmament and thus directed scholarly attention to the importance of broader contexts as facilitating or inhibiting mobilization (Tilly 1978). While I emphasize threat here, the following chapter highlights the importance of opportunities in shaping target responses. What’s more, the majority of the threats that incumbents reported did not come from the movement but were instead independent aspects of broad change processes. Movements are important, but they do not act alone.

This intellectual arc has been traced in past explanations of movement actions and outcomes. Targets appear as static fixtures in the structural firmament. This need not be the case. From this data, we may begin to sketch some early and reasonable assumptions about how these same factors affect targets. Targets usually have more opportunities and fewer threats. They are incumbents, after all. Whether a movement wants to strike a strong actor (producing a deterrence effect) or a weak one (producing an early victory) is a matter of tactical concern and considerable variation. Furthermore, ally splits and elite challenges create opportunities and crises for movements while likely generating threats for targets. Seasons of instability and crisis provide the chance to form new alliances, as the literatures on democratic transitions and social movements make abundantly clear (Linz and Stepan 1996, 165). In changing conditions, Fligstein and McAdam (2012, 105) argue that incumbents are inclined to “respond to any perceived threat conservatively, fighting tenaciously to preserve the settlement that is the political and cultural source of their advantage.” They are likely to do so “even when it is apparent to most observers that the system is doomed.” Such is the power of perception, whose fruits we will explore in the next chapter.

SUMMARY

For the social movement groups in this study, local emancipation processes are tied to perceptions of broader processes. For this reason movements choose tactics that create new institutions, like MNREGA, and then create struggles for access to those same institutions. This is no accident but is instead linked to a broader concern with the quality of democracy in India. As the founder of a partner organization explained:

If our local governance units are not truly representative, if our democratic organizations are not functioning in a democratic manner, if marginalized communities continue to be excluded, it harms the growth of our democracy. And so that’s why [we are] interested to bring all the marginalized communities into the mainstream development process. That’s why [we are] interested to raise voice against the malfunctioning of the democratic institutions.

Of course, there is often a significant gap between this movement strategy and the adversary’s experience. Movement efforts are seen as one of many threats, and their effects are often conflated with other phenomena. All of this turmoil and transformation requires some action—farmers especially have to do something, as the status quo is untenable. In this chapter, I have argued that slaveholders are experiencing the direct and indirect effects of movement efforts, but they are also experiencing a larger set of economic, political, and cultural processes that shape their assessments of their problems as well as their range of motion in response.

It is important to emphasize that this situation is not static. Mayawati, the Dalit chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, lost an election in the course of this fieldwork. The SP, which replaced her, is known to support the violent repression of Dalit claims. Some time later, the right-wing BJP decimated Congress in national elections. This same party then went on to rout all other parties to secure the prime ministership. The potential effects of these transitions was not lost on landlords. Before the election, they asked laborers How much longer do you think Mayawati will rule? Once the SP won the election, they taunted, Who will protect you now? These early and anecdotal observations serve as a reminder that movement gains having nothing to do with broader changes in social norms and public opinion may be reversed quite rapidly, and with little warning, so long as incumbents have sufficient resources.

Current and former oppressors find themselves in the midst of radically new circumstances. An earlier consensus had formed around the notion that bonded labor was in the best interest of the laborer. This arrangement is called into question when social-movement activity—new opportunities to take advantage of new resources that help frame certain activities as unjust—concatenates with broader political and economic shifts. Where elites had sourced their legitimacy in age-old notions of caste hierarchy, and this understanding had apparently received broad support, they must now contend with new interpretations of this relationship and with diminished resources to enforce this interpretation. Thus equipped, they must find some way to respond, as seen in the next chapter.