Between wars

Landless Scheduled Caste farmers of Punjab vow to intensify their movement as the state prepares to acquire village common land for industrial development

- JITENDRA CHANDIGARH

THE ATMOSPHERE suddenly becomes sombre and resembles that of a war room as a few middle-aged farmers enter the living room of Ranteesh Singh. “They are here to chalk out the strategy for our next battle,” says the 60-year-old resident of Punjab’s Model Town Raipura village, located some 50 km from Chandigarh.

The visitors are from Sangrur district that has been at the epicenter of a land rights movement sweeping across the state over the past decade, upsetting the deeply entrenched power equations between upper-caste land-owners and Scheduled Caste farm workers. In Model Town Raipura, for instance, the entire cultivable land is owned by just 10 upper caste families. The remaining 43 households belong to Scheduled Caste communities, often referred to as Dalits, and are landless. The disparity in land ownership is palpable across the state, which has the highest proportion—32 per cent—of Scheduled Caste people in the country. In rural parts of Punjab, Scheduled Caste communities constitute more than 37 per cent of the population. Yet, only about 3 per cent of them have land to till, says a study by the Dr B R Ambedkar Centre of the Panjab University in Chandigarh.