Constitution’s dead army

Thirty years ago, a retired army man’s body was being dragged by a police jeep as his adivasi brethren, armed with bows and arrows, helplessly tried to stop the convoy but were fired upon and chased away.

He was bayonneted in the police van, and then dragged across the village, for speaking up for his people’s rights, and there was never any inquiry, nor any prosecutions against the police for his murder.

Gangaram Kalundia was an adivasi of the Ho tribe, who joined the army when he was 19, fought in the 1965 and 1971 wars as part of the Bihar Regiment, and had risen to the rank of junior officer.

He voluntarily retired and returned home to find that his village Illigara in Chaibasa of West Singhbhum of Jharkhand (then Bihar), along with some 110 other villages, would be submerged due to the Kuju dam project, funded by the World Bank.

He would organise his people to fight for their fundamental rights against displacement and the project, only to be brutally murdered by the police early in the morning on April 4, 1982.

‘This is where we placed stones to stop the convoy that had Gangaram,’ said Tobro, then 14, pointing to a small woodland by the roadside, ‘and this is where we were, with bows and arrows, but the police fired upon us and chased us away.’

While Kalundia was killed in 1982, a long agitation had still sustained itself, which had often driven people like Tobro underground, aware that the police were rounding people up.

Surendra Biduili, 52, was part of the agitation against the dam, and the eventual victory in 1991 when, ‘the World Bank withdrew the money.’ ‘Their reports said that the dam would only submerge lands that had paddy,’ he continued, ‘but it was a lie, we were cultivating vegetables as well.’

It was much later when Gangaram had become a symbol for opportunistic politics, and his shaheed divas would be attended by every other political party, or as Surendra would say, ‘First everyone used to be afraid to mention Gangaram’s name, now all the parties of contractors and dalals come for his shaheed divas.’

In the thousands
Gangaram Kalundia was not the only adivasi leader killed for representing the rights of people. Just a few kilometres away from Chaibasa, across the Sal tree forest, is the village of Bandgaon, where Lalsingh Munda was killed in daylight in the market on the November 1, 1983. His concerns were that sacred grounds were being used by non-tribals and contractors as a waste dump.

‘You travel by bus to Chaibasa, well, back then, people used to get off the bus to piss into the sacred grounds.’ said Phillip Kujur, a member of the Jharkhand Mines Area Coordination Committee.
Kujur was also associated with Lalit Mehta, who was brutally murdered in Palamau in May 2008, Niyamat Ansari who was killed by the Maoists in Latehar district on March 2, 2011, and Pradip Prasad, who was killed by PLFI extremists in the village of Mukka, Latehar, on December 29, 2011. Sister Valsa who fought for the adivasis in Pachuwara in Jharkhand’s Pakur district, was murdered on November 15, 2011.

The roads in adivasi villages are punctuated with memorials for fallen leaders and activists. The office for NGO Birsa in Chaibasa has a memorial stone with other names: Vahaspati Mahto killed in 1977 in Purulia, Shaktinath Mahto killed in 1977 at Dhanbad, Ajit Mahto killed in 1982 at Tiraldih, Beedar Nag killed in 1983 at Gua, Ashwini Kumar Savaya killed in 1984 in Chaibasa, Anthony Murmu killed in 1985 at Banjhi, Nirmal Mahto killed in 1986 at Jamshedpur, Devendra Mahji killed in 1994 in Goilkera. The memorial ends with the sentence, ‘Anaam shaheed… hazaaron mein.’ (Unknown martyrs, in the thousands)

‘When I was young,’ said Phillip, ‘I was travelling with two veteran activists, who kept pointing to village after village saying, ‘here’s where another cadre of ours was killed’, and there I was, another man they trained to fight for people’s rights. Finally, I turned to them and asked, ‘you taught all these people how to fight, but did you teach them how to stay alive?’

In Memory of Gangaram
‘They all talk about Gangaram, but they don’t care about his wife.’
Birangkui Kalundia, Gangaram’s widow, lost her only daughter when she was giving birth to her grandchild. She was widowed by the state, and her daughter would be another statistic to those 80,000 women who die every year due to childbirth.

Her brother-in-law would also cut ties with her, often keeping the produce of Gangaram’s 15 acres for himself, leaving her out with nothing, and after his death, she moved out of the village his husband fought for, to move in with her new caretakers, her nephew and his wife, where she lives with a quiet pride till this day.

She still holds onto the medals won by her husband, the citation for his President’s Medal, speaking in soft tones unforgivingly about the men who killed her husband, coming to terms with injustice in this life, to a hope for justice in the next.

The writer is a journalist