Why can’t society fight to end manual scavenging?

It is strange to write a person into a character, direct that character on stage, live with him in your thoughts for months on, and then finally meet him for real. And this is exactly how it happened with me and Bezwada Wilson.

I was working with my friend Harsh Mandar's book Unheard Voices. The minute I started it, I knew I had to create a performance around it.

For many months, I had felt that I needed to create a piece that I could take to relatively well off schools and colleges, where the so-called leaders of tomorrow were being reared, to introduce to them the real plight of India and Indians, to help them break through the false comforts of middle and upper class cocoons of plenty that their parents and teachers had placed them in. I felt a performance, based on the stories of the book would be ideal.

There were many stories to inspire and I spent months internalising the material. But the story of Narayani Amma, the manual scavenger, and her empowerment through a series of meetings with Wilson, chose me the first time I read it.

Wilson's father was a manual scavenger in the Kolar gold mines, but managed to become a gardener. By the time, Wilson was born, he belonged to a church. Wilson started attending the seminary, and was confronted by dry latrines and manual scavengers. He fought with the priests to banish it, but they wouldn't listen. He tried to join the brotherhood to abolish this disgrace, but the Fathers threw him out because they thought he was bringing shame to them by talking of such things. He started working in a factory.

In 1988, Wilson filed a PIL and won the right for the community to be employed in other work on the shop floor. The young stopped working in the latrines. Things began to look up till there was a sanitary worker's strike in 1998. The management immediately called for the young of the community to clean the shit. Imagine their plight, to be cleaning the shit of colleagues with whom they had shared the shop floor for ten years.

For 15 years he fought before setting up the Dalit Human Rights Group to jointly fight these indignities.

The greatest difficulty, says Wilson, was to convince his own community that carrying other people's excreta, manually picked up and carried on the head in baskets, was not their destiny - that it was not their past sins that had condemned them to a life of such humiliation and despicability. At last, after ten years, his community started gathering together to fight for their rights as Indians. The Safai Karmachari Andolan (SKA) was born with Dr Wilson as its powerhouse.

SKA is on an urgent mission and they have launched a nationwide yatra currently making its way across India, to end manual scavenging, still prevalent in most of our states. Their aim is to end it by the end of this year. Will they be able to?

The question that arises in my mind is the following. Is this an issue only of the Dalit community or of all Indians? Most of us will try and stop a wrong being committed in front of our eyes - a child being beaten, a woman being molested, an old person being heckled. Why then do we remain so immune to this inhumanity that goes on all around us? In spite of an official ban on manual scavenging since 1994, nagarpalikas and panchayats, even city municipalities heap this indignity on our brothers and sisters.

Do we still want to remain silent? Does that sit with our sense of ourselves as human
humane beings?