Mahendra Singh Tikait withdraws Meerut dharna but his popularity remains intact

The dust around the Meerut commissioner's office has settled. The besieging cohorts of Mahendra Singh Tikait's Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) have folded up their tents and gone home. Though the state Government rejoiced, saying Tikait had backed down, the 25-day dharna raised a potent new force that will continue to haunt Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Bir Bahadur Singh and influence political developments in the state. Special Correspondent Ramindar Singh spent three days in western Uttar Pradesh to unravel the Tikait mystique. His report:

The siege has been lifted but Tikait, the man who made it all happen, will remain a figure to reckon with. The rough-hewn, barely literate Jat farmer has wrested the mantle of Charan Singh and entered the pantheon of the nation's peasant leaders. The kind of popular wave created by Devi Lal in the neighbouring state of Haryana is in evidence in western Uttar Pradesh too. And Tikait is riding the crest. The only major difference is that Tikait is not a party politician. Not yet.

What made the BKU chief call off the dharna? If Tikait were a politician, ego and considerations of loss of face would have forced him to persist with it. After the outright rejection of his demands, the logical next step would have been to up the ante, to escalate the confrontation. Tikait could have been in no doubt that the huge crowd camping at Meerut would do his bidding even to the extent of resorting to violence. Hyped into a state of anger and expectancy, agitating farmers like old Ram Sarup of Daha village in Meerut district, made it quite clear that Chaudhary Tikait had only to give the word and they would march out to face police bullets.

"Yeh sarkar hamari boat nahin maanti. Hamay toh vaisey bhi mama hai (We are fated to die anyway as the Government does not hear our pleas)," he said, his eyes brimming with tears. Further afield, in Aylam village of Muzaffarnagar district, Sukhwal Singh Pawar was even more forthright. "If Tikait says burn your crops, uproot railway tracks, stop traffic, we will do it. It's more honourable to be shot by the police than to seek alms from the Government".

This sentiment was echoed by kisans in Moradabad and Saharanpur districts even after the dharna was called off. To a man, they deny that it is a rich farmers' movement: land holdings are getting more and more fragmented as unemployed children claim their share.

Though Tikait appeared to have backed down, it did not discernibly weaken his support in the Jat heartland of western Uttar Pradesh. Apart from a small section of younger, hot-blooded farmers who were disappointed at the absence of fireworks, the large majority of kisans felt that Tikait must have had good reason to do what he did. Only one of a group of sugarcane farmers outside the cooperative sugar mill at Rambala village in Meerut district said the dharna should have continued, even if it led to violence.

"The Government never accepts peaceful demands," said Surender Singh of Nala village. All the others said Tikait did the right thing. But Mauji Ram of Baral village, made it clear that Tikait's action was dictated by concern for the farmers, as the sugarcane crop, much of it still standing in the fields, has to be harvested and sold before the weather turns too hot. "We cannot store sugarcane so we are forced to sell it even at low prices. If we wait, the sugarcane hardens and dries."

But the story may be different when the wheat crop is harvested in April. Mauji Ram said he and others like him would refuse to sell the wheat at the existing prices in the market or to government agencies: "We can store wheat and we grow our own vegetables, so we won't go hungry. But the Government won't get our wheat without paying a fair price."

Keeping the rabi wheat crop out of the market could be one of the unannounced steps the BKU has in mind to keep the agitation going. Tikait issued other directives to farmers dispersing from Meerut. He exhorted them not to pay electricity bills, house tax or land revenue and not to allow any government functionary to enter the villages. Some of the boycotts are already in force.

Tikait has not paid his power bills for the past 25 months and the records of the state electricity board reveal that the collection of dues from 300-odd villages of Shamli division dipped dramatically from about Rs 16 lakh a month to between Rs 40,000 and Rs 85,000 a month from August to November last year as the kisan agitation hotted up.

Not a single bill was collected from Tikait's village Sisauli, and nearby Bhaura Kalaan. "Cutting the defaulters' connections will depend on local conditions. Our linemen were not even allowed to enter Bhaura Kalaan," a board official admitted ruefully. With cash flows down, the board is unable to replace burnt-out transformers and that angers the farmers even more.

Tikait obviously calculated that non-payment of bills, which depletes state coffers, would make the Government sit up and take notice of his demands. Sensing that the desperate adminis- tration may actually be contemplating arresting him, Tikait said at Sisauli: "If I am in jail then l can honestly say I am not responsible for what the farmers do."

Just as Devi Lal did in Haryana, Tikait has raised issues which are important to small farmers like himself. He talks about fair prices for farm produce, a co-relation between the prices of agricultural produce and the cost of inputs, improved educational facilities and more jobs for children of farmers and narrowing the yawning gap between the standard of living in towns and villages. This has struck a chord in most peasant hearts, whether they be Jats or Rajputs or Harijans.

Across western Uttar Pradesh, farmers repeat the Tikait litany: how can a government whose ministers spend crores on holidays and weddings honestly say it does not have the money to meet the basic demands of farmers? Tikait also complains about widespread corruption: "We have to pay anything from Rs 5,000 to Rs 8,000 to get our sons a job in the police and Rs 15,000 for a job in the army." These injustices make him angry and he talks about using a lathi on Rajiv to make him listen (see interview).

The fact that Tikait is himself an ordinary farmer, like the ones whose cause he espouses, makes him a credible leader. Between him, his brother and their six children, they have barely 15 acres of land. There is no tractor and Tikait uses a pair of oxen to plough his fields. His mother Mukhtiari Devirecountshow difficult it was for them to pay the school fees for Tikait's sons who, though educated, have found no jobs and work with Tikait in the fields. Pointing to their very humble house, Tikait's brother Bhopal Singh says:' 'If this is the way the Chaudhary of 84 villages lives, you can imagine the condition of the others."

Tikait was always slated for a leadership role. He is accepted by the villages in his khaap (clan) as a kind of ombudsman, a super sarpanch who has been mediating disputes since he became Chaudhary at the age of eight, after his father's death. Even today the throng of mediation-seekers at his house never thins. Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose is obviously Tikait's hero: Bose's pictures outnumber all others in a diverse gallery which includes Guru Nanak, Swami Vivekananda, Bhagat Singh, Chandra-shekhar Azad, and the guru of the Radha Soami sect.

No wonder then that Tikait is a militant reformer who made villagers in his clan shun dowry and ostentation at weddings, so much so that most private buses plying on rural routes in Muzaffarnagar and Meerut districts now carry the McLuhanesque message Dulhan hee dahej hai (The bride is the dowry).

What is it about Tikait that makes villagers look up to him? "He is truthful. He is one of us. He is not doing this for personal gain," people say. In fact, several thousand volunteers have handed over signed jeevan daan pledges to Tikait, so fierce is their loyalty. These qualities and his sizeable following will ensure that Tikait remains a force to reckon with in the country's peasant politics.