Anumeha Yadav - In Haryana, Jat rage over reservations is spreading like wildfire // Himadri Ghosh & Nikhil Babu - Ignited hopes and no jobs: Why Jats have revolted
Ignited hopes and no jobs: Why Jats have revolted
In Haryana, Jat rage over reservations is spreading like wildfire
Traditional landowners, the Jats are a powerful Hindu caste
now demanding classification as a “backward” caste – a contention rejected last year by the Supreme Court – so that
government jobs can be reserved for them. However, an IndiaSpend analysis of employment data and
evaluation of aspirations of young Jats revealed that the protests are
manifestations of India’s slow, inadequate job-creation and a failing education
system creating thousands of “unemployable” graduates.
This disconnect between education, aspirations and jobs
explains similar demands to be classified as “backward” and
“other-backward-caste (OBC)” by socially powerful caste groups – Gujjars (Rajasthan), Marathas (Maharashtra), Patels (Gujarat) and Kapus (Andhra Pradesh), among others – struggling to
find satisfactory employment.
Labourers, guards and maids form the majority of the jobs
available to more than a million Indians – some estimate it is nearly two
million – who join the workforce every month, as IndiaSpendreported. As we explain later, over 30 years, India
generated no more than seven million jobs every year, with only a fraction
being the kinds of jobs the young Jats desire. This is why protestors across India demand secure government
jobs; it is why engineers and doctors throng job openings for peons, clerks and
constables (as they did in Uttar Pradesh last year, when 2.3 million applied for 368 positions of peons).
As we also reported, new employment data indicate two disquieting
trends. One, a slowdown in employment in the formal, organised
sector (which in any case employs only 12% of India’s labour force), the prime staging ground
of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Make-in-India programme. In Indian factories,
more than 400,000 people lost their jobs during the financial year 2012-13,
according to government data.
Two, this slowdown hides a larger, long-term trend: India
Inc is automating and squeezing more output from its workers and so needs fewer
of them. In isolation, the latest government data show that organised industry added
nearly 500,000 jobs in 2013-14. Unemployment in India, according to labour ministry data, is less than 5%, but these datado not reflect under-,
partial- or disguised-employment, such as Rangi’s. No more than 17% of all Indians were wage earners, as this 2013-14 labour ministry reportacknowledged, with no more
than 60% of those above 15 years old who sought work over the year getting it
(more than 46% in urban India did not find work)... read more:
Protests by Jat
agitators demanding reservations in public employment intensified and spread to
more parts of Haryana as well as Delhi, enclosed by Haryana on three sides. A
week into the agitation, protesters continued to block road and railways on
Saturday. The army was deployed in eight districts, including in Rohtak where
soldiers had to enter the affected areas using helicopters after protesters dug
up several roads, news agencies reported. Angry protesters set
fire to public buildings, including a railway station building in Jind and a
petrol pump in Rohtak. Protesters threw stones at the house of agriculture
minister OP Dhankar. A day earlier they had tried to break into the house of
state finance minister Abhimanyu Sindhu. Both political leaders belong to the
Jat community and agitators blame them for failing to bring legislation for
Jats to be included in the other backward classes category.
Political rivalries : A few kilometres off Rohtak
Road, in Bahadurgarh in Jhajjar district, Jats dismissed Chief Minister Manohar
Lal Khattar's announcement that the government had accepted their demands
calling it “a delaying tactic.” “We have heard similar vague promises so many times the past
18 months,” said Ravi Rathi, a young man leaning against a broken tree trunk
being used by the group to block the entrance to Parnala village. “Successive
governments have promised us the same, but taken no action after the
announcements,” added a man standing next to him, also in his 20s. The young men, more than 30 in number, had occupied a narrow
road over a nallah flowing on the village outskirts. Besides
blocking the road with tree trunks, they had strewn thorny kikar branches
on the road to allowing no vehicles on the road, except for medical
emergencies.
The village mukhiya Rajesh Rathi who stood with the men said
the government had left them with no option but to resort to intensifying their
agitation. He blamed Bharatiya Janata Party's Member of Parliament from
Kurukshetra Raj Kumar Saini for instigating the violence with his provocative
speeches. Saini, a first-time member of parliament who also belongs to
another backward class, has formed the “OBC Brigade”, a loose coalition of
members of other backward class communities who maintain that including
traditionally dominant communities like the Jats in this list will dilute the
benefits of reservations for other communities. He has threatened to resign from his parliament seat over this issue.
“Saini has been abusing Jats at public functions,” claimed
the village mukhiya (chief) Rathi. “In early February, our leaders raised the
issue of how BJP had failed where Congress had tried to deliver on Jat
reservations," Rathi said. "Saini had retorted with 'Jat atankwadi
hain, Jat bawle hain (Jats are terrorists, Jats are insane). So now,
the young boys have responded with a 'we will show you what terror means,'”
Rathi concluded.
A little farther away, on Rohtak road which the protesters
had blocked by lining it with construction material and blue billboards of the
Delhi Metro, Yogesh Dalal, clad in a sports jersey tried to make his way to
Tikri a border village, pushing his motorcycle on the blockaded, deserted road. Dalal a head constable in Delhi police and a Jat himself,
said he supported the community's agitation. “Farming is finished, and there is
high inflation. Jats struggle to get government jobs because they lack the
benefit of reservations,” Dalal said. He too laid the blame on Saini for the
protests turning violent, claiming that in some instances Saini men had led
violent attacks for which Jats were detained.
Crises in villages: Besides political competition with other castes, older
members of the community spoke of the economic desperation that had gripped
most farm households in the area. In Bahadurgarh's Parnala village, for
instance, of the over 800 households most had to sell their farmland at a
pittance when the government acquired land for Bahadurgarh Modern Industrial
Estate set up by the state government in the 1960s. The industrial estate, on
the edge of the village, holds over 1,300 units now, including factories
producing footwear, pharmaceuticals, steel sheets, glass. But since nearly all
the factories prefer to employ migrants whom they view as more pliant than local
workers, the Rs 3,000 crore business generated in the industrial estate per
year offers hardly any livelihood opportunities for local residents.
In Parnala, villagers estimated that around 40% households
are dependent on only farming, while others supplement their income by running
shops for cycle repairs, groceries, or by working as truck drivers and helpers.
The farmers lamented the crop losses due to successive droughts and weather
disturbances of the last two years. Around the village, the standing carrot
crop was going to waste in fields after the prices crashed this season...
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