2016 Ramon Magsaysay Awards: No rest for crusader vs India’s manual scavenging

MANILA, Philippines – As a young man, Bezwada Wilson of India asked why the men in their community became alcoholics who seemingly went out of their minds after drinking, beating the women and children and throwing “food items (or) whatever is there” at them.

To make him understand the situation that drove them to get intoxicated, the men took him to see what their job was: removing human feces and urine from dry latrines with their bare hands. They then carry the buckets of excrement on their heads to designated depository sites.

“The day I went and I saw them cleaning…I (made) the decision (to stop the practice) and I started crying,” Wilson told The STAR in an interview at the Ramon Magsaysay Center.

He did not know what to do at first, “but destiny has given me an opportunity to move into this direction.”

In his previous media interviews, Wilson put things bluntly when asked about his advocacy: “No human being should clean another’s shit by hand.”

“My fight now is: Technology has advanced so much; so why can’t this work be done mechanically?” he said.

The issues surrounding this kind of job in India are complex. Wilson was born to a family of dalits or the lowest caste in India. Although his family was engaged in manual scavenging for generations, he was spared from doing such work, being the first in his family to pursue higher education.

Manual scavenging is a hereditary occupation or a form of slavery in India involving 180,000 dalit households cleaning the 790,000 public and private dry latrines across the country and 98 percent of them are meagerly paid women and girls.

While India’s Constitution and other laws prohibit dry latrines and the employment of manual scavengers, these have not been strictly enforced and even violated by the government itself.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi once described the practice as a religious duty, which enraged Wilson, as he could not see any dignity in the kind of labor that they had to do.

It was during one hot summer day in 1982 when Wilson, now 50 years old, was at the turning point that almost led him to commit suicide as he really could not swallow the fate designed for them by society and its systems.

He had gone back to his hometown after finishing his high school education that took him away from home for seven years.

“On hot days the excreta harden; it is difficult to scrape off,” he recalled in one of his earlier published interviews.

The images were painful but he had to channel the anger to a crusade that had now liberated 300,000 out of 600,000 manual scavengers.

But his first success was with himself. When he started looking for employment, Wilson said he was offered the scavenging job.

Out of frustration, “I had thrown my employment card (and told himself) ‘I don’t want to do this…’ because that is not my destiny and that is not my dream.”

Despite growing up being told that rebellion had no place in their community because of their caste, reports that came out early this year quoted Wilson as saying he wrote a letter to the managing director of Kolar Gold Fields where his family worked in dry latrines to protest the practice, but nothing happened.

After that, he decided to write to the prime minister, which the media learned about and reported. Finally, KGF demolished the dry toilets and that gave him his first experience of direct action.

Inspired by that and by a woman who stared angrily at him for asking how it was to do scavenging for a foreign journalist, he worked hard to fight for his cause until the Safai Karmachari Andolan, a people’s movement, was launched in 1993.

As national convenor, Wilson initiated the filing of a public interest litigation case before India’s Supreme Court naming all state and government violators of the 1993 Prohibition Act banning dry latrines and the employment of manual scavengers.

“Manual scavenging is now an issue that the Indian government must address…one cannot ignore (it) now, that is our real privilege. We are really so happy to say that the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation…made invisible people visible to the whole globe, not just India today,” Wilson said.

They dalits used to be invisible and “untouchable” – meaning they could not be touched because they were the lowest caste – since the generations before them did not have names and were called only in general terms as an older or younger sibling.

From having no identity, they now have a fighting chance and the Ramon Magsaysay award is particularly special to them because it recognizes extraordinary work in Asia, justice and human rights.

At this point, Wilson said, “We are not demanding or requesting, we are commanding what they have to do.”

In 2013, KSA successfully lobbied for a new law that included rehabilitation support for scavengers and for scholarships for children of manual scavengers and conducted vocational training for their daughters to move them into more decent jobs.

It is now involved in crafting a new law that provides financial aid for scavengers transitioning to new occupations.

RMAF chose Wilson to receive the award, having spent 32 years on his crusade, leading not only with a sense of moral courage but also with remarkable skills in grassroots organizing and working with India’s complex legal system, “reclaiming for the dalits the human dignity that is their natural birthright.”

SKA, which undertook a number of huge mass actions, including latrine demolition and awareness campaigns, had grown into a network of 7,000 members in 500 districts across the country.

As they continue to struggle for the dalits’ total emancipation from their degrading servitude of manual scavenging, Wilson, who now works as a member of the Prime Minister’s Adarsh Gram Yojna (a rural development program), said the award had given him one of the “happiest moments” of his life.

Interestingly, the other Indian awardee is Thodur Madabusi Krishna, a classical music artist in India who happens to a member of the Brahmins, the highest of the four Hindu castes made up of priests and scholars.

Krishna uses his Karnatic (one of the two classical types of music in India) to heal deep social divisions in India that come in many layers, including the caste system.

But Karnatic music is not for the marginalized, he observed, and so he broke the rules to make communities share their art forms and bridge the gaps among them. The STAR featured him in its Aug. 27 issue.

Krishna, who decided to hold concerts in open and public spaces, said in an interview: “Discrimination is not necessarily don’t come, don’t go. It’s much more subtle, it happens in so many different layers… You don’t realize the intimidation that is felt by a person who does not belong to that world when they want to enter that door.”

Krishna expressed belief that those in the classical world were afraid of being laughed at but “we have to learn to be laughed at” also.

“And it’s not about liking (a particular kind of music)…I have no right to not allow the person to come and say I don’t like it. That is important, anyone should have free access, let them hate it after that, no problem,” he stressed.

Krishna told The STAR he did not expect to receive the award because he was doing things for himself, but it had made him realize there was much more he could offer and he was just beginning.

There is much more to be done to remove intimidation and fear, even in music in the country where they belong.