We The People: A Tribal Woman’s Fight for Equal Property Rights

Rattan Manjari is an iconic tribal woman whose battles with patriarchal norms are legendary. The 70-year-old hails from the remote Ribba village in Kinnaur—a high-altitude district along the Indo-Tibetan border—where women have no legal titles to property and power in other matters. From managing her apple orchard in Kinnaur to organising women against the customary law called Wajib-ul-Urj that prevents women, unmarried daughters, widows, and deserted single women, from inheriting ancestral property… Manjari does it with determination.
Women in tribal families at Kinnaur, Pangi, Lahaul-Spiti and Bhamour suffer gender discrimination, injustice, and legal deprivation. Due to Manjari’s efforts, about 35 applicants have received property rights and their names noted in the revenue records. She also runs Mahila Kalyan Parishad—a group seeking equal rights for women in ancestral property matters.

Manjari was elected unanimously as village pradhan at the age of 21. “I was lucky that my family, particularly my mother, inspired me as a 14-year-old to raise my voice against the century-old patriarchal laws. I could also reach out to the state chief ministers and even prime ministers of India, P.V. Narasimha Rao and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. I led hundreds of tribal women to spread a gender revolution. Still, there’s a long way to go,” she rues.

The 1926 law is practiced in Kinnaur and Lahaul-Spiti districts, besides the tribal belt of Chamba district, despite a high literacy rate of 81 per cent. “This customary law seems to have originated from the fear of losing tribal land if a woman marries a non-tribal. Unmarried daughters have a share in the property with their brothers, but after the father’s demise, the sons become sole inheritors,” says
Dr Dev Kanya Thakur, a journalist whose film, No Woman’s Land, looked at gender discrimination in Kinnaur and Lahaul-Spiti.

Manjari recalls that the Himachal Pradesh high court had held that gender discrimination violates fundamental rights. “The daughters in a Hindu society cannot be left and segregated from the mainstream as they are entitled to equal share in the property,” the court ruled on June 25, 2015. The matter later went to the Supreme Court, which referred it back to the high court, where it is still pending. 

As a last-ditch attempt, Manjari wants to meet the newly elected President of India, Droupadi Murmu. “I am sure she will make a big difference vis-à-vis my struggle for getting the legitimate rights of tribal women enforced,” says Manjari.

(This appeared in the print edition as "The Fight for Equal Property Rights")

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