Little People Do Big Things

ELECTION time. Party members huddle together to elect a prime minister even as the opposition anxiously awaits their next move. Tension runs high. Which way will the vote go? In a ruling party where women command a brute majority of 75 per cent, would the next prime minister, like the previous two, also be a woman? The ambitious speaker of the last Lok Sabha, Devkaran Gujar from Sargaon, pastmaster at realpolitik, is banking on his scheduled tribe status, his enviable track record of pushing development work through in remote rural areas, the goodwill of his constituency, to propel him into the hot seat. He argues his case earnestly. "BOTH previous prime ministers were women, BOTH from Chhota Narainpur. Isn't it time to give another gender/person, another place a chance?" In another corner the formidable Jat representative Shrimati Bhagchand Devi rallies her supporters. "BOTH previous prime ministers," she thunders, "were from Chhota Narainpur. Shouldn't a more deserving person and more neglected constituency be given a chance?" From yet another corner the wily dark horse, purse-mouthed Ramkanya Sadhu, watches the proceedings with furrowed-brow concentration. "Not sex, caste or constituency. Competence should be the criterion for selection," she says, pushing her case for the top job. The air is thick with intrigue: members threaten defections, walkouts. At one point Laxmi Devi and Kaushalya Devi, the two previous prime ministers, rush in with respective entourage to counsel, restraint, arbitrate with warring factions, find a way out of a seeming impasse.... A tumultuous one hour later it's all over. Officials, admirers, cohorts, constituents rush to felicitate the new prime minister, Ramkanya, who receives their congratulatory outpourings with the kind of equipoise that an Indira Gandhi might have envied.

Unremarkable, all this. Except that Prime Minister Ramkanya is 14. And certainly the only head of state in the world who is child labourer at marble factory by day, student by night. Rival contenders Devkaran, 13, and 'Shrimati' Bhagchand Devi, 15, share that dual identity. One is a shepherd, the other dutiful wife and farm-hand by day. All three have just one thing in common: they study in one of the 60 night schools run in Ajmer district by the Social Work Research Centre at Tilonia, a two-hour drive from Jaipur.

The parliament Ramkanya heads is one to which 3,000 children, age 6 to 15, students all at these night schools, elect their own representatives once every three years. Two main parties exist: Ujala (Light) is the ruling party, Gwala (cowherd) the opposition. Independents, too, are allowed to contest in all fairness. Welcome to the first parliament of its kind anywhere in the world with an annual budget of Rs 40,000, recently increased to a hefty Rs 90,000 after a Rs 50,000 grant from the Election Commission. One that gives these children real power in the way their schools are run, in the way they are treated and taught. Which means they can fire teachers they think are not up to scratch, report and seek action on their absence and latecoming and push for school supplies like books, copybooks, slates and blackboards. "The whole idea," explains SWRC director Bunker Roy, "is to give power to the people who have a vested interest in these schools being run well. In this case, the children themselves."

No fable or farce this but a serious fact that is seriously implemented. Prime ministers allocate portfolios on merit rather than muscle, ministers zealously follow up on complaints received from "state chief ministers" (yes, there is a legislative assembly too), each cabinet member goes for regular school "inspections" for which the local SWRC office provides transport and escort services. SWRC section heads at the head office and at the seven field centres across the district are accountable to parliamentarians, obliged to submit "action taken" reports on queries, suggestions made at the monthly cabinet meetings.

Budgets are seriously drawn up and adhered to. Last year, the cabinet voted to take a tour of all the field centres as also Jodhpur and Barmer at an expense of Rs 20,000. The year before the incumbent prime minister organised a Bal Mela where children from every centre came to meet, brainstorm, have fun. Not fun 'n' games alone. Work is what this parliament is all about. At the one parliament session I attended everyone (that included little seven-year-olds like Bishnaram, Chhotan and Leela) had "inspected" at least two schools 30 km apart and had come armed with meticulous lists of what was needed at each school. Devkaran, elected speaker of the house at the same session, pulled up the SWRC "secretariat" for not providing folders to carry official papers. "Will I get them the next time or is it yet another of your empty promises?" he said sneeringly to 40-year-old Bhagchand, the education department head responsible for the delay.

Our eavesdropping on party confabulations that preceded the election of the leader of the Opposition for the Gwala party was educative. Santosh, 13, leading member of the opposition, asked just one question of Manglaram. "Tu bolega? Ladega?" (Will you speak? Fight?) He answered in the affirmative. She voted for him. So did everyone else.

A valid question: are we romanticising the whole phenomenon? Making too much of too little? Not if the children's track record is anything to go by. Only last year, Santara, 14, chief minister from the Sardar Singhji hamlet, led a delegation to the Ajmer collector's office when an obdurate sarpanch locked the doors of the local SWRC-run school on the plea that children could go to the dayschool run by the panchayat. "We told her where to go," recalls Bhagchand, and "she did the rest. Brilliantly."

The fifth standard student explained to the collector the hidden agenda of power play, the insecurity of a sarpanch fearing loss of power to a voluntary social work body, explained the necessity of operating a night instead of a day school. "Most of us work in the fields during the day and can only study in the evening. You can't deny us an education because we earn our living," she argued. The collector issued orders for the school to be reopened within four days. An absentee schoolmaster was sacked when she complained to her education minister last year. The first prime minister Kaushalya, 15, a Jat farmhand who today works as a teacher at a Rs 250 per month salary at the very night school she studied in at Buharu village, steamrollered residents of a neighbouring village into coughing up half of the Rs 4,000 needed to build a compound wall for their school when the SWRC pleaded its inability to foot the entire bill.

A positive fallout of this education-related activism: a heightened awareness of the system, its workings, its power structures, avenues for redressal of local grievances. Children have often successfully and constructively intervened in community affairs. Take Devkaran. This 13-year-old successfully resolved a six-year dispute between the SWRC and his Sargaon village residents on where a water storage tank should be built. "We wanted it near the temple," reveals village elder Ramlal. "Some others who feared that would create sludge wanted it built near the pond. That quibbling led to SWRC declaring they wouldn't build ANYTHING here."

Till Devkaran stepped in, forced the warring parties to agree on the location by the pond. Next he refused to attend further meetings of parliament where he served as speaker till the reluctant SWRC found funds and built the tank.The SWRC had to capitulate to his demands. By which time Devkaran, newly confident of his political skills, decided to further armtwist the villagers. He forced them to agree to pay Rs 650 each to lay individual pipelines to their dwellings. 65 of the 119 Sargaon households have coughed up, the rest are expected to follow suit. Roy is hardly surprised at Devkaran's astounding political skills and level of maturity. "That level of maturity is the norm rather than exception here. Don't forget these kids learn hard lessons early in life. Girls go straight from girlhood to wifehood. There's no adolescence here. These kids turn adult early."

 A statement borne out by facts. Last year, Kaushalya, 15, the first prime minister, stunned breastbeating sobsister participants at the Child Labour Conference at Delhi with her perspicacity, saying, "we have to work to survive. Don't take away our jobs. Give us an education instead so we can look after ourselves, not be exploited because we are ignorant." Laxmi, 15, the Gujar shepherdess who became the second prime minister, successfully insisted on the SWRC giving vocational training to a 12-year-old boy employed as a marble factory labourer when he wrote to her asking for another job, another life. "This political exercise is preliminary. The object is to teach them to fend for themselves. Become aware citizens, survive in their context, not get gypped by the local moneylender, understand the dynamics of the local system," explains Roy.

Today this newly aware, politically savvy community of minors is earning both the allegiance and the admiration of their community. "Our water tank," says Ramlal, "would never have gotten built had it not been for Devkaranji." That honorific ji used by a man thrice his age for this mere pre-teen boy in a traditional society where respect is always an elder's prerogative speaks volumes for Devkaran's achievement.

In another radical departure, Kaushalya is repeatedly invited to sit in on panchayat meetings by the sarpanch. No mean achievement in an orthodox society that had hitherto treated women as mere chattel and childbearing machine. Perhaps the children's crowning achievement is that today panchayat members sit in on their elections and parliamentary sessions to learn the procedures and implementation of the parliamentary system. The Election Commission grant is the government's acknowledgement of the children's contribution to the political education of the larger community.

This parliament sets an example that the august national body would do well to emulate. Gender, caste, don't swing the vote here. Ability alone does. Talk of reservation is passe in a context where children have elected three women prime ministers in a row, where even the present parliament of 16 has 12 women members.

For all their political finesse, the children exhibit a pragmatic awareness of the brute reality of their lives, a rugged realism about a system they can only dent but are far from demolishing yet. Devkaran is clear about the certitude of his fifth class level literacy, the inevitability of his goat grazier adulthood. "I'll do what I have to but no one can cheat me after what I've learnt," he says cheerfully. Mehrun, 14, farmhand by day, fifth standard student by night, got married last year to a boy she's never seen. "Is he educated?" you ask. "Anari hai (he's illiterate)," she answers. Did she have a say in the marriage, see him at least at the wedding if not before? "Nahin. Hamare mein to shaadi par palak bhi uthaane ki ijaazat naheen hai sahib (No. At our weddings, we are forbidden to even raise the eyes)," she answers. That may be true. But the Tilonia experiment is indicative of another truth: while the likes of Mehrun may not be raising eyes to lok at their husbands,they are certainly raising their eyes towards  a heightained political awareness, a new light that promises to lead them slowly but surely even further from the abject ignorance and hopelessness that has been their lot so far.