|
|
|
A Parliament of children shows the way, electing members on merit
who champion their rights
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, postmaster 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 1 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 firth 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 out living," she
argued. The collector issued order 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 farm-hand who today works as a
teacher at a Rs 250 per month salary at the very night school she
studied in at Buharu village, steam-rollered 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 ii
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 1 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 their eyes to look at their husbands, they are certainly
raising their eyes towards a heightened political awareness, a
new light that promises to lead them slowly but surely ever
further from the abject ignorance and hopelessness that has been
their lot so far.
 |
||
|
||
|
||
