A Letter to Aruna Roy:
Practitioner of People’s Politics

Dear Aruna Ji,

Namaskar.

I’ve never met you, though I’ve read about your amazing work. Why am I writing this letter to you? To thank you for The Personal is Political: An Activist’s Memoir, a book  which you were reluctant to write.

I almost did not read the book. I stumbled upon this book in the library, borrowed it, read the commendations by Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze, and the foreword by Gopalkrishna Gandhi.

Aruna Roy is a dedicated social activist, but is her memoir worth reading? I wasn’t very sure. I read a few chapters, and thereafter, just couldn’t stop. I’m glad I read the book.

Notably, you have called your book a memoir, not an autobiography. Gopalkrishna Gandhi says, ‘… this book is more than a memoir, more even than a story of the writer’s times.’ Indeed, it is.

You’ve said, ‘My journey from urban middle class to rural marginalized India is interwoven with the warp and weft of other people’s lives. ’

You further say, ‘Writing has given me an opportunity to walk through memories - a gallery of portraits and anecdotes of remarkable people - to think of experiences, events and struggles. They are cameos of unrecognized greatness of many ordinary people.’

Thank you for telling us about the feisty women - Naurti, Mangi, Bhuriya, Billan, Chunni Bai and others – whom you call friends and mentors; of Chunni Singh, Shankar, Mohan Ji, Tej Singh Ji, Lal Singh and many other comrade-saathis. Your book tells the story of your shared life with these and other marginalized people of rural India.

Who’re you, really? Feminist, social activist, change agent, Gandhian, anarchist, urban Naxal, sickular? You have been labelled with these and many other adjectives. Many have commended your missionary zeal and exemplary work; others have vilified you for your alternative politics – non-party politics, the politics of people as differentiated from electoral politics. Politics is ‘everywhere,’ you assert.

Gender is my primary identity, you mention; but that’s rather inadequate. Elsewhere you’ve said that you can’t be catalogued. That’s more apt.

You’ve called yourself almost a midnight’s child, born just a year before India’s independence. Drawing inspiration from many makers of modern India, you’ve endeavoured through your life and work to realise the dream of equality and justice for all peoples of India.

You quit the IAS in 1975, after seven years in the system, choosing rural Rajasthan as your home and place of work. Tilonia, only 360 kilometres from Delhi, was ‘a  different world in every way.’

You say, ‘My shift from the IAS to an NGO – Barefoot College, SWRC, Tilonia – was dramatic. It changed the socio-economic and political context of my life. From Tilonia to Devdungri was a greater dramatic shift  in ideological perception.’

Chunni Singh, a founder member of MKSS (Mazdoor Kisan Sangharsh Samiti) and ‘comrade-saathi’ who went with you to Manila to receive the Magsaysay, says, ‘Karni aur kathni mein pharak nahin honi chahiye.’

Shunning publicity, you walked your talk, and lived as your saathis lived - in a mud hut that had no electricity, no running water, and no toilet.

To better understand the plight of minimum-wage labourers, you enlisted as a labourer for a fortnight. The work involved using gainti-fawda for digging, and lifting and carrying mud. You confess that you lacked the skill and was a total failure, but were more convinced than ever before that all manual work involved specific skills and merited wages for skilled labourers.

Your memoir is a report on the state of India’s republic, particularly the yawning gap between the guarantees and promises made by the Constitution and the unrealized dreams. But the book reaffirms your firm faith in democracy, the Indian Constitution, and the Gandhian methods of satyagraha, non-violence and civil disobedience as instruments of protest to speak truth to power.

Not an autobiography, not the story of your life; but the story of the many unnamed and unsung participators and partners who dreamed of  equality and justice guaranteed under the Indian Constitution, and fought to realise it in bits and pieces.

You and your saathis established MKSS (Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan) whose slogan is ‘Nyay Samanta bandhutva ho adhaar, aise rachenge hum sansaar.’ (We will create a world based on justice and equality.)

An aspirational, almost utopian, goal in the present world of stark inequality and denial of justice to the poor and the marginalized.

You have quoted Eduardo Galeano who said, ‘Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I’ll never reach it. So what’s the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking.’

You firmly believe: ‘Courage lies in walking towards what may always recede.’

You’re saddened by the rise in economic inequality, the assault on the Constitution, and the undermining of democratic institutions. Yet, MKSS’ campaign has resulted in powerful rights-based legislations – Right to Information (RTI Act), Right to Work (MGNREGA), Right to Food (NFSA), Forest Rights Act and others, directly benefiting millions of people.

I admire your commitment to the values you cherish, and your courage to pursue it regardless of outcome. Keep walking, Aruna Ji.

Warm regards.

Sincerely,

A reader moved and inspired by your memoir.

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