35-yr-old lawyer becomes face of ‘apolitical’ Gujarat Dalit stir

DHOLKA (AHMEDABAD): Ram Parmar, a daily wager from the Dalit community, is listening to a speech at a marriage hall in central Gujarat’s Dholka village on Friday.

DHOLKA (AHMEDABAD): Ram Parmar, a daily wager from the Dalit community, is listening to a speech at a marriage hall in central Gujarat’s Dholka village on Friday. He doesn’t know the speaker — a lean man with a stubble and a raspy voice. Yet, he is spellbound, cheering and whistling each time there is criticism of the government for atrocities on Dalits.

HT Image

In the past fortnight, Jignesh Mevani, a 35-year-old lawyer from a middle-class Dalit family in Ahmedabad, has earned numerous fans like Parmar. Mevani — who on Friday launched a 10-day march from Ahmedabad to Una — came into the limelight when he conducted a Dalit mahasabha in Ahmedabad on July 11. It was the biggest gathering for the cause of the community in Gujarat in recent history.

The trigger was a video that showed cow protection vigilantes flogging four Dalit men for skinning a dead cow in the Saurashtra region’s Una town.

Mevani formed the Una Dalit Atyachar Ladai Samiti with four of his aides. The group has held meetings and protests across the country, the biggest of which was the Ahmedabad mahasabha.

He is now a rallying point for those who want the discourse on Dalit issues to be in sync with the community’s ground realities.

“The Una episode caught the imagination of the country. I thought it was important to channelise that mood into something concrete,” he says. As he hops villages on his padyatra, he avoids rhetoric and talks about definitives. He makes community members take a pledge to shun their traditional jobs of disposing of animal carcasses and manual scavenging, and to reach out to the government for alternative livelihood options. At the end of each speech, he asks them to spread the message on social media.

“Slogans against upper castes and public reading of Dalit literature are important but I wonder how far we can go with that. This is why we at the Samiti are clear that we will have specific demands,” says Mevani, reading the latest media updates of his campaign on his mobile phone.

At a halt in the outskirts of Ahmedabad, Mevani and his group ran into some Congress workers and an argument ensued. He asked them to join him, as individuals and not as party workers. “This is apolitical. Period,” he says.

Mevani honed his oratory and organisational skills during a stint with Jan Sangharsh Manch, a civil society group in Ahmadabad. He worked with victims of the 2002 Godhra riots and studied cases of extra-judicial killings in the state. He also took a keen interest in the issues of sanitation workers and trade union members. In 2011, he filed a PIL in the Gujarat high court claiming irregularities in land allotment to Dalits.

With the Una incident, Mevani says, he realised it was time to consolidate community members. “The sheer barbarity of the crime punctured the myth that atrocities were a thing of the past.”

He says he isn’t surprised at the overwhelming response he has received. “A majority of Dalit academics who set the agenda are not in touch with current issues affecting the community. Those who have a grasp on issues are not articulate. I bring a combination of an academic and an activist,” he says.