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SABAH GURMAT
“Please give me a minute and take a copy of our magazine before you leave," said Mahavir Singh, the 41-year-old farmer handling the small children’s library in Ghaso Kalan village in the northern district of Jind in Haryana.
The Rs 15 magazine Abhiyaan's cover featured a Palestinian child sitting amongst the rubble. The edition devoted to Palestine included Hindi poems and essays about the Palestinian struggle.
The cover said: "It was to be denied in our time
We were to be culpable too
We lived when a boundless crime was perpetrated and we did not speak"
“Aapko achha lage aur agar ho sake toh aap donate kar sakte hai (If you like it and can, consider donating),” said Mahavir.
After hours of discussing his struggles to make a living off his four-acre farm and his desperate job search, I didn’t expect Mahavir to hand me a magazine about Palestine.
Reading it, I discovered that the publication came from a small printing press in Rohtak. Its circulation was aimed at places like Jind, Hisar, and Rohtak in rural Haryana.
Mahavir was one of the people I spoke with in May for a report that I was writing about the unemployment crisis and agrarian distress ravaging the state and much of the country.
The problem in Haryana was particularly acute, with many trying everything to get overseas and find work. Little surprise then that the BJP, the party in power at the centre for ten years, failed to form a majority despite a religiously divisive campaign led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has refused to acknowledge the enormity of the job crisis and the boundless pain and suffering it had wrought on millions.
For my report, I spoke with people aged 20 to 40 who shared how they had applied for hundreds of jobs while their mental health deteriorated, but what struck me in Ghaso Kalan village was that despite the hopelessness, political consciousness seemed to be getting stronger and stronger.
Mahavir spoke of his incarcerated friend Neelam Azad. This 38-year-old woman was jailed under India’s anti-terror law after the protest she and five colleagues carried out in Parliament to draw attention to the unemployment crisis was deemed a security breach. Her mother told me that her daughter had many degrees but had to find work as an agricultural labourer.
The farmer protests in 2020 and 2021 against three farm laws and the continuing demonstrations on the Punjab-Haryana border exposed many young people in Haryana to the world of farmer and worker unions.
The many makeshift libraries that popped up at these protest sites have become repositories of knowledge and information about mass movements, people who led them and current affairs.
This consciousness may have pushed Neelam to give free English tuition to children and start a free library with books about anticaste icons B.R. Ambedkar, Jotiba and Savitribai Phule, and freedom fighter Bhagat Singh.
Six months after Neelam was arrested, the tuition that took place in the library no longer happened. Books and chairs gather dust, and a musty sofa smells and looks like it has seen better days. But even in this rundown state, the library still functions.
“Without Neelam, none of us has been able to stay and man it full-time, but if anyone wants to use it or needs any book,” said Mahavir. “There are no other such places here. We can’t afford to lose it for good.”
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