Living Next To Graves, Cooking Chicken Feathers Or Rats For Meal: Musahar Life As They Know It
Musahar Story Part II: With no place to go, 22 Musahar families live in a graveyard located in Fulwaria area of Varanasi, next to a wide and open sewerage line. Keeping them company are all kinds of insects and snakes, besides rats that they often kill and cook.
Varanasi/Kushinagar (Eastern UP): It was 6.30 pm and already getting dark in a chilly December in the historic Varanasi town in eastern Uttar Pradesh when this writer, accompanied by a photographer and a local journalist, entered this graveyard meant for the people from the Kabir sect. It was darker inside, as we snaked through the tombs of various sizes supported by our cellphone lights with huge stray dogs barking around us — fortunately none but us since the local person accompanying us had his own way of shouting back at them. We reached those thatched huts huddled between the graves.
The 22 families who live there in the huts are not caretakers of the graveyard, and they don't help in digging the graves either. They are from the Musahar (rat-killers and eaters) community, considered socially the lowest among the Scheduled Castes, or Dalits, whom even the Dalits look down upon as Dalits living in separate ghettos.
The graveyard is located in Fulwaria area of Varanasi city, just about 100 metres away from another Musahar ghetto adjacent to the main road, though they are also living in the same pathetic state as those at the cemetery.
The contrast was striking. We were covered in three layers of clothing, mufflers, woollen caps, shoes and thick denim trousers, while they shivered in half-torn clothes as the men talked and their women cooked outside their huts by burning whatever garbage they had as stove material. (After our intervention, a local NGO distributed blankets in the graveyard Musahar ghetto the next day).
Do you know what they were cooking for dinner? Chicken feathers and waste thrown outside non-veg shops and restaurants. If luck favours, they are able to pick some wasted food outside marriage halls after a competition with the street dogs. On days when they manage to get adequate work, they buy vegetables or food from roadside stalls. But that winter night, all of them were cooking stuff from chicken feathers. Dogs hovered around there, played with the kids, and were to sleep together on the ground later.
The 22 families used earlier to live in a slum near a railway crossing number 5, but some “local goons threw us out of there a few years ago and we couldn’t find any other place, so came and settled in this kabrastan (graveyard),” said Suresh Musahar, who is in his early 30s, holding his two-year-old baby.
Asked about the baby’s name, he replied: “Teen-chaar saal ke baad naam rakhenge agar woh tab tak zinda rahe to; kya pata kya bimari lag jaay (We will have a name for her after three-four years if she lives until then; who knows what disease she may contract).” Local freelance journalist Vijay Vineet, who has been covering Musahar issues in Varanasi, told us: “Most children among them die because of severe malnourishment — it could be malaria, it could be dengue, it could even be Japanese Encephalitis, it could be food poisoning, it could be hunger or anything else.”
They have no ration cards, no Aadhaar card or job card under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), leave alone benefits of any other government schemes reaching them. They haven’t even heard of the Right To Education Act (RTE Act) to be able to send their children to school, where they may well get some mid-day meal. “We have no permanent address to have any of these cards. None of our children goes to school. How can they?” Dinesh, another man from the ghetto, wondered. Asked about his age, he said he could be a few years older than Suresh. Like him, no one among them knows their age since they don’t have birth certificates.
"Our original work is not to dig graves, but to pick paan-patta (leaves) from nearby forests and stitch them as food plates used in traditional weddings and similar occasions, but that hardly is enough now after the new trend of using paper plates in marriage ceremonies. We do whatever casual work we get and mostly eke out a life as labourers at LPG distribution depots to unload LPG cylinders from trucks and tempo vans. We hardly get Rs 100 to Rs 150 on lucky days, and sometimes nothing,” said Dinesh, as others gathered around nodded in agreement.
The graveyard is located next to a wide open sewerage line, and according to the families living there they often find all kinds of insects and mosquitoes, besides rats that they often kill and cook for dinner, as well as snakes in the graveyard. The only thing they have in the name of a government facility here is a water handpump. There are no toilets.
Govt Schemes Not Reaching Most Musahars
The 22 families in Fulwaria’s graveyard may be only slightly worse off than those in the hundreds of Musahar ghettos in as many as 14 districts of Uttar Pradesh, including Varanasi, Gorakhpur, Kushinagar, Maharajganj, Gazipur, Mau, Azamgarh, Ballia, Jaunpur, Chandauli, Pratapgarh, Sonbhadra, Mirzapur and Allahabad (now known as Prayagraj), making an estimated population of nearly 10 lakh. This number is arrived at by assorted civil society organisations, who dispute the Census 2011 Musahar estimate of 2.5 lakh — the same as in Bihar, where activists and grassroots organisations stress the number is not less than 30 lakh.
The Uttar Pradesh government claims it has initiated several welfare measures for the Musahar community, including affordable housing, toilets, job cards under MGNREGA, enrolment of children in schools, reduction in the number of child marriages, unlike all previous governments, but even whistle-stop visits to the community’s colonies in Varanasi, Gorakhpur and Kushinagar, which has the highest population of Musahars (an estimated 1 lakh) living in 200 ghettos under 156 villages, reveal that the initiatives are mostly on paper. Or, at best, they cover hardly 15-20% families. And in some villages, where houses were built for all, are either not worth staying or require major work to make them liveable.
"The only consolation is that some attention is being lately paid to the Musahars at the state government level, but the challenge is the implementation of any welfare measures given the deep embedded caste discrimination at the lower executive machinery,” said Lenin Raghuvanshi, who co-founded People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (PVCHR) with his wife Shruti Nagvanshi.
For instance, many families from the 70-odd in Gurmia tola (ghetto) in Kushinagar’s Kurva Dilipnagar block, which has 14 Musahar colonies, have got houses but most people sleep outside since the construction smacks of poor quality, and they fear it may collapse anytime. Toilets in any of these houses are not used at all for its real purpose but as storehouses or deserted rooms covered with weeds and some are half-broken. There is hardly any drainage facility, and most of them do not have water connection.
"Whatever houses you see here were made after intervention of NGOs and activists like me,” said Rambriksh Giri, who is associated as a volunteer with ActionAid. Similarly, he added, whatever little development one may see here is because of pressure from civil society organisations and individuals who work as a link between these villages and the government. He said ActionAid had identified and got 9,000 Musahar children admitted to school, “where the biggest challenge is that most Musahars have no Aadhaar cards and so many don’t have ration cards”.
"And many who have ration cards, all their family members are not enrolled there. If there are five members in a family, you will find only one name and so they get grains quota of only one person and not all members, and this hardly covers the requirements of the entire family,” said Giri.
Nathuni Prasad is a 50-something visually challenged woman who walks a few kilometres everyday to pick up tree branches and leaves, some of which she sells and most is used for cooking. Her extremely malnourished husband Bijli Prasad has an MGNREGS job card but says he hasn’t got any job for the last three years. He is not alone. There is Gulab Prasad in Gurmia tola who too has a job card made in his name but he has been without word for three years.
“Under the scheme, the job card and the money gets deposited in our accounts but the village head and his cronies take it out and keep the money with them. Sometimes, they give us a few hundred rupees once in a few months while most NREGA works are done using machines while our names would be found in the muster rolls. On paper, we are getting the money and the work both, but in practice, we don’t get anything,” Gulab Prasad said, with several others joining in to describe the same experience.
This is not just about Gurmia tola, every Musahar ghetto has identical tales to tell. Some are slightly better where local NGOs or activists have established a rapport and put pressure on the local administration.
Asked why no one complains, a villager said: "Sir, koi complain karne nahi jaata, pradhan ke saamne log darte hain to kachhari jaane ki kaun himmat karega (Sir, no one wants to lodge a complaint. They are scared of even going to the village head, where will they get the courage to go to court)?"
Despite repeated attempts, Kushinagar District Magistrate Ramesh Ranjan could not be reached either on his landline phone or mobile number for a comment on the allegation made by the villagers at several Musahar ghettos about issues relating to NREGA job cards. This report will be updated when his response is received.
Darshan Desai is a veteran journalist currently based out of Gujarat. This article has been supported by Work: No Child’s Business (WNCB) alliance.
[Disclaimer: The opinions, beliefs, and views expressed by the various authors and forum participants on this website are personal.]
Top Headlines
Trending News
