October 26, 2007	Friday	Shawwal 13, 1428

NEW DELHI: On a hot, dusty highway some 40 miles from Delhi, a human column snakes its way towards the Indian capital carrying a unique message of defiance to the country’s leaders: “Give us back our land.”

Some 25,000 of India’s poorest people — tribal peoples, “untouchables” and landless labourers — have stopped traffic for nearly three weeks on the road that links Delhi and Agra, home to the Taj Mahal. Headed by a group of chanting Buddhist monks, the marchers say they aim to shame the government into keeping its promise to redistribute land.

The human train has been eating, living and washing by the road since the beginning of the month and by the end of the week will arrive at the Indian parliament, vowing to remain a public embarrassment until the government relents. Last week three marchers were killed by a speeding lorry.

With fists and voices raised, the scene is a world away from Indian newspaper headlines about the country’s new luxury goods market or its soaring stock markets. Nowhere is this process of concentrating wealth in a tiny segment of the population more visible than in the ground beneath Indians’ feet.

India has one of most iniquitous systems of land ownership in the world. Last week India’s biggest real estate baron made a paper fortune of £500m in a day. Government figures show that the average expenditure of countryside household India to be just 500 rupees a month a day.

Most of the marchers say their dire condition is because they have no patta (deeds) to their land. Unable to grow produce on their ancestral land and with no patta to access state welfare services, the villagers are now fighting a losing war against poverty.

“I haven’t got any rights on my land,” said Prem Bai from the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. “I have got four boys and can hardly manage the family with few days’ work labouring on other’s fields. If we go to forests then the forest department arrests us. Our life is very difficult.”

The march is the brainchild of a veteran Gandhian, PV Rajagopal, who made his name by persuading bandits in central India to lay down their arms in the 1970s. He says the human caravan is a warning shot to the “establishment”.

Rajagopal says there is a rising tide of violence in the country as the poor “are being driven out of villages and slums in cities”. In the country’s rush to industrialise, he adds, “we’ve seen alarming examples of outsiders seizing land on vast scales while the local rural poor are denied land. The result will be bloodshed and violence on a massive scale unless the government acts”.

The issue is increasingly an explosive one in India, where incomplete reforms have left much of the country in the hands of a few.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service