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Journalism of Courage
As temperatures crawl towards 40 degrees Celsius, nearly 10,000 farmers on Sunday began a 200-km march from Dindori in Nashik district to Mumbai, seeking remunerative prices for their farm produce, especially onions.
At the forefront again is a 77-year-old, now leading his third such march in the past five years related to agrarian distress: Jiva Pandu Gavit.
A tribal activist and dedicated Communist, Gavit has kept the CPI(M) flag fluttering in Maharashtra, winning from the Kalwan Surgana Assembly constituency (ST reserved) seven times since 1978. (Called Surgana earlier, the seat was renamed Kalwan post-delimitation.)
The marchers Mumbai have a 17-point charter of demands, including remunerative prices for onions, cotton, soyabean, tur, green gram, milk, and hirda. The farmers are seeking Rs 2,000 per quintal for onions, an immediate subsidy of Rs 600 per quintal, along with change in export policies.
One of the major onion producers in the country, Maharashtra has seen a drastic fall in onion prices over the past few days. While onion prices in the beginning of February were pegged at Rs 1,100-1,150 per quintal, they are around Rs 700 per quintal now.
On Monday, Chief Minister Eknath Shinde announced Rs 300 per quintal ex-gratia subsidy to affected onion farmers. “There is a bumper crop of red onions in the market now. This is the prime reason for the fall of prices. This is a perishable crop so it does not come under the minimum price act. The state government has appointed a committee to find solutions to the issue, and it has suggested per quintal financial help,” he said in the Assembly.
It was due to the clout Gavit wields as a farmer leader in the state that the CPI(M) made him the face of the Kisan Long March in March 2018 when, under the Devendra Fadnavis-led BJP-Shiv Sena government, over 40,000 farmers covered the same Nashik-Mumbai distance on foot over agrarian issues.
As the marchers arrived in Mumbai, the Fadnavis government gave an assurance to accept their demands, including clearing pending appeals in connection to applications for titles to forest land.
A year later, in March 2019, Gavit again led a march of farmers from Nashik (Dindori specifically) to Mumbai, stating that the government had failed to adhere to its promises.
This march, though, was called off after 13 km, following deliberations with the Fadnavis government. Gavit and the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) said the state government had again promised to meet their demands, and also said that unlike last year, it would hold a review meeting every two months to monitor implementation of the promises.
While these two agitations made Gavit a household name in the state, his own political career hit a roadblock after his 2019 Assembly poll defeat.
Now, embarking on his third Nashik-to-Mumbai march, Gavit has claimed they will not relent until all their demands are actually met.
Born to landless labourers in Surgana, Gavit gave up his studies at a college in Aurangabad mid-way and returned home when the state was hit by a massive drought in 1972.
He subsequently took up work as a mukadam, a job akin to a foreman maintaining payment records of tribal workers at a unit.
Gavit says it made him realise how the tribal workers were exploited. “While on books a worker was to be paid a certain amount, in reality he would be paid less than half. I had been a student of Milind College set up by Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar. That institution had revolutionary fervour which had rubbed off on me. It was in this period that I studied Marxism.”
He subsequently started organising tribal workers to fight for their rights. A few years later, he formally made an entry into the CPI(M) and, in 1975, the party fielded him from Surgana.
Gavit’s first electoral success came in 1978, at the age of 29, though the win was diabolical. With 13 other candidates in the fray from Surgana, Gavit won getting just 7,527 votes of the total 48,302 – or less than one-sixth, meaning he too lost his election deposit like the other candidates.
Gavit would win consistently from Surgana after that, winning seven of 10 Assembly elections (losing in 2004, 2009 and then 2019).
The CPI(M)’s dominance in the seat is due to Gavit’s uncontested popularity in the area. His supporters also credit him with being the driving force behind the effective implementation of the Forest Rights Act in the state.
Maharashtra has so far distributed over one lakh titles under this Act. Over 20,000 of these titles have been granted in the Surgana Kalwan belt alone, largely due to Gavit’s efforts.
