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Topic Discussed: The Hindu Notes of 12th January 2019

• No freedom without equality at Sabarimala
• Hurrying through a legislation
• Disquieting decision
• Wall of shame
• Meghalaya’s rat hole traps

No freedom without equality at Sabarimala

Freedom of religion means the right to practise one’s own religion, not the freedom to undermine fundamental rights

When Bindu Ammini and Kanakadurga’s entry into the Ayyappa Temple at Sabarimala on January 2 elicited a ‘purification ritual’ from the shrine’s priests (picture), one was reminded of the purification of the Chavdar Tank at Mahad in 1927, following B.R. Ambedkar’s satyagraha for ‘Untouchables’ to drink water there. Brahmins from the area poured 108 earthen vessels of panchagavya, five organic substances associated with the holy cow, including its milk, urine and dung, into the tank to undo the supposedly “polluting” effects of close to 10,000 Mahars drinking the water.

The memory of Mahad

Ambedkar’s Mahad satyagraha had two chapters, on March 19-20, 1927 and on December 25, 1927. The symbolism of mass drinking of the water, with Ambedkar himself taking the first sip, was akin to an act of civil disobedience. Both were carefully planned, peaceful and disciplined protests, and yet were violently disrupted. Mobs, rioters and police colluded to attack and disperse the Mahar satyagrahis; the local British administration ended up siding with the Hindu hardliners under the guise of not wanting to hurt the religious sentiments of this socially dominant and politically powerful group.

“The orthodox Hindu is a strange fossil of humanity,” wrote Dhananjay Keer, Ambedkar’s biographer, narrating the events at Mahad. At that time Ambedkar’s efforts were focussed on claiming that the tank was a public resource and drawing water from it was a basic human right for ‘Untouchables’ as much as for others. He was not interested in entering the Veereshwar Temple nearby. But he did play a role in temple entry satyagrahas at the Parvati Temple in Pune in 1929 and the Kalaram Temple in Nasik from 1930 to 1934.

All these campaigns ultimately failed: upper castes pushed back using Brahmin strictures of adhikar (entitlement) and bahishkar (exclusion), arguments from private property, outright physical violence, as well as the law and order machinery of the colonial state to keep Dalits out. Adding insult to injury, first they performed purification rituals, then they obtained stay orders from government authorities, and later they filed legal cases. At no point did they hesitate to use tactics of intimidation.

At Mahad, Ambedkar endorsed the Gandhian language of satyagraha. He was inspired by a recent struggle in the princely state of Travancore, where the reformists T.K. Madhavan and K.P. Kesava Menon led a movement in 1924 to allow the extremely stigmatised castes of Ezhavas and Pulayas to worship at a Shiva Temple in Vaikom. In historian Ramachandra Guha’s telling, it was a rare moment in modern India’s history when progressive and dissenting voices, from distinct political streams and different regional backgrounds, rose together as one. Vaikom saw a convergence of Kerala’s Sri Narayana Guru, Tamil leader E.V. Ramasamy “Periyar”, and Mahatma Gandhi himself, who asked Namboodiri Brahmins point blank to explain their refusal to allow devotees from these castes to worship at their temple.

But a decade later, Ambedkar was disgusted by the resilience of caste discrimination, terminally alienated from Gandhi on the question of Untouchability, and disillusioned about the political efficacy of satyagraha. At the end of his tether, in Yeola outside Nasik in October 1935 he declared that he was born a Hindu but would not die one. He abandoned the logic of his own earlier position on tank and temple entry, and decided instead that he did not want any part of a religious system and its attendant social structure that would simply never let go hierarchical and discriminatory principles to affirm the claim for equality, dignity and respect for all.

Different discriminations

Apart from the reactionary impulse to “purify” what has been sullied by the proposition of equality, Sabarimala is and is not like Mahad. True, a specific group is targeted for exclusion in both cases: women of ages 10-50 (deemed reproductively active) at the Ayyappa Temple, and Dalits at the Chavdar Tank nearly a century ago. But in today’s India, Article 14 of the Constitution guarantees equality, and the Supreme Court verdict of September 2018 further reiterates that females of any age have the right to perform the 41-day pilgrimage and worship at the Sabarimala shrine.

Fittingly, as the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, it is precisely Ambedkar’s momentous intervention in our life as a nation that gives us an egalitarian Constitution and a strong judiciary. He did not have these institutions to back him up during his own shattering struggle against caste, but he ensured that Untouchability was outlawed, and that equal citizenship and fundamental rights — regardless of gender or community — were enshrined in the charter document of the Indian Republic. The historic precedent of Vaikom, together with the gains of decades of progressive politics in postcolonial Kerala, make the resurgence of religious orthodoxy, caste mentality and misogynistic patriarchy at Sabarimala hard to swallow.

The 5-million strong, 620 km “Wall of Women” on New Year’s Day saw Kerala’s women asking for the right to worship Ayyappa like their male counterparts. Was this wall in 2019 like the “Walk on Mahad” in 1927? Yes, in a certain sense. Ambedkar’s procession leading thousands of Mahars on March 20, 1927 gave “a new turn to the history of India”, wrote R.B. More, the main organiser of the Mahad satyagraha. Thirty years later, in Nagpur in October 1956, Ambedkar led half a million Dalits to convert to Buddhism. He wanted them to leave behind their Hindu identity and with it the caste system that discriminated against them.

But women — whether in Kerala or elsewhere — cannot “convert” en masse out of their religious background because of aspects of patriarchal tradition that oppress them qua women. Gender and caste are both definitely grounds of discrimination in Hindu society, but they do not occasion similar responses from those who are at the receiving end. Hindus who disagree with caste can embrace Buddhism, emulating Ambedkar’s example, but what are women supposed to do? India’s feminist movement, Kerala’s long engagement with Communism and the verdict of the Supreme Court all offer different avenues to women seeking justice at Sabarimala. However, a radical resort to Ambedkarite religious conversion does not seem to make sense in this situation.

Reform and renewal

In Sabarimala the Bharatiya Janata Party and Sangh Parivar are stoking the fires of religious conservatism, and acting against the interests of women. This is only to be expected of the right-wing Hindu nationalist political platform that is thoroughly reactionary. What is so disappointing is that even the Congress has taken a regressive stand on this issue, with prominent leaders in Kerala claiming that they are torn between two equally strong constitutional principles — Article 14 guaranteeing equality and Article 25 guaranteeing freedom of religion. To make this argument is to display a basic misunderstanding equally of the Constitution and of Hinduism.

Freedom of religion means the freedom to practise and pursue one’s own religion, not the freedom to undermine the fundamental rights of others. Nor does freedom of religion warrant contravening the writ of the Supreme Court, which explicitly grants women the right to worship at Sabarimala. Hinduism as a faith is capacious, inherently diverse and continually evolving, with strong themes of self-criticism, self-correction and self-improvement written into it. This is particularly true in southern India, where inspiring figures like Andal and Nandanar, Chokhamela and Kanakadasa, Basavanna and Akka Mahadevi, Ayyankali and Narayana Guru challenged the bounds of orthodoxy, broke the rules of caste and gender, and triggered popular movements of reform and renaissance over centuries.

Fellow citizens of all religious persuasions are as much the heirs of these dissenting, progressive and indeed provocative traditions from the deep past, as they are the children of a modern-day enlightenment brought about by Gandhi and Ambedkar. We owe it to ourselves as democratic Indians to throw open the doors of the Ayyappa Temple to all those who wish to enter and worship there.

Ananya Vajpeyi is a Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies,

New Delhi

Hurrying through a legislation

The passage of the quota Bill highlights grave gaps in India’s parliamentary procedures

Parliament ended the penultimate session of this Lok Sabha with both Houses passing the Constitution (124th Amendment) Bill, 2019, that enables 10% reservation in education and employment for economically weaker sections. The process by which this was done illustrates the collective failure of parliamentarians to review the government’s proposals and hold it to account.

Hasty steps

Let us review the sequence of events. On Monday (January 7), it was reported that the Cabinet had approved a Bill to provide reservation to poor candidates regardless of their caste, and that this would be introduced in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday, the last day of the winter session. News reports also suggested that the Rajya Sabha would extend its session by a day, so that this Bill could be discussed on Wednesday. There was no formal press release by the Press Information Bureau.

The rules of procedure of the Lok Sabha require every Bill to be circulated at least two days ahead of introduction. This is to give time for MPs to read the Bill and discuss it (or make objections) when the vote on the motion to introduce the Bill is taken up. This Bill was not circulated, even on Tuesday morning. At 11 a.m., when unstarred questions are tabled, one question concerned whether the government was “exploring the scope of providing reservation for poor candidates from forward communities for education and employment” and the details. The Ministry categorically denied that there was any such proposal under consideration. Then at 12.46 p.m., the Bill was introduced, with copies having been circulated to MPs a few minutes earlier.

The usual practice is to refer Bills to the respective standing committee of Parliament. This step allows MPs to solicit public feedback and interact with experts before forming their recommendations. In the case of this Constitution Amendment — clearly one with far-reaching implications — this scrutiny mechanism was bypassed.

The debate started around 5 p.m., just a few hours MPs had been given a copy. The debate ended around 10 p.m.

Meanwhile, the Rajya Sabha hardly functioned that day due to repeated disruptions. Finally, the chair adjourned the House till the next day — the first official indication that the sitting was extended by a day. The next day, Wednesday, the Rajya Sabha took up consideration of the Bill around 2 p.m. and ended the debate just past 10 p.m. A motion was moved by some members to refer the Bill to a select committee, but this motion was defeated by a wide margin, and the Bill was then passed.

Let us summarise the number of ways in which due oversight was skipped. The Bill was not circulated ahead of being introduced, it was not examined by a committee, there was hardly any time between its introduction and final discussion. Barring a few small parties, none of the larger Opposition parties asked for the Bill to be carefully considered by a parliamentary committee — even in the Rajya Sabha where they might have been able to muster the numbers to ensure this.

The British contrast

Contrast this with the incidents in the British Parliament the same day (Wednesday) when the Speaker ensured parliamentary supremacy over the government. A member of the ruling Conservative Party wanted to move an amendment to set a deadline for the Prime Minister to put forward new plans if she loses the Brexit vote next week. When the government objected that such amendments to set the business of the government in the House can be moved only by a Minister, the Speaker differed. He said that every member had a right to move an amendment. The motion was won by 308 votes to 297.

This case highlights three important ways in which the British Parliament works better than ours. First, the absence of an anti-defection law, so that each MP can vote her conscience. Note that the motion that put the government in a spot was moved by a former attorney general and a member of the ruling party. Second, it is known exactly how each MP voted. In India, most votes (other than Constitution Amendments that need a two-thirds majority to pass) are through voice votes — just 7% of other Bills had a recorded vote over the last 10 years. Third, the Speaker insisted on the supremacy of Parliament, and allowed a motion against the wishes of the government. Unlike in India, the independence of the Speaker is secured in the U.K. as no party contests against the Speaker in the next general election.

Parliament has a central role to secure the interest of citizens. It is the primary body of accountability that translates the wishes and aspirations of citizens into appropriate laws and policies.

Falling short

However, our Parliament often falls short of these goals due to some structural reasons. These include the anti-defection law (that restrains MPs from voting according to their conscience), lack of recorded voting as a norm (which reduces the accountability of the MP as voters don’t know which way they voted on each issue), party affiliation of the Speaker (making her dependent on the party leadership for re-election prospects), frequent bypassing of committees (just 25% of Bills have been referred to committees in this Lok Sabha), insufficient time and research support to examine Bills, and the lack of a calendar (Parliament is held at the convenience of the government). We need to address each of these issues to strengthen Parliament and protect our democracy.

Disquieting decision

The unseemly tussle in the CBI’s top echelons reaches an unsatisfactory end

The removal of Alok Verma as Director of the Central Bureau of Investigation is a disconcerting denouement to an unseemly episode. The controversy that began with a public tussle between Mr. Verma and Special Director Rakesh Asthana has ended with the former’s removal, although it is couched as a transfer. It was obvious from the beginning that the government did not want him to continue, although it sought to give the impression that it was being even-handed in asking both Mr. Verma and Mr. Asthana to proceed on leave. Mr. Verma’s transfer has exposed an uncomfortable truth — that the legal protection for the CBI Director from external interference is not as strong as some had believed. The Supreme Court’s judgment makes it clear that as long as such transfers follow a set procedure, the incumbent may be replaced. Though the court declared that no authority, other than the high-powered selection committee, could transfer him, its reinstatement of Mr. Verma was not unconditional. It asked the committee — comprising the Prime Minister, the Chief Justice of India, and the leader of the largest Opposition party — to decide on whether he should be divested of his powers. The government quickly convened a meeting, which was attended by Justice A.K. Sikri, as the nominee of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi. Despite a dissenting note by Mallikarjun Kharge, the majority, that is, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Justice Sikri, ordered Mr. Verma’s transfer.

Questions have been raised about the committee refusing Mr. Verma a personal hearing. The panel apparently chose not to hear him on the ground that the Central Vigilance Commissioner, who held an inquiry on the Supreme Court’s earlier orders, had heard him in the presence of the retired judge, Justice A.K. Patnaik, a supervisor appointed by the court, and that the prima facie findings against Mr. Verma were enough to conclude that he should not remain in that office. As he was neither suspended nor transferred, but only given a post of equal rank, there was no need for a hearing. Even if this position is not strictly untenable from a legal standpoint, it has serious implications for the CBI’s independence. Future regimes may use this precedent to get such an adverse report against an inconvenient director and unseat him. Mr. Kharge’s demand for getting Mr. Verma’s response should have been considered. Mr. Verma has claimed that the CVC report was based only on the complainant’s charges against him, and did not represent the CVC’s ‘findings’. An important learning from the entire episode is that the bipartisan appointment process for the post with the presence of a high judicial functionary as envisaged by the 2003 amendments may not be enough to thwart political stratagems. Far from resolving the institutional crisis in the agency, the outcome may have deeply politicised it.

Wall of shame

The shutdown over the Mexico wall demand will long define Donald Trump’s presidency

It began as a populist campaign promise that brought President Donald Trump’s supporters cheering to their feet and paved the way for his election. Now, the border wall with Mexico has become a morass of partisan bickering that has stalemated the U.S. federal government into a three-week-long shutdown, leaving nearly 800,000 public sector workers furloughed without pay. At the heart of this political crisis is the increasingly bitter polarisation of public opinion over immigration. On the one hand, Mr. Trump has steadily contributed to the strident and crude anti-migrant rhetoric, characterising prospective migrants from Latin America as drug-dealers, rapists and violent criminals and shutting down the U.S. border to travellers from certain Muslim-majority countries. On the other, his insistence that he will not sign any appropriations bill to break the funding logjam in Congress and end what could soon become the longest shutdown in U.S. history, unless that bill includes $5.7 billion in financing for a border wall, has gone down badly with Democrats, who control the House. Matters took a darker turn as Mr. Trump doubled down on his refusal to negotiate over funding for the wall and said he may declare a state of national emergency over this uncomfortable status quo.

There are disquieting questions about the veracity of some of Mr. Trump’s claims: migrant border crossings have been in decline for the best part of two decades; it is through legal ports of entry and not unauthorised crossing points that hard drugs such as heroin enter the U.S.; and even the State Department has admitted that no terror operatives have entered the U.S. through Mexico. Then there is the more blatantly flawed reasoning touted by the President that “Mexico will pay” for the wall. Now it appears that even Mr. Trump is backing down on his claim, arguing that Mexico would only “indirectly” fund it through trade deals. It is well-known that only corporations pay tariffs under these deals, not governments, and hence no such payment will come from Mexico. Even as the acerbic back-and-forth between Mr. Trump and Congressional Democrats continues, the deeper malaise is a profound disagreement among Americans on what their nation’s very soul stands for. Is the U.S. truly a melting pot, a country built on the prowess of entrepreneurship and technology, in large part driven by immigrants seeking the “American dream”? Or is it a declining world power that has squandered too much to other nations and peoples and is readying itself for an uncompromising battle to claw back what it reckons it has lost? If it is the latter, then we could expect Mr. Trump’s vision to succeed, but if not, a course correction is in order.

Meghalaya’s rat hole traps

As efforts are under way to reach 15 miners trapped in an illegal coal pit in Meghalaya since December 13, the tragedy puts the spotlight on the dark underbelly of coal mining in the State, despite a ban by the National Green Tribunal. Rahul Karmakar reports

It was the compensation cheque, for ₹1 lakh, that convinced Solibar Rahman, 64, that he would never see his 20-year-old son, Monirul Islam, ever again. Monirul is one of the 15 miners trapped in a coal mine barely 2 ft wide — hence called a ‘rat hole’ — in Meghalaya since December 13.

There has been no official word on the fate of the miners. If he had had to make a choice, rather than the modest compensation, Rahman would have preferred a “more valuable” death certificate. He and two others, Md. Abdul Mian and Abdul Salam, whose sons are also trapped in the same mine, had travelled 330 km from their villages in western Assam to Khliehriat in Meghalaya to collect the cheques, which were handed to them on January 7. The return trip, in a hired car, cost them ₹12,000.

Khliehriat, which is Meghalaya’s coal trade hub, is the headquarters of East Jaintia Hills district (EJH), which also has the most mineral resources among the eight mining districts of the northeastern State.

Says Rahman, “This cheque means the value of my son’s life was a mere ₹1 lakh. I had earned more in my last year at a coal mine in 2012.” In April 17, 2014, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) had banned rat-hole coal mining in Meghalaya, but conditionally allowed transportation of extracted coal. Rahman was among the first in Bogidari, one of 22 villages in the flood-prone Bhangnamari village in Assam’s Chirang district, to have worked in the coal mines of EJH. Bhangnamari is about 140 km west of Guwahati.

A bad crop on a small farm and mounting interest on a loan taken from the local mahajan, or moneylender, had forced Rahman to venture out of his village in 1983. A recruitment agent working for coal mine owners introduced Rahman to Mookhain in EJH. Rahman earned enough money to repay the loan and sustain his large family for a few months. His experience marked the beginning of a trend that saw men in the villages of Assam take loans to escape poverty, grow a crop if they had some land, and take a bus to the mines when the yield was low. They would crawl into rat holes and take on the back-breaking job of cutting coal for about 180 days. The wages enabled them to repay their loans. It was not long before Bogidari and adjoining villages became a regular source of labourers for the mines.

But this trend came to an abrupt end with the NGT ban. Now the hunt for employment took scores of Bhangnamari’s men — who had the mines to fall back on in times of need — to stone-crushing units in far away Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan and Gujarat.

Says Taijuddin Ahmed, ward member of Nizdamugaon near Bogidari: “At least 200 men from our villages have died of tuberculosis and breathing complications after working in these stone-crushing units. The wages were also much lower than in coal-mining. When they came back to their villages, many decided to go back to the mines, thinking that these were a better option compared to dying a thousand deaths elsewhere.” Ahmed’s brother-in-law, Amir Hussain, is among the 15 miners trapped in the 380 ft deep mine at Ksan, near Lumthari village in EJH district. Officials say the miners must have either hit an aquifer or the wall of an adjoining abandoned water-filled mine, causing the ‘hole’ to get flooded.

Blackmailed

Rahman knows that the ₹1 lakh he received on day 26 of the mining accident will not last long. Much of it will go into repaying the interest and principal of a ₹30,000 loan that Monirul had taken from a small bank last year for a farm project that failed to take off.

Monirul would probably have been alive today had the sirdar (mine manager or supervisor) of another mine not withheld his payment for the two months he had worked. Miners are paid on a weekly basis, but Monirul had opted to take his wages all together. Says Manik Ali, Monirul’s elder brother: “I forced him to return when I visited him in Meghalaya two months ago. I was scared when I saw the working conditions. There was no coal left in the mine he was working in, and the sirdar was pressurising him to work in another mine. He let my brother go, but said his dues would be cleared only if he came back and worked.”

The sirdar, a man named Mahesh from Mankachar in Assam, has not been seen since the tragedy at Ksan. According to Nizdamugaon’s Saheb Ali, one of five survivors of the December 13 disaster, they were not even supposed to be working in the Ksan mine in the first place. He says, “We needed a vehicle to move our belongings to the new location that Mahesh had taken us to earlier, but he diverted the mini-truck to a jungle atop a hill. We had no option but to work.”

In the two mining seasons that he worked — typically from October to March, but invariably stretched by greed — Saheb never knew who the owner of the mine was. It is a rule: nobody asks questions. Says Manik, “Monirul rang me on December 12, a day before all communication was lost. He said he had to work one more day for the weekly payment, and would return home with a little more than ₹30,000. In a way, I am responsible for his death.”

Jrin Shullet, 32, is the owner of the mine that devoured the 15 workers. From Narwan village, an hour’s drive from the Ksan mine, he is listed as a coal miner in the ‘Directory of Establishments’ in Meghalaya’s Sixth Economic Census, 2013 for establishments having eight or more workers. He was arrested a few days after the accident. His partner and mine manager, James Sukhlain, is absconding.

Though Monirul and the 14 others are still officially only ‘trapped’, the EJH administration, in its SOS letter of December 13 to the National Disaster Response Force, said that “efforts are being made to recover the dead bodies by pumping the water with the help of generators”. Manik, too, speaks of his brother’s death, as he knows that no trapped miner has ever come out alive from a rat hole in Meghalaya.

After receiving the compensation cheque at the Deputy Commissioner’s office in Khliehriat, Abdul Mian, 60, wondered when his son, Md Saher Islam, would be declared “officially” dead. Khliehriat is 45 km from where his son remains trapped. He says, “I had gone to the doctors and officials in Chirang district seeking a death certificate. They said they were helpless as he had died in Meghalaya. My son took a loan to pay the labourers after having sunk ₹4 lakh in a disastrous bamboo business. The bank said the loan would be waived if I can produce a death certificate.”

Ending up nameless

The EJH district authorities are not clear about the formality. Says Deputy Commissioner Federick M. Dopth: “We are waiting for the rescue operation to end. Let us concentrate on the work at hand. Everything will be done as admissible.” Veteran miners of Bhangnamari such as Md Hussain Sheikh, 48, know that it will not be easy to get a death certificate. Even before the December 13 disaster, there was a long history of coal mine workers dying without a name. For instance, 15 labourers each had died in the flooded mines of Meghalaya’s Garo Hills area in 1992 and in 2012.

Says Sheikh: “Apart from flooding, there is also the danger of the rat holes collapsing. But the risk in those days was less because the coal seams were closer to the surface. Money was also better in those days. You could make ₹250 per gaari (wheelbarrow) of coal then, compared to ₹150-170 now. The payment decreased after rat-hole mining was declared illegal.”

It is not only miners who die in these mine shafts. According to Balios Swer, president of the Jaintia Coal Miners and Dealers Association, there are about 60,000 mines spread across 360 villages in the EJH.

Says environment activist Brian Kharpran Daly of the Meghalaya Adventurers’ Association (MAA): “There are thousands of huge holes, 90-100 m deep, all over the place. They just leave them like that after extracting all the coal. Many children and livestock have fallen in these mines and died. But there are no complaints lodged because the coal barons are too powerful and everyone is scared.”

Daly says that the December 13 incident, like most mine accidents, would have remained unreported had it not been for the fact that three of the trapped miners, Shalabas Dkhar, Dimonme Dkhar and Melambok Dkhar, are locals from Lumthari village. He adds, “In the pre-ban days, when coal was available closer to the surface, all the miners were ‘outsiders’ from Assam, Nepal and even Bangladesh. So they died nameless and nobody cared. But things have changed. The mines have poisoned the land, forcing even the local villagers to work there.”

A woman from Lumthari village, who does not want to be identified, says that the Lytein River valley used to be a productive paddy-growing area until 15 years ago. But today she barely ekes out a livelihood, breaking slabs of limestone. This is equally damaging to the environment but it is not illegal. The Jaintia Hills, especially West Jaintia Hills district, are rich in limestone too.

Says Daly: “The whole valley has become acidic, like a desert. Mining has robbed the poor villagers of their farmlands. There are no trees around, hardly any birds, only shrubs that you associate mostly with barren land, as the topsoil has disappeared. Worse, all the water sources in Jaintia Hills are polluted. The toxic cocktail unleashed by coal and limestone mining and the cement plants has turned the rivers either orange-yellow or a sickly blue.”

The Meghalaya Pollution Control Board, in its report of 2008 titled ‘Investigation Report on the Contamination of the Lukha River’, had blamed toxic effluents from the mines and cement plants for the death of the Lukha as well as Lunar rivers. The cement plants began large-scale limestone mining and production activities in the area in 2007, when the Northeast Industrial Policy that offered tax holidays brought investors to the State.

The NGT’s order banning rat-hole mining came after the All Dimasa Students’ Union in neighbouring Assam filed a petition stating that the non-treatment of toxic discharge from the coal mines of Meghalaya was polluting streams and rivers downstream in Assam. Their petition was based on a study by O.P. Singh, a faculty member at the North-Eastern Hill University in Shillong, Meghalaya’s capital.

Meghalaya and Bangladesh too are suffering. For instance, Kharkhana, in West Jaintia Hills district on the Bangladesh border, used to be a fishing village. Says Daly, “Today not even a tadpole is there in the river that flows into Bangladesh, which is also bearing the brunt of mining-induced pollution.”

What fast-tracked the NGT ban was the presumed death of 15 miners at Nengkol in Meghalaya’s South Garo Hills district on July 6, 2012. A petition by Impulse, a Shillong-based non-governmental organisation, claimed that the mines employed 70,000 children. This, too, had influenced the NGT, though the State government maintains that a survey found only 222 child labourers. Children are preferred because their smaller physique makes them ideal to navigate the narrow rat holes from where the coal has to be dug out manually. Former miners says the burrows are pitch dark, the ground slippery with constant water seepage, and stale toxic air makes it difficult to breathe inside.

Resource curse

Coal-mining has been taking place in Meghalaya since the 1840s, but production accelerated from the 1980s. The Meghalaya government’s latest estimates put the State’s coal reserves at 576.48 million tonnes, though only 133.13 million tonnes are classified as ‘proved’. The coal boom in Meghalaya saw annual production rise from 39,000 tonnes in 1979 to 5 million tonnes in 2014. Unlike open-cast mining in central India, rat-hole mining involves side-cutting — tunnelling in from a hill slope — or digging pits into the hills until miners hit a seam of coal. The tunnels are then made from the bottom of the pit, where the extracted coal is collected and hauled up by cranes. In the shallower ‘traditional’ mines, labourers carried coal in conical bamboo baskets using makeshift wooden stairs.

Sheikh, who had worked in the mines for 12 years until 2012, says that certain precautionary measures were taken in the pre-ban days. He says, “Water is always there in the mines. My job was to get into a rat-hole four-five hours before the coal-cutters went in, and pump out the water. The pump would be turned off only after the miners left.”

Says Sheikh, “They [rescue agencies working at the Ksan mine since December 30] can keep dewatering, but the flow will not stop as thousands of mines are interconnected because of the labyrinthine tunnels.”

“It is like an ocean underneath,” adds Daly.

Activists says that all the seams in the Jaintia Hills were exhausted a decade ago. So the mine owners are now exploring remote forest areas that were once out of bounds. Only a handful of rich coal barons can afford the machines that can dig deeper. The illegality of the whole exercise has let them throw caution to the winds.

A Citizen’s Report (prepared by civil society groups in Meghalaya and submitted to the Supreme Court a month after activists Agnes Kharshiing and Amita Sangma survived an attack by the ‘coal mafia’ in November) observes that the State’s mineral wealth has been a curse. It says: “Coal mining in Meghalaya operates as a ‘shadow’ economy, wherein district councils, traders’ associations, armed extortionists and insurgents, various tiers of government, border security forces (in the case of exports to Bangladesh), and even weigh bridge and toll gate operators have long operated with legal impunity — that is, until the 2014 NGT ban.” It blames loopholes in the Sixth Schedule and the land tenure system. Miners and local councils have allegedly been using exemptions given to tribal people (under the Sixth Schedule) to justify rampant mining.

The government has control over only 5% of Meghalaya’s land, with the rest being either community or privately owned.

Says Kharshiing, who has been documenting illegal coal mining and transportation: “Earlier, people used to mine their own land. As the trade boomed, rich miners took lands on lease and ended up owning mine after mine. Today, they are openly flouting the ban to mine fresh coal and passing it off as coal extracted before the ban.”

While imposing the ban, the NGT had allowed miners to transport an estimated 1.76 million tonnes of extracted coal. But traders are alleged to have transported 5.5 million tonnes, because of nine extensions of the deadline, the last of which expires on January 31.

Says Dolly Khonglah, a former coal exporter: “The coal extracted before the ban was exhausted long ago. But the mining is still going on in broad daylight because of the nexus between miners, politicians and administrators. This needs to be stopped immediately.”

Catch-22 situation

Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K. Sangma’s ruling National People’s Party (a Bharatiya Janata Party ally) had promised before the Assembly polls in 2018 to get coal mining back on track. He believes that Meghalaya needs regulated and safe mining to generate livelihoods. His government had challenged the NGT ban in the Supreme Court last November.

Congress MP Vincent H. Pala, among a dozen politicians named in the Citizen’s Report as coal mine owners, also wants coal-mining to continue with regulations. He says, “The ban was unfair to Meghalaya, where the topography necessitates a different type of mining.”

Former State Chief Minister Mukul Sangma had earlier said the ban was costing the State ₹600 crore in annual revenue. Balios Swer adds that mining has been sustaining lakhs of people directly and indirectly. “The ban has virtually destroyed the local economy,” he says.

Says Daly: “It is a catch-22 situation. The State is addicted to mining. People think they will be doomed if they stop, but they will not live long if they continue. Since they are going to mine anyway, it might as well be legal. But for that the State needs a proper mining policy which needs to be enforced strictly.” Activists say enforcement is lax because it is the coal money that funds elections and runs the State machinery.

Daly’s adventure group had, in 2007, petitioned the Supreme Court for a mining policy to protect Meghalaya’s cave systems from unregulated mining. He says, “Now it is 2019 and there is still no policy. This has come back to haunt us, with ordinary people vanishing in the mine shafts.”

But the last word is Rahman’s: “I am hoping that my son’s body will be found so that he can get a decent burial. The rat hole is not the place for him.” As he waits, his thoughts drift to the 20 men from Bhangnamari currently digging for coal near Ksan. “The least that mine owners can do is to follow some safety measures so that the sons of other fathers don’t end up the same way.”