The Land Rights Movements By Dalit Collectives In Punjab

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The continuing land-rights movements by Dalit collectives in Punjab

October 23, 2024

The popular perceptions of Punjab and its contiguous agrarian expanses often evoke narratives of bountiful harvests, high wages, comfortable standards of living, high levels of mechanisation, market-governed cultivation, and regular displays of affluence—an overall oasis of prosperity that delivers economic salvation. Moreover, an oasis that also helps feed multiple states, while keeping India’s granaries stocked up for future contingencies. With a culture that revels in merry-making and extravagance, these narratives are reinforced and propagated by the entertainment industry. Hardly ever, however, do these images of Punjab bring into focus its dark-skinned Dalit natives, who have spilled their sweat and blood at the fields of the fairer, well-to-do, landed castes for generations, creating and enhancing their wealth and property. Those who hold sway in the state, along with the upper and backward castes, are the Jatts, a dominant, agrarian community who constitute just about 27 percent of the state’s populace, and…

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Prashant Rahi

Prashant Rahi is an electrical and systems engineer, who completed his education from IIT, BHU, before eventually becoming a journalist for about a decade in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. He was the Chairperson for Human Rights and Democracy at the annual Indian Social Science Congresses held between 2011 and 2013, contributing to the theorisation of social activists’ and researchers’ experiences. Rahi devoted the greater part of his time and energy for revolutionary democratic changes as a grassroots activist with various collectives. For seven years, he worked as a Correspondent for The Statesman, chronicling the Uttarakhand statehood movement, while also participating in it. He has also contributed political articles for Hindi periodicals including Blitz, Itihasbodh, Samkaleen Teesri Duniya, Samayantar and Samkaleem Hastakshep. From his first arrest in 2007 December in a fake case, where he was charged as the key organiser of an imagined Maoist training camp in a forest area of Uttarakhand, to his release in March 2024 in the well-known GN Saibaba case, Rahi has been hounded as a prominent Maoist by the state for all of 17 years. In 2024, he joined The Polis Project as a roving reporter, focusing on social movements.