An analysis on the current economical situation of Jats in Haryana
Beyond reservations: Haryana's Jats believe the ground is slipping beneath their feet
http://scroll.in/article/754203/beyo...ath-their-feet
Close on the heels of the Patels of Gujarat, the Jats of Haryana could renew their protests for OBC reservations.
Supriya Sharma · Sep 12, 2015 · 09:10 am
Photo Credit: Supriya Sharma
Fifty kilometres west of Delhi, in the district of Jhajjar in Haryana, a group of young men in bright coloured sneakers were running on a highway that cut through fields of millet and paddy. Driving past them in his white-coloured hatchback was Bharpoor Singh Jakhar, the district president of the Adarsh Jat Mahasabha, a community organisation of Jats. "Our boys aren’t running for fun or fitness," he said wryly. "They are running for jobs.”
The Jats are an agrarian middle caste that dominates the political and economic life of Haryana and parts of western Uttar Pradesh. Despite this, they have come to believe that they are lagging behind others.
“Our boys train hard because they know the only jobs they can get are those in the armed forces and the only quota they can avail is the sports quota," said Jakhar, a middle-aged man with a long face that ends in a beard.
Like the Patidars of Gujarat, Jats want to be counted among the Other Backward Classes. From 2009, when the Adarsh Jat Mahasabha first made this demand, they have mounted several agitations asking for a share in OBC quotas in government jobs and educational institutions. In March 2014, three days before the announcement of the national elections, the United Progressive Alliance government approved the inclusion of Jats in the Central OBC list for nine states in North India, despite the National Commission for Backward Classes recommending against it. One year later, in March 2015, the Supreme Court struck down the decision, holding that the commission's advice was binding and the government had no valid reason to go against it.
Since then, the Jats have been restless. Now, bolstered by the Patidar agitation in Gujarat, they have begun to mobilise again. The All India Jat Aarakshan Sangarsh Samiti is threatening to hold street demonstrations in September. A fringe group that also calls itself the Adarsh Jat Mahasabha (even though Jakhad’s group holds the official name) has called for the formation of balidani daste or sacrifice squads made up of young people who will be given commando training by retired army personnel.
Protests planned
On Saturday, Jat leaders from several states and political parties are expected to meet in Delhi to discuss their strategy. But Jakhar and his colleagues across North India plan to burn effigies of these leaders – in Jhajjar, it will be the effigy of Deepender Hooda, the local MP and the son of the former chief minister. (Incidentally, most chief ministers of Haryana have been Jats).
"If Jat leaders really wanted to get us reservations, they would have done things differently," Jakhar said. "They rushed the proposal through the commission and did not wrest a favourable report, and deliberately took a decision in a manner that made it look suspect.”
But do the Jats really deserve reservations? For a moment, Jakhad hesitated. “All those who work in agriculture require reservations,” he said. Though his family cultivates four acres of land and he is nominally a farmer, Jakhar is essentially an entrepreneur. The only one of his siblings to have more than a school education, he owns a furniture store in the town, a shop in the local agricultural mandi, and also dabbles in the real-estate business. By moving beyond agriculture, he has escaped the primary source of insecurity in his community. His individual trajectory is a good starting point to understand Jat angst.
Bharpoor Singh Jakhar outside his furniture store in Jhajjar town.
The crisis of agriculture
The village of Talao lies three kilometres from Jhajjar town. Jakhad’s father owned 16 acres of land here, which he cultivated with a pair of bullocks that he shared with his neighbour. All four sons helped the father. Jakhar, however, also took out time to study.
Despite the limited resources, the family's income rose steadily through the seventies and eighties. Those were the decades when, like the Patidars in Gujarat, the Jats were at the forefront of an astonishing rise in agricultural productivity. “If Patels led India’s milk revolution, the Jats led the green revolution,” said Himanshu, an Associate Professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at the Jawaharlal Nehru University.
But the green revolution model of input-intensive farming ended up yoking the farmers to an increasingly uncertain market. Over the past two decades, the withdrawal of the state and the ascendance of the market has meant that the cost of inputs – seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, diesel for irrigation pumps – has kept climbing, even as government support in purchasing the harvests has declined.
Earlier this year, Haryana witnessed fertiliser riots – farmers queued up for days for subsidised fertiliser; when the stocks did not come, they went on a rampage in some places. “This is the only community that needs to stand in a queue, both when it buys, and when it sells,” said Jakhar.
Exacerbating the crisis is the fragmentation of land holdings. After the death of Jakhar’s father, the family land was divided among his four sons: each got four acres. “He did not even own a pair of bullocks, while each of us owns a tractor and a tubewell,” Jakhar said. Farming is more convenient, but the profits have gone down, since the costs have multiplied.
A group of Jat men sit down for their evening game of cards.