There's a cheerily childlike spring to his step. You wouldn't believe that 52-year-old Karnal Singh spent 59 days in jail even as he nursed a severely crushed forearm-result of a brutal police lathi-charge. The stainless steel prosthesis doctors put in to save his battered limb still hurts, but for the first time in his life it's been worth all the pain.

On Baisakhi this April 14, after working as serfs for many generations, cutting and bringing in the crop of upper-caste Jat zamindars, Karnal Singh joined 700 other Dalits of Balad Kalan village in Punjab's Sangrur district, in the first real harvest of their lives-2,640 quintals of wheat sown, tended and collected from farmland they leased jointly from the panchayat. Now, they are looking to bring home an even more bountiful crop of paddy.

From seeding to eventually being allowed to reap the rewards, it's been a truly tumultuous and decidedly painful journey for 143 Dalit households in Balad Kalan.

Although a key 1961 legislation-the Punjab Village Common Lands (Regulation) Act-decrees that all panchayats in the state must mandatorily reserve 33 per cent of all available shamlat or common land for lease to Scheduled Castes (SCs), for years upper-caste farmers, local sarpanchs and revenue officials have invariably been complicit in hosting dummy SC claimants to deprive real Dalit families access to such holdings.

The story was no different in Balad Kalan. On June 27, 2014, Karnal Singh and his comrades, for the first time alerted to their rights by the Zameen Prapti Sangharsh Committee (ZPSC), a loose, Left-oriented coalition working for land rights in Sangrur, came out of their homes to battle a 500-strong posse of Punjab Police men. The riot-ready policemen had been called out to support panchayat and revenue officials attempting to subvert the auction of 121 acres of common land reserved for lease to SCs. "They (the police) were brutal," says Paramjit Kaur, 38, who spent weeks in a coma after a particularly vicious policeman repeatedly pounded her on the head with his baton. Forty-one Dalit men were charged with "attempt to murder" and incarcerated without bail for 59 days. This, until August 28, 2014, when the state administration and panchayat agreed on a 'samjhauta' and surrendered control of the land.

Balad Kalan echoes an unprecedented transformation that is overtaking rural Punjab, quietly but firmly challenging, even demolishing, age-old caste equations. Dalit collectives like in Balad Kalan have managed to take control of common land legally reserved for Scheduled Caste communities in as many as 16 Sangrur villages.

Sandip Kaur, 25, Matoi village, Sangrur district She led an agitation by educated Dalit girls in 2014 to win the lease of 17 bighas of farmland on May 28, 2015. Fodder crops from the land now mean that her mother Amarjit Kaur and other women no longer need to forage for green fodder to feed their cattle Sandip Kaur, 25, Matoi village, Sangrur district She led an agitation by educated Dalit girls in 2014 to win the lease of 17 bighas of farmland on May 28, 2015. Fodder crops from the land now mean that her mother Amarjit Kaur and other women no longer need to forage for green fodder to feed their cattle

While Dalits have for long been agitating for access to land, the movement for village commons began to gather steam after 2008, when a group of youths in Benra village, 50 km from Balad Kalan, succeeded in rallying together all 250 Dalit households to gain control of nine acres-even forcing the district administration to cut lease rates. "Like in every other village, here too the Jat zamindars had proxies helping them bid for land that could only be leased to Dalits. We created a situation wherein no Dalit had the courage to stand in as a proxy for a zamindar," says Bahal Singh, 30, who helped raise the Kranti Pendu Mazdoor Union to lead the campaign in Benra.

Right through the summer and monsoon of 2008, every Dalit man, woman and child maintained a zealous vigil forestalling attempts by Jat landlords intent on grabbing land reserved for Scheduled Castes. "We physically surrounded and forced, even carried away, proxy claimants from the auctions," says Balbir Kaur, 65, who led Benra's Dalit women and schoolgirls to stand vigil at the land lease auctions.

Late in 2008, Bahal Singh and his friends succeeded in winning the lease for the nine acres, also paving the way for what must be documented as the first functional Dalit collective farm in Punjab. The nine-acre holding has been life-altering for impoverished households. Twenty-seven-year-old Harbans Kaur used to trudge for miles every day in search of green fodder for the lone cow her family struggled to feed. "There were days when I had to return with no more than a handful of weeds," she recalls. Increasing mechanisation and use of herbicides on farms increased yields particularly for crops such as paddy, but also meant that the weeds Dalit workers traditionally gathered as fodder were no longer available. Left to forage along irrigation canals and the fringes of Jat-owned farms, Dalit women invariably became targets of abuse.

Benra's Dalit women were understandably reluctant to describe the abuse but the Punjabi hinterland abounds with tales of oppression, from Bant Singh Jhabbar whose limbs were hacked off by a group of Jats for trying to protect his daughter from sexual abuse in January 2006, to the 16-year-old Dalit girl of Sangrur's Kalbanjara village who set herself on fire on August 5 this year reportedly to escape harassment by upper-caste youth.

In a deliberate departure from the traditional wheat-paddy cycle, all nine acres leased by the Dalit collective are planted with fodder crops-barseem (clover) and chari (sorghum)-all year round. And for as little as Rs 400 (half the market price) members of the collective can harvest one biswa (1/96th of an acre). But since there is limited land, each Dalit family is allowed no more than 10 biswa. The system, managed by an 11-member committee, works seamlessly, dividing the produce equitably, while ensuring sufficient earnings to bid for the land year after year.

"The chari this year is sweet like sugarcane," Bahal swears, happily chewing a stalk of sorghum.

Inspired by what had been accomplished in Benra, a group of eight Dalit girls in Matoi, a small hamlet outside the Muslim-majority township of Malerkotla, also decided to stand up for themselves. After a year this May, Sandip Kaur, 25, and her friends, all college students, won the lease for 17 bighas (3.4 acres) of land.

Although relatively small, Sandip's mother Amarjit Kaur says the holding is a "godsend" that now makes it possible for several Dalit families in the village to keep cows and buffaloes.

Karnal Singh, 52, Balad Kalan village, Sangrur district The landless wage earner sustained serious injuries in 2014 during a Dalit agitation to take control of 121 acres of common land. He, along with other Dalit families , has benefited with a share in the biannual wheat-paddy harvest and multiple fodder crops Karnal Singh, 52, Balad Kalan village, Sangrur district The landless wage earner sustained serious injuries in 2014 during a Dalit agitation to take control of 121 acres of common land. He, along with other Dalit families , has benefited with a share in the biannual wheat-paddy harvest and multiple fodder crops

In Balad Kalan, where the Dalits possess a significantly larger land holding (550 bighas or 121 acres), the benefits added up to a virtual bounty. At the Baisakhi harvest this April, each of the 143 Dalit households received four quintals of free wheat and a trolley load of toori (dry fodder) and the right to harvest fresh fodder from 10 biswa land. The land also ensured round-the-year employment for 100 people as farmhands and occasional work for many more during the sowing season. "We also sold wheat worth Rs 24 lakh in the mandi and used the money to make a repeat bid for the land in May," says Rampal, 55, responsible for maintaining records for Balad Kalan's Dalit collective.

ZPSC convener Mukesh Malaudh, 28, who has been closely associated with the movement to reclaim reserved common lands, is convinced that collective farms are the only real solution for Dalit families to benefit from what is their right. "A third of the 1.54 lakh acres cultivable shamlat land in Punjab should legally only be in Dalit hands. But barring the handful of Sangrur villages, a major chunk of the holdings are usurped unlawfully by upper-caste zamindars," he says.

"Depriving Dalits of land has been part of an insidious design in which upper caste landlords and the establishment are complicit," says P.S. Verma, a Chandigarh-based academic and author of a pivotal early 1990s study of rural common lands in Punjab and Haryana. It is only with the organisational backing of some Left groups that villages in Sangrur and some others in the Doaba region (Jalandhar-Kapurthala-Hoshiarpur) are now making successful bids for their land, Verma adds.

Dalits in only a few dozen among Punjab's 12,000-plus villages have gained access to their share of the shamlat. The numbers, although small, are significant in a state like Punjab which has been increasingly in the grip of an agrarian crisis amid shrinking size of landholdings, rapidly depleting groundwater table and rising cost of pursuing the Green Revolution cropping cycle of wheat and paddy. Both with the fodder crops in Benra and the mix of fodder and wheat in Balad Kalan, the Dalit collectives are happily proving that farming can still be a mutually beneficial venture-making for distinctly better living and the sense of empowerment that land brings to deprived people.

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