Dayamani Barla decided to contest elections soon after her release from jail. In the winter of 2012, she spent 69 days in a small cell in the Birsa Munda jail here. She was an accused in a case related to leading a protest of 400 Oraon tribal people in Nagri, who questioned the allotment of their multi-crop farmland to campuses of elite institutions, such as the Indian Institute of Management and a national law university, when barren land could be found nearby.
Every time she appeared in court, tribal women would bring her fruits. She recounts being able to see only a patch of the sky from the cell window. Her sister-in-law passed away when she was in jail.
“When I came out I felt vulnerable. I needed a formal alliance to back me in this work. Market forces put a price on every human being and institution, and many are drawn to individualism. But there is still a collective spirit in the villages here, even if there is vacuum in leadership,” she says.
It is this void the 48-year-old believes she can fill if elected on the Aam Aadmi Party ticket from Khunti, from where BJP’s sitting MP Kariya Munda has been elected seven times.
Before Nagri, she had led a movement against the Koel Karo dam at Torpa in Khunti, where she was born into a Munda tribal household. From 1995, Dayamani, who was then working as an independent journalist with Jan Haq Patrika , organised villagers in their struggle against the dam, which would displace over 53,000.
The resistance continued despite eight persons dying in police firing in 2000. She received death threats when she travelled across four districts of Jharkhand between 2006 and 2010, organising people opposed to giving up over 11,000 acres of their farmland for Arcelor Mittal’s steel plant.
“Why should we settle for ‘compensation’ when we should be co-owners?” she raised the question of crushing disparities in mineral-rich Jharkhand while addressing Bokaro farmers, who enforced an “economic blockade” against the plant of Electrosteel Casting Ltd. last September. The speech resulted in an FIR against her.
When not travelling in villages, Ms. Barla can be found in a tea shop she runs with her husband, Nelson, near Sujata Chowk here..
At a campaign meeting at Ghorpenda, on an impulse, she trails off to pick a jharoo (broom), AAP’s election symbol, from the floor of a nearby hut before beginning her speech. “When I go to government offices, sometimes peons ask rudely, ‘What do you want, why are you here.’ There have been instances when I have waited outside offices for long and watched their reactions change when I say my name is Dayamani Barla and this is why I am here,” she says.
Her childhood had taught her what to steel up against. At nine, she watched her parents lose their land to a businessman after signing on documents they could not read. While they began working as domestic help in Ranchi, she and her brother studied in their village at Arhara, finding food for them.
At 13, she moved to Ranchi, lived in a shed with cattle, cleaned utensils and eating leftovers at the Ranchi police barracks. She cleaned utensils in a household till her employer tried to sexually assault her. “I was 15. I do not know from where I got the strength to throw that man off and escape. I left that work and supported myself learning typing in Hindi and English till I enrolled for M.Com. at Ranchi University,” she recounts.
She briefly worked at an NGO but left it when she found the organisation made little attempt to account for funds got for public purpose. She soon started contributing articles to Prabhat Khabhar . In 1995, she set up the tea shop. Her livelihood assured, she immersed herself in the Koel Karo movement. “She knows what it is to be poor and their problems. She believes if you have been given buddhi, social consciousness, it is meant to be passed on,” Mr. Nelson says.
At Jabra, she takes time to build the conversation slowly about her election campaign with the villagers who have brought their own mats to sit on. “What is it that we are fighting for? What should we do to take this campaign forward,” she asks them and listens as the group slowly comes to a consensus. At the end, the group of more than 60 people decide to contribute two kg of rice and Rs. 50 each for her campaign.
At Ludru, where people have erected a monolith to inscribe the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996, rules governing the use of community resources in the village, she asks whether these norms are effective. “Sometimes, I act radical with a reason; other times I try to check myself if I am being firm or stubborn,” she muses on her way back to Ranchi, 40 km away.
On the evening before her nomination, she visits a Birsait village, where Birsa Munda followers, who avoid meat, alcohol and food from outside and wear only white, live. After listening to her, Jagai Aba, an eldery man, softly warns her: “The party [Maoists] will try to decide whom the village votes for. There is danger and you stay away from the forest.” In turn, she invokes an annual rite the Birsaits perform in Singhbhum forests where they declare the forest to be sacred. “Mango, mahua, sal trees, bears, tigers, scorpions — everything is in its place, is it not,” she says. “Now is the time to save them.”
