In the Danger Zone

by Stefan Gates

  His entire family live on rice with rice sauce, and it's diets like these that cause half of India's children to be malnourished. You can't get the minerals and vitamins you need by eating only rice.

  Some TV presenters and gushing food writers will have you believe that dirt cheap peasant food from across the globe is good, wholesome and delicious. But with the truly poor, that's simply not true. Most of the food they eat is bland and depressing such as CSB (corn soy blend) flour mixed with water. In Uganda it's flavourless ugali, in India it's plain, low-quality rice, and the locals make no show of enjoying it. 'Look at what we have to eat,' says Anshuman. 'It's terrible.'

  In many of the poor countries I've visited it's very difficult to talk to women – they are not expected to speak on behalf of the men, and their concerns are routinely dismissed. I try talking to Anshuman's wife Mina, asking questions like, 'Do the landowners treat the dalit badly around here?' but she just can't seem to answer. It's as if she's stuck for words, and after persevering for half an hour or so I give up. It seems that the less educated people are, the shyer they are. It appears to be part of the cycle of deprivation – the poor, and especially the female poor, are less assertive because they feel less able to express themselves and hence their problems don't get attention. They are surprised to the point of terror that anyone, especially a foreigner, should want to know their opinion about anything.

  Anshuman, however, is confident and voluble: 'The landowners do everything in their power to keep us in our place,' he asserts. I ask if he supports the Naxalites, but he dismisses both them and the Ranvir Sena (the landowners' paramilitary group) as irrelevant. 'How can they help us with politics when all we need is food?'

  I pay Anshuman for the food I've eaten and he takes me out to the rice fields to show what he does all day. Rice provides the main income and employment for more than 50 million Indians like him, and right now it's one of the year's several harvest times (these fields usually provide three harvests every year), so Anshuman and his entire family work from eight until six every day in a local landowner's fields. The children never go to school because they're needed in the fields too. The entire family lives in a shocking state of feudal serfdom, in thrall to the landowners. 'They pay us just enough rice to keep us alive so we can work their fields, but not enough so we can sell it to make any money or own any land ourselves.'

  I try my hand at harvesting. It's backbreaking work. I cut one row of rice about 2 metres wide and as I do a large crowd gathers, shocked and amused to see a white guy in the fields. I ask Anshuman if the landowner would know if he stole a bit of rice?

  'Yes, the villagers would tell him that I had stolen the rice.'

  'Why on earth would they do that?'

  'They want to keep us in our place.'

  The strength of caste fatalism means that the poor would even inform on each other to make sure no one breaks out of the system. I find it terrifying. I say, 'If it was me, I'd just be tempted to come out at night and nick loads of rice. But that's just my feckless Western attitude I suppose.'

  Anshuman shrugs.

  Word gets out to the surrounding villages, and people start arriving on bikes to take in the scene. I feel a little embarrassed – I want to know how hard their work is, but it's ended up feeling like a celebrity visit to Africa. When I get to the end of the row, the embarrassment is compounded by everyone breaking into applause and someone offering a bucket of water to cool me down.

  I can't tell whether Anshuman resents this pandering or if he's enjoying the attention that he's getting. I give Mina her knife back, and worry that I've trivialized her life with this grand-standing. Oddly enough, the undeserved applause and water make me feel more angry about the way the dalit are forced to live.

  Back in the village I find a woman called Dreya threshing rice and I ask her if I can try – I've only ever seen raw rice in books. It grows very much like grass, and at the ends of the stalks grow little beads of rice. The whole stalk is cut in the field and left there to dry, then the grains are beaten against a rock to separate them from the grass. It's bloody hard work.

  Dreya is an angry woman, one of the first women I've met here who isn't afraid of expressing her frustration. She tells me her daily routine: 'I have no land of my own so I work in someone else's fields from 8 a.m. till 6 p.m. in return for some rice.'

  She gets this food only for a few months each year, during harvest time. The rest of the year she often goes hungry, although occasionally she and her husband might get a small job and can buy some more food. 'We don't get money. We just get rice. We farm and they give us rice, not money. They feed themselves. They let us starve

  'What do you do between harvest times?'

  When we earn we eat; when we don't earn we don't eat.'

  She's angry and unhappy, and suddenly she's none too pleased to be surrounded by a journalist and 100 of her neighbours, all of them watching her work. She talks about her anger at both the government and the Naxalites. She reckons that neither have done any good for her. She says that people are often forced to vote under threat of violence.

  Suddenly there's a commotion. Rats! Someone has spotted a rat, and everyone rushes back to the fields, us included. Maybe the rat-eating isn't a myth after all. We arrive just as a group of men have trapped two of them. The first tried to scarper after the lair was discovered with a shovel, but it didn't get far. There's much excitement, shouting and pointing, and the men are clearly full of adrenalin. They dig up the lair and pull out a second rat by the tail.

  Despite all the wild-eyed excitement the rats are pretty tiny – more like mice, if you ask me – but this is a place where protein is an extremely rare treat, and these guys have been very lucky.

  The rats, on the other hand, are very unlucky. The men pull the tails one way and the heads the other until their necks break with a light 'snap'. There's a fair amount of twitching afterwards. In many ways, this is as good as the feudal deal gets for the dalit: in return for saving the landowner's rice from pests, they are allowed to keep any rats they catch. I had thought that Hindus were vegetarians, but it's probably best to keep this to myself – other than rice, these people get very little to eat, so who's complaining?

  When the three men kindly invite me to try their catch, I accept. They cook the rats over a makeshift fire of straw and twigs. First they are rolled on the fire to burn off the fur, then when the skins have been thinned by the flames, the men pick open the stomachs to eviscerate them, saving the liver. They are then roasted over the fire for another ten minutes or so, and when they're blackened from the flames, they are ready to eat.

  It's an odd feeling putting a rat in your mouth. These seminal experiences should really be private affairs, but I've got a pushing, shoving audience of 100 people. I wonder if this is the point when my stomach finally says 'enough is enough' and delivers me a crippling bout of salmonella. But if I bottle out from the scary bits, all our interest in the Musahars is just poverty tourism – like looking at the poor from the comfort of a tour bus. I have to get involved.

  So I sink my teeth into the hind quarters of a charred, grilled rat, and it tastes pretty good, if a little burnt. A little like baby chicken. Whenever I've visited a new conflict zone and tasted something unusual, my friends always say 'I bet it tastes like chicken', and it hardly ever does. But rats really do taste like baby chicken. It's sweet and flavoursome from the crispy skin, yet surprisingly fatty, and disconcertingly rare inside. I reason that it's been so burnt in the fire that it must be OK to eat. I chew the meat off one of the legs, then hand it back, conscious not to take too much food from them. When I hand it back to the rat-catcher, he upstages me by putting the whole thing in his mouth, chewing it and then swallowing it whole: bones, skin, skull, the works. Then he beams at me.

  I visit Dreya again to ask about how the dalit live. I wonder if she feels that it's a difficult life – perhaps it just looks difficult and unhappy to me as a Westerner? She's sarcastic about the question.
'Of course I'm unhappy,' she says. 'Look at my life.' That puts me in my place.

  That night we eat with Ramswaroop and he explains how the dalit are treated by the wealthy. The higher castes see them as unclean, and refuse to eat from the same plates, eat food that the dalit have touched, or even to walk on the same paths (the dalit are expected to cross the road when someone of a higher caste passes). The dalit must use different wells, live apart from the rest of the community, and any ownership of land or animals is seen as an affront to the higher castes.

  We spend another day in the village, chatting with the Musahar then we're taken for lunch. It's the most gruesome and uncomfortable spectacle: Ramswaroop takes us to one of the larger village houses and sits us down with the elders. A group of 150 or so people gather to stare at us (they don't do anything, they just stare) and we proceed to cat a meal that he's paid for. The food isn't particularly special or good, but when 150 rat-eaters are staring, it's hard to swallow a pakora.

  I tell Ramswaroop how uncomfortable this is, but he's dismissive. They aren't resentful, he says, just interested. It feels too weird for me, though, and puts me off my food, so I thank him and go to play with the lads instead. I've got a handful of modelling balloons in my pockets, and I make some balloon dogs, giraffes and elephants. There's practically a riot when I hand them out.

  It's finally time to leave so I thank everyone, shaking hands and dishing out hugs where they're likely to be accepted. I've got mixed feelings about leaving: it'll be a relief to be back in less difficult surroundings, though – I've rarely seen poverty on this scale, and certainly never seen it so systematically enforced.

  I'm still trying to negotiate meetings with the rebel groups, but neither the Naxalites nor the Ranvir Sena are minded to chat. I wonder if we should give up, but it feels important to get the other side of the story, so I decide to head for the centre of Bihar so that we'll be ready to drive to meet them if they suddenly agree.

  On the way, I bump into another dalit subcaste beside a murky pond: the snake eaters, a nomadic people who catch snakes in the fields for food. A young man is at home in a shack of tarpaulin and twigs, and he shows me a highly poisonous cobra he has caught. Vicious-looking thing it is, too. It seems like a precarious way to get a meal.

  The Ranvir Sena

  I leave for the town of Bodh Gaya on the next stage of our long, increasingly fraught, roundabout journey in search of the Ranvir Sena – up until now I've heard so much from the dalit that in order to get a balanced view I need to speak to the wealthy landowners. I get the feeling that I'm running out of time. My attempts to set up a meeting with the Maoist Naxalites seem to have failed – they refuse to be tied down to a meeting point, nervous about putting their security at risk.

  I decide instead to concentrate on finding the Ranvir Sena so drive for hours to Jahanabad to pick up a contact who says he might be able to introduce us to them. We need to drive on to a village in the south, and he reckons it'll take us two hours. We squeeze into the car and after five hours of slow and painful driving we arrive in R____a, a tiny medieval-looking hamlet of cow dung and rubble. It's already dark. I've had to promise not to reveal the name of the village or the people in return for a meeting, but there's still no certainty that they'll turn up. I sit and hope.

  After much toing and froing between the rebel contact and the villagers, I am led out to the pitch-black fields; the BBC security team would take a dim view of this. I power up the satellite phone and call the office in White City to give my GPS co-ordinates to my researcher James, telling him to panic if we don't call again in a couple of hours. Quite what he can achieve from west London, I'm not entirely sure, but it's all I can do. The villagers seem suspicious of my phone – perhaps I'm a government agent trying to bust the rebels. But would a government agent really be so stupid as to put himself in this kind of danger? Only a journalist could be this reckless.

  I wander around the fields in the dark looking for the paramilitaries. After an age, I stumble across the rebel army of the Ranvir Sena in the pitch black (how they manage to find their way around I don't know, but they don't use torches). There are a dozen or so fighters, all carrying rifles of varying age and effectiveness. Their faces are covered in scarves, and they are all silent except for the leader, who calls himself 'Dinka'.

  My relief at finally finding the rebels is tempered by my unease at sitting down with a visibly angry armed group who could easily kidnap me if they wanted to. I don't want to make these people any angrier than they already are, but at the same time I have to ask some provocative questions.

  Dinka talks with righteous indignation and heavy gesticulation about his need to protect his land, his caste and his family. He immediately pitches his army as the protector of poor, downtrodden landowners, accusing the Naxalites of stealing land and massacring landowners for no apparent reason. I suggest that they do have a reason: to fight the wealthy, even if he doesn't agree with it; they are poor and desperate, and motivated by centuries of persecution. He's not interested. I ask what he'd do if he was in their situation with no possibility of escape and with his family starving.

  'I'd abide by the law – I wouldn't fight,' he says. 'Exploitation happens to all classes, not just the poor.'

  I say that I'm not sure if I'd resist the temptation if my family was starving by force.

  He says that the Ranvir Sena have been portrayed as the villains of the piece, when in fact all they're doing is protecting their land. 'Sure, I hit my labourers every now and then, but how else can I assert my authority? We've been involved in many attacks against left-wing groups. If someone destroys my farm, can I not hit him, abuse him out of rage? They graze their cattle on our land and steal our grain, then we abuse and beat them.' Christ alive.

  To begin with, he denies that he has ever been part of an attack – he was merely part of the administration of the Sena. Later, though, when he's got his fellow army members together for a show of strength, and to display their guns, he is more forthcoming – he's been part of a battle against the Naxalites during which they had killed three Maoists. It made him very happy, he says.

  Funnily enough, I don't really take to Dinka, nor his ridiculous claim that he's fighting to create an egalitarian society. How does he work that out? I sense that he's just a bully. All this conflict over food and land could only happen in a place that's desperately hungry.

  I say goodbye and call the office to say that we haven't been kidnapped. 'Oh, good,' says James.

  We set out in the dark (another bad idea – this area is renowned for banditry) and drive to a safe house 3 km away. It takes about 45 minutes to get there, on the worst roads I have ever bounced along, and I arrive to discover that there's no electricity, water or food. We share rooms and sleep on the hardest beds known to man – they are actually low tables – all they offer is a slight levitation from the floor and the bugs and snakes that live there.

  Tomorrow I am hoping to meet the Naxalites, but unfortunately they are even harder to pin down than the Ranvir Sena. Fingers crossed.

  After another sleepless night on a hard, sweaty bed, I get up and drink chai, which seems to have appeared from nowhere, then wander around the village – another beautiful medieval scene straight out of a movie – an art director's dream. The houses have no walls so the inhabitants effectively live in the open air in utter poverty.

  I'm baffled at how this cycle of poverty can be maintained, so I visit the Hindu priest at the village temple. He claims to welcome the dalit to his temple, although Anoj, my translator, doesn't believe a word of it. I ask if he thinks the dalit deserve their fate, and he says yes, the dalit, the poor, the lepers and disabled all earn their state after being bad in a former life.

  This fatalism is really dangerous: not only are the dalit expected to remain poor and dispossessed in a system sanctioned by their religion, but this destitution is supposed to feed down through the generations. The children of a dalit will be dalit, as will their children and their gr
andchildren, and they are all expected to be poor and destitute too – there isn't supposed to be an escape from the cycle.

  And this is where the situation in India feels so gruesome and unfair. In the war-ravaged wastelands of central Africa, the one thing people have is hope and optimism fed by religion. Sometimes it's blind hope and sometimes people's dreams don't happen, but when you have nothing, it seems obscene that something as basic and unthreatening as hope can be denied to you. But to the landowners and the powerful, hope is the most dangerous thing, and the caste system is what they've used to eradicate it.

  I find the priest thoroughly depressing, and he also seems to be a bit of a bully. Village priests come from the highest Brahmin caste and wield enormous power. When a new child is born, parents ask their temple priest to give it a name, and dalit children are routinely given names like 'dirt' and 'filth'. The parent has to use the given name in order not to offend God, and hence the child is forever singled out for persecution.

  I hate to criticize an ancient culture, but something really bugs me about India, and that's the way that people treat each other. In everyday life I keep seeing the enforcement of hierarchies at every level: anyone who sees themselves as more powerful, rich or higher caste treats other people – staff, servants, passers-by and even colleagues – with a shocking arrogance and rudeness. Perhaps it's a remnant of the caste system, perhaps it's a function of a society where there is such a disparity of wealth. Perhaps we do it in Britain, but it's just less visible.

  Across India by Train

  As I leave Patna, I wonder if there's a solution to the horror of untouchability. It might sound surprising to say this, but it's possible that money could offer a way out. Many rural dalit take the view that money has no morality and knows no religion, so it should be possible for people to escape their village, move to the city where no one knows their caste, and life instead becomes about money. There's still poverty in the cities, but at least its egalitarian poverty! If the rich get richer, then perhaps the wealth might filter down, and capitalism is, after all, supposed to filter wealth down through society.