Zamindari lives on

This is Sonu and Monu’s village. It’s a village with a gate, I have not seen many of them. The gate has the name of a Thakur. We enter into one of the biggest villages we have seen in these parts! Every community is represented, and the inequality is also as well represented. Most of the village has pucca houses overpowering small little mud huts.

We start talking to the people and we hear the name of one household creep up often. There are no complaints registered in the police stations  from this village. There is never a need to. Thakur sahib resolves all issues and his word is final. There is harmony here, all castes and the two religions live here peacefully. After some prodding we heard of the mosque that was not built because it was opposed.  We heard of the BPL cards that were taken away. We move a little further and hear of the children who did not get the uniform from school; of the hospital where the doctor never comes. But why I am surprised, this is how development has been happening.

But this village is not the same, it is the village with gate! But it means more than that. The panchayat is family business for the Thakur sahib here. Different people tell us that 4 or 5 members of the Panchayat are from his house. This is the village of the former MLA (also from the same family, obviously!), so it is well connected with the political center.

We visit a kori household where a woman has 5 children before her 30^th  birthday. This desperate

woman tells us that she does not want more children but does not know what to do! Where are you, Asha Bahu? She has a 2 year old and 3 year old, too young to go to school, so I naively ask if they go to he anganwadi. She says they come and get the children when there is some inspection, otherwise the anganwadi does not work. So this woman leaves her children at home and goes to work at the field, since she has no other option.

The women and her mother-in-law are working on Sonu’s fields, cutting his crop. He does not have to pay the market price, since they have worked for him for generations! 

We are told time and again that not much can happen in this village without the blessings of that family. For a moment I forget that Zamindari has been abolished.