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Kailash Satyarthi
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The underdog Nobel Laureate By Aditi Tandon The most defining legal interventions of India’s first natural-born citizen to win the Nobel Peace Prize include bringing the Prohibition of Bonded Labour Law cover to all those denied minimum wages; amendment of service rules to bar government officials from hiring child labourers and defining child trafficking.
“It’s a moment of great joy and honour for me, for India and for children who continue to live in slavery and exploitation. I am happy to be the first natural-born Indian to have won the Nobel Peace Prize though I wish Mahatma Gandhi had received this honour before anybody else in our country,” said the man of the moment soon after the Norwegian Nobel Committee people phoned him this October 10 to break the news. This was a big surprise because for every year starting 2006, Satyarthi was among the Nobel Peace Prize nominees. But he never made the cut. His daughter Asmita, who goes to college, admits, “We were not expecting the Nobel now. It was like we had lived the dream and saturated the hope of its coming to life. But here it is!” If Satyarthi’s range of work against child and bonded labour is anything to go by, there was never a doubt that he was a serious contender for the Nobel. Only the world took time to acknowledge. From 1980 when he launched the Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA) to date, the Vidisha-born activist has rescued 85,000 child workers from carpet and garment industries, cracker factories, brick-kilns and other hazardous settings. Life of insecurity
“None of this was easy,” says Satyarthi’s wife Sumedha who was a bride of two years when her husband asked her for a lifelong commitment to a difficult cause. It was in 1980 that Satyarthi, then a successful electrical engineer, quit his job to start his save-children mission. As times went by, the journey got dangerous, with Satyarthi surviving two attempts on his life from people whose businesses he was hurting by freeing child workers. “The worst attack on Satyarthi’s life was in 2004 during a rescue of children from the Great Roman Circus in UP’s Gonda. He took all threats in his stride. That makes him special,” says HS Phoolka, a Supreme Court lawyer, who offers free legal advice to the BBA on child issues. Satyarthi’s family recalls another instance where they had to temporarily relocate from their Delhi residence due to threats from a Panipat based exporter whose interests the BBA’s work had harmed. Not to forget the 2007 controversy involving fashion brand GAP that was accused by Satyarthi of trading in works created by child labourers in Delhi sweatshops. While much is known of Satyarthi’s work against child labour and his experiments like Mukti Ashram and Bal Mitra Grams where he rehabilitates children, little is known of his contributions to child legislation in India. The most defining legal interventions of BBA include bringing under the ambit of the Prohibition of Bonded Labour Law everyone who is denied minimum wages; amendment of service rules to bar government officials from hiring child labourers and defining child trafficking. “Trafficking was first defined in India in response to our 2005 PIL seeking a complete ban on child labour. The SC orders came on April 18, 2011. Besides, it was on our petition recently that the Delhi High Court ordered compulsory licensing of all placement agencies dealing in domestic work in and around Delhi. We are also working on missing children,” says Bhuvan Ribhu, Satyarthi’s son, a lawyer with BBA. In the amended criminal law that followed the recommendations of the Justice JS Verma Committee, child trafficking has been included as an offence under Section 370 of the IPC. The Verma committee had in its report adopted the same definition of trafficking as the apex court had laid down in the BBA’s case.
Not all agree
Notwithstanding his work, Satyarthi has his share of challengers. Many child rights activists question his aggressive pursuit of ILO Convention 182 on hazardous forms of child labour which India has not ratified yet. “ILO 182 is very narrow. Our domestic law on hazardous occupations is much more comprehensive. One can’t understand Kailash Satyarthi’s zeal for such a regressive Convention which even recognises child prostitution as a form of hazardous occupation. India considers child prostitution a crime. If we were to ratify the said Convention, we would be compromising our progressive stand,” says Bharti Ali of the HAQ Centre for Child Rights. HAQ also questions Satyarthi’s rescue model for leading children to freedom. “No one has a moral right to rescue children unless they can rehabilitate the victims meaningfully. Satyarthi’s rehabilitation model is weak and carries the potential of making children more invisible,” Ali adds. But the Nobel Laureate’s supporters feel otherwise. They swear by the workability of the BBA’s “Mukti Ashram”, where rescued children are temporarily lodged before being rehabilitated. They also hail the BBA’s Bal Mitra Gram, an initiative started in 2001. Certified by the ILO and UNICEF as one of the world’s best models to eliminate child labour, Mitra Grams are villages where resident children are free from exploitation and receive education. Ask Satyarthi what he feels about detraction and he says: “At this time all I want to do is call the attention of the world to the 16.50 crore child workers across the globe and six crore in India. This Award will help bring the focus back on child issues. We must work together for a world free of child labour.” For his part, the Nobel Laureate has his life course charted out. He has crossed several milestones along the way — from 1980 when he formed the BBA to 1998 when he led the Global March against Child Labour to seek the ILO’s ban on child work to 1994 when he founded Rugmark (now Good Weave), the first mechanism for certification of child labour free rugs in South Asia. Satyarthi’s eyes are now set on the more than 1.7 lakh missing children in India. Recently the apex court made FIR registration in missing children’s cases mandatory on a petition the BBA filed. The past practice was to simply make a ‘daily diary’ entry. “FIRs alone won’t help. We have to find our children. There’s a lot of work to do,’ says the workaholic, whose friends describe him as a “seeker of truth”.
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What makes you reinvent yourself? My detractors often scoff that I am still experimenting and haven't found myself. However, at 70, I can discern certain moves and patterns that go on to make my artistic persona. You have moved away from painting to working with found objects. Was the process organic or was there a trigger? A bit of both. But yes there was an impetus. The Gulf War of 1991 led to a series of works in engine oil and charcoal on paper. I brought in the engine oil tray and stitched it to a drawing. Once an object came so did the relationship with the already existing material. In my next exhibition I was still painting but roping in other materials. For one exhibition I took the painting off the wall and then photography came in. I curated a show on a red sandstone column with photographs of four renowned artists, including Dayanita Singh and Ram Rahman. I began to work in three-four dimensions, giving new meanings to already existing material. Which is more joyful — painting or working with found objects? In painting, one begins from zero to finally arrive at an image over a period of time and thus one invests more emotionally in the creative transformation. While lending new meanings to the existing material, like say a Coke can, the intellectual engagement is greater. I can't say if one is more onerous than the other, only that the challenges are different. Does memory play a big part in your
creative process? Between history and memory there is a thin line. It may not necessarily be my personal memory. Though we look at memory as a more imaginative tool, historians feel that the way you collect facts also involves some degree of memory. My approach varies depending on whether it's social, political or personal history. For truly historical projects like the site-specific installation project in the Durbar Hall of Victoria Memorial Kolkata, it becomes a learning exercise. For Kochi Muziris biennale to represent the ancient seaport of Muziris, I created an imaginary landscape "Black Gold", using discarded terracotta shards taken directly from the archaeological site of Pattanam in MuziriI. Is an artist's perception of history different from a historian? Artists can be more free. I can play around with facts, provocations, the pleasure principle and then qualify it with a rider-it's not an objective take, but my point of view. But whether artists will bring in newer viewpoints, it's hard to say, for as it is few artists will go in that direction. Besides, by and large, artists work from subjectivity, which is not a bad thing by itself. But the moot question is how you extend that notion of subjectivity to the outer and to others. Some artists are doing it, like Arpita Singh refers to Palestine issues but does it in a private way. Some people have found scandalous the way you have represented your aunt Amrita Shergil on whom you have written the book Re-take of Amrita. Indeed, I am often asked just because I am her nephew, doesn't mean I can get away with anything. But I am proposing certain provocations. For instance, self-portrait is a very narcissistic activity. Then there is playacting between the father and daughter, where the daughter even poses in a swimsuit. I am only reading into the photographs, not trying to scandalise, only alluding to the undercurrents of eroticism. But as in one of my constructed photographs where I have made Amrita's hair touch her father's beard, they are close, yet not too close. I also take the same cue and know how near and how far to go. Are you charmed by Amrita who you have chronicled through photomontages as well as a book? Most certainly. Besides her enchanting personality, here was an artist all of 28 years with such a self-questioning intelligent approach of making art. Had she gone to Lahore, which was the cultural capital of the north at that point, instead of Shimla, she would have flowered in a very different way. Is your fascination with the famous Shergil legacy over? Pretty much. Actually I have already moved to another artist Ram Kinkar Baij, who in a way complements Amrita. He was a far more radical artist than her, though he didn't get noticed in the beginning. I am creating a collaborative project for he was a multitalented artist. There will be photographic representations of his works. The exhibition will be held in the IGNCA which has many interesting spaces. But the exciting part is the exhibition will lead to a performance, a three-hour play. The work that I will make will become both a prop and a set. Is it easy to find funding for such unusual projects? No one has to go with a begging bowl. Actually artists are pretty much on their own. How much of your art is influenced by your wife, the renowned art critic Gita Kapur? She is a big name in modernism and I take her view seriously. Her feedback gives me the confidence to carry on even though she doesn't get directly involved with my work. Do you think visual art ought to have a place at literature festivals? Yes, even though there are certain irritants as artists' agenda is different. However, they can include artists who are dealing with narrative and literature. But they must have good advisers for that and not end up inviting illustrators. The focus can be on artists such as Nilima Sheikh, who has done some beautiful paintings on Agha Shahid Ali's poetry. Then there is Atul Dodiya who has worked on Gujarati poetry. You have spoken strongly about artistic freedom. Where do we stand today? Some forward movement is there. But at the same time today we are living in orthodox, conservative times and don't know what the growing right-wing politics will do to culture.
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