Rise and fall of India’s ‘untouchable’ rat-catcher turned politician forced to resign after angering party’s boss/ Vancouver Sun 20150222

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Rise and fall of India’s ‘untouchable’ rat-catcher turned politician forced to resign after angering party’s boss

By The Telegraph

February 20, 2015

[Photo]

Jitan Ram Manjhi, left, meets India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

When Jitan Ram Manjhi, a former rat-catcher from the lowest of India’s “untouchable” castes, became chief minister of the eastern state of Bihar last year, it was hailed as the most remarkable political rise since independence.

On Friday he resigned, according to The Times of India, before his own party leader had a chance to use a confidence vote to sack him for not doing as he is told.

Brought in as a puppet to secure the vote of Bihar’s 20 million mahadalits, the “untouchables” who are key to controlling the state, Mr. Manjhi bravely began making his own policies.

“I started taking independent decisions in favour of the downtrodden, minorities and backward castes,” he said.

I started taking independent decisions in favour of the downtrodden, minorities and backward castes

But his temerity infuriated the head of his political party, Janata Dal (United), and his political career has ended just 10 months after he triumphantly took office.

Mr. Manjhi’s Musahar caste is a landless community of India’s poorest, hungriest and most illiterate people, many of whom live in semi-slavery and survive by eating rats.

In an interview on the eve of the no-confidence motion, Mr. Manjhi recalled the extreme poverty of his childhood and said Bihar’s political leaders, including some in his own party, still refused to accept that a rat-catcher could be an able leader.

He described how his family had lived in a tiny jhopri – a hut made of mud and straw – and survived by catching rodents and eating fried rat curry.

His father worked on their landlord’s rice paddies for below subsistence wages. “It was not sufficient for a day and morning meal. We had one meal per day. In the week we had to live on empty stomachs,” he said.

“He caught rats, brought them to the house in place of pulses and vegetables, and that rat meat was supplemented with bread and rice. This was our common meal… my mother and father fried it on the fire, cut into pieces, fried up in mustard oil, turmeric, garlic, whatever was available – fine taste.

“Super taste is when is caught, prepared in fire, we cut into pieces and put salt, oil, green chilli – that mix with fried rat is very tasteful. It is a unique taste, not like chicken, not like mutton.”

He attended the village school sporadically but when his father told the landlord he wanted him to attend full time, he was ridiculed.

“The landlord said, ‘Don’t educate him, spare him for my cowherding, he will be bonded labour to me,'” he said. “My father did not agree and was many times abused and beaten and asked to leave the house where we were living.

“I saw him beat my father and you can imagine how I felt. We were helpless and I asked my father to be silent, have patience and we will overcome these maladies.”

In 1980, after several years of campaigning for the Congress party, he fought and won a seat in the state legislature but his “untouchability” often saw him overlooked in favour of less able but higher caste colleagues.

His fortunes changed under Nitesh Kumar, the Janata Dal leader credited with wresting Bihar from gangsters and improving governance after he became chief minister in 2005. Mr. Manjhi came to national attention in 2008 when he urged people to eat rats to ease a food crisis caused by rodents eating grain. They had the same nutritional value as chicken, he said.

We were helpless and I asked my father to be silent, have patience and we will overcome these maladies

After he succeeded Mr. Kumar in May last year, he was derided as a “dummy chief minister” who would be controlled by his predecessor. The claims were true, he admitted.

But when he started to take his own decisions, he said, his former patron waged a campaign to oust him.

He believes Mr. Kumar feared that some of his measures to improve education and land allocations for the poor were making him too popular. Mr. Kumar told the Economic Times it had been a mistake to stand down in favour of Mr. Manjhi. “Instead of doing his duty, he started following his personal agenda and kept making controversial remarks which embarrassed the party,” he said.

Mr. Manjhi said his former leader had indeed misjudged him. “He mistook that I might become more popular than him. He underestimated my performance and me as a person,” he said.

Mr. Manjhi is now free to return to his village, eat rat curry once more and create a new party to lead Bihar’s millions of rat-catchers and mahadalit untouchables back to power once again.

With files from the National Post

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