Organising Legal Literacy Programs (LLP) is one of the most important experiences for me in Law School. I seem useful, though I may perhaps never be. We pick groups - school kids, organisations for women, workers. And then we teach them a few basic things about the law, generally in the form of a skit. I learn more than I teach.
My most recent LLP was for workers in the unorganised sector. This was on Labour Day, right outside the Town Hall in Bangalore. The last time I took to the streets was for a pride march; there's a part of me that comes to life when I'm out on the streets, hollering. Sometimes, it's necessary to be in one's face to tell them what you have to say. At least that's how I feel. I've never been one for subtleties.
Anyway, so there we were, a bunch of us law students, participating in a protest. The protest was to seek more legal protection to the unorganised sector. The only applicable statute for this oppressed section of our, yes, our society, does nothing but pay lip service to them. It makes them eligible for government programs that already apply to BPL families and more importantly, seldom work. But we set forth to tell them about this anyway. Foolish? Perhaps. Naive? Definitely.
In the midst of my extempore in Kannada, a woman from the audience, eyes brimming with tears of rage, asked me why I was telling them to go to the government when it was the government that was oppressing them. She told me of her husband who'd succumbed to alcoholism, of her three unmarried daughters and asked me what she ought to do. RTI I said, feebly, knowing fully well that this was just an excuse of a solution. She thought I was the government. Well, I sure as hell held out to be its spokesperson!
And once I'd braved the lady, a man, an activist, walked up to me and told me I was wrong. He wasn't being curt, no. He was however being brutally honest. "Che Guevara must not just be on your T-shirts", he said, "...we must not tell them to beg the government, we must tell them to revolt. Revolution is the only answer. It's as if they are compressed in a bottle. Help open the lid and you'll see them ebb and revolt for what is rightfully theirs. Keeping them oppressed is beneficial to an entire class of people and that's not obvious to them. Tell them as educated people that they should holler, they will".
In the end I wondered what the rally had achieved. I'd made a woman cry, a man wonder why I was siding with the devil and there were workers from the unorganised sector who were holding placards that they themselves couldn't read. The few passers-by who stopped were bemused by what we had to say, not enlightened. The government wasn't there. I had no legal solutions to offer, even after going to presumably the best law school in the country (which, ironically, has only just regularised its workers).
But what's the alternative? Not make any noise and live in a vacuum? Give up without trying? Women, blacks and the LGBT community, among others, have seen some success after demanding rights have they not? I live in the hope that workers of the world will unite, and get rights to help them live life to its hilt. And that you and I will help them in their endeavour.
