When Dalits fight to reclaim half the sky

“Now we no longer need to enter their fields. We grow our own grains; we grow our own fodder. This is our land as far as your eye takes you.” With an outstretched arm, Rajinder Kaur points towards a vast stretch of around 125 acres, which Dalits in this village reclaimed from the dominant castes here in 2014, 67 years after Independence.

Almost every landless Dalit woman in village Balad Kalan carries with her a story of when they were ‘shown their place’ by upper caste men for stepping into their fields. Though the humiliations they faced are still present in memory, their epic struggle seems to have pushed those into the past.

The Dalit movement has fought vigorously to reclaim their right to a one-third share of panchayat lands. That’s a right enshrined in the Punjab Village Common Lands (Regulation) Act, 1961. Their struggles have retrieved 20,000 bighas (around 4,210 acres) in 162 villages in south Punjab since 2014. And now, Dalits are once again pushing the barriers of resistance. They’re laying claim to lands held by dominant castes that exceed the limits laid down in the Land Ceiling Act, 1972.

Balad Kalan, located between Sangrur and Patiala on National Highway 7, is where the movement encountered its most defining moment. It’s where women like Rajinder Kaur are happy to talk today, openly and at length about the wonders their collective struggle has achieved. Balad Kalan is not new to battles for justice. The memorials on the village periphery to those who fell fighting for the dream of a just world hold silent testimony to its history of resistance.

The battles for this land were not easily won. “It was routine for the sarpanch to till all the 125 acres meant for Dalits,” Charan Singh, a daily wage labourer, tells PARI. He heads the committee which oversees the management of the reclaimed land. “When we sought to join the lease auction,” says Charan Singh, “the Akali Dal sarpanch resisted and tried to intimidate us with the help of the administration. We blocked the Chandigarh-Bhatinda Road [local term for NH 7] and stalled the auction six times. In response, police lathi charged us. Women were picked up and taken to Ladda Kothi police station, and 41 men were jailed for two months.”

Meanwhile, in the village, landlords exploited the absence of the jailed leaders and Dalit men to plough the fields and sow paddy. In response, farmers’ unions, writers, artists, and rights groups united in statewide protests. Eventually, the leaders were released unconditionally, and a written agreement granted the land to Dalits on lease. “When released, we directly headed towards the fields and hoisted the flag of the Zameen Prapti Sangharsh Committee [Committee for the Struggle to Reclaim Land] —on those very acres,” ZPSC president Mukesh Malaud tells PARI matter-of-factly. Malaud himself remained in Sangrur jail for two months during the Balad Kalan struggle. Since then, he has been living in the shadows, dodging the police at every turn. “After getting possession of the land, the biggest challenge before us was how to manage it. And obviously, the individualistic competitive model of agriculture forced upon us by the Green Revolution was never an option.

“So, we opted for collective farming.”

The ZPSC formed small groups of Dalits, and the land was equally divided among them with complete freedom to sow whatever met their needs. The changes born of their struggle, later guided by the model of cooperative farming, now resonate through the village air, shaping the lives of women like Rajinder Kaur and others with newfound dignity. “Earlier. we were enslaved by the landlords. The committee liberated us and made us owners of this vast field,” she says while referring to the ZPSC.

In the almost feudal nature of oppression in the village, women suffered the most, Mukesh tells us. “Before ZPSC’s influence, it was common for landlords to target Dalit girls and newly married women. They’d be waiting for them to enter the fields to gather wild grass – where harassment was routine.”

A 2015 study, done by Professors Gian Singh and Dharam Pal, published in the Journal of Rural Development, found that while working in the fields, 6.83 per cent of landless Dalit women in Punjab faced sexual exploitation. The actual number is likely to be much higher as an overwhelming majority – 78.11 per cent – refused to respond.

Rajinder Kaur shares a story from her younger days, when along with other Dalit women, she had gone to collect wild grass growing along the water channels, hoping to feed her lone buffalo. Noticing the ‘trespassers,’ the furious dominant caste landlord shouted at the women: how had they dared to enter his fields. Rajinder recalls how he flung their sacks outside the field, one by one. “He told us to get lost. Often, when we merely approached their fields, they would drive us away as though we were just stray cattle. I can’t even tell you what words the landlords would use,” she says.

Mukesh says “such atrocities often forced them to sell their cattle as the women always remained vulnerable while collecting the wild grass. The situation was such that sometimes women had to walk up to five or six kilometres just to collect the grass, wasting their entire day.” Today, they collect fodder from their own fields in the evening and work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in the day.

The movement to reclaim land, Mukesh says, brought more than dignity for the Dalit women. “It has completely ended the culture of begaar [forced labour] and has given bargaining power to the Dalits.”

You begin to understand this is a real success story when Charan Singh talks about his group of 22 Dalit families in Balad Kalan. This group cultivates 77 bighas – each receiving 20 marlas (just an eighth of a bigha) for growing fodder, with wheat and paddy grown on the collective farm. “After the last paddy harvest, each family got 19,000 rupees as profit, besides five quintals of wheat for self-consumption and a tractor load of chaff for cattle. The rest of the wheat was sold in the market. Besides profit, the amount we got from both the crops was enough to pay the lease money for the next year,” he says.

This struggle for land has brought such a change to the rural landscape of south Punjab that almost every village has scripted its own unique story. If one village has bought all agricultural implements, another has bought tents and utensils to be used for community functions. Like at Batriana, a village located around 15 kilometres from Balad Kalan. There we find Ramkaran Singh, who works as a carpenter and is a member of the committee that manages the collective Dalit farm of the village. He is preparing paddy fields with a Swaraj 855 tractor. “We bought it from the profit of our farm,” he says.

In this village, all Dalit households, around 130, are members of the 28-acre collective farm which they have been cultivating since 2015. From a Swaraj 855 tractor to a trolley, from a Happy Seeder to ploughs, you name the agricultural implement or machine – and they own it. “Even after spending around 10 lakh rupees on machinery, we have saved 7 or 8 lakhs, which we have given on 10.8 percent annual interest to arhtiya (commission agent cum moneylender) Mangat Sharma, who earlier used to lend us money,” says Ramkaran.

During the harvest season in these villages, Dalit women no longer look towards the landlords. They sing their own songs in unison to celebrate the arrival of the season. “Our own houses are filled with grains. And look at these kupps [haystacks], we have stored chaff for the entire year, says Savitri Kaur in Balad Kalan. “Now almost every house in our vehra [Dalit settlement] earns by selling milk. Some even rear more than one head of cattle,” she says, pointing towards the Dalit farm where a cluster of kupps is located.

The Dalit collective farming model we are seeing today in Balad Kalan and Batriana traces its roots to 2008. That’s when Dalits in Benra village (Dhuri subdivision), asserted control over their nine-acre share for the first time. However, the ZPSC says that it is not just about collective farming, it is a struggle for land. “The state’s Department of Rural Development and Panchayats leases out about 1.56 lakh acres of panchayat land annually, with one-third [52,000 acres] reserved for Dalits,” says Mukesh. “Yet for decades, powerful landlords have routinely grabbed this land at throwaway prices, using loyal Dalits as frontmen to bypass the law.”

After Balad Kalan, the movement spread like wildfire adding on average 15 new villages to the list every year. As the number of villages swayed by the movement kept increasing, so did the criminal cases against ZPSC leaders. Against Mukesh Malaud alone, 28 criminal cases have been registered, including several for attempt to murder, land grab, obstructing traffic and stopping officials from discharging their duties. “Now,” he smiles, “I am waiting for the 29th case to be registered.” That’s because the ZPSC has recently have given a new turn to the movement by starting a campaign for implementation of The Land Ceiling Act, 1972.

Dalits make up around 32 per cent of the population of Punjab – the highest for any state. But they own just 3.5 per cent of its total land. “How did some people manage to get such huge chunks of land? They got these lands as gifts for their loyalty to the British or erstwhile kings. Our only demand is to implement the law of this land. If the government won’t implement it, people will,” Mukesh tells PARI.

And people do seem to have already started implementing the law. On May 20, 2025 amid echoes of slogans like ‘Long live the unity of landless’, hundreds of Dalits, each clutching earthen lamps emerged from distant villages. Led by Malaud and his comrades, they started marching towards Bir Aishwan in Sangrur, where 927 acres of land of the erstwhile raja of Jind princely state is located. In the revenue records, this land is marked as bechiraag (uninhabited, but literally meaning – without a lamp).

In a firm voice, Mukesh told the crowds, “Dalits have brought these lamps from their homes to create Beghampura [poet-saint Ravidas’ imagined utopian, casteless village] on this very land. It is just the beginning. There are 153 bechiraag villages in Punjab, which together hold one lakh acres of land. Now, no village will be left bechiraag, each inch of such land will be lit soon.” Police arrested around 400 Dalits, including several leaders of the ZPSC and have been desperately searching for Mukesh since. However, as if honouring a ritual long observed, he has once again vanished into the people, just as he has for the past 15 years.

Amid this very real game of hide and seek, the footprints of Mukesh and his comrades remain etched in over 100 villages in South Punjab. Balad Kalan, which has weathered many rough seasons, is where the ZPSC flag was hoisted for the first time 11 summers ago. Its fading red colour now seems to be merging with the endless green fields.

This story is published under the PARI Senior Fellowship 2025.