Janadesh 2007

People’s Verdict 2007

Retrieving People’s Dignity through Land and Livelihood

A Non-Violent Civil Disobedience Campaign in India

2^nd October 2007

“The essence of non-violent civil disobedience is to stand firm for what is right and springs from a deep sense of injustice.  Opposing injustice means seeing that people have sufficient for their survival; seeing that the Earth is carefully maintained; and seeing that non-violent behavior continually transforms positively our human relations.”

Preface

People’s Verdict is a campaign on “Retrieving People’s Dignity through Land and Livelihood” and it aims to have people take up non-violent struggle and civil disobedience in their communities at the local, national and international levels throughout the world in the future.

Advancing the People’s Verdict is a way of pressing for a common social change agenda for removing poverty and redistributing justice in the form of land rights to the poorer sections. People’s verdicts have been declared in various parts of India for the past ten years at the local and state levels. It is gradually being expanded to national and international levels.

The progression of building a People’s Verdict from the grassroots to the global level will culminate in a large action in late 2007. The large programs being planned in India is to have 25,000 people march 350 kilometers to Delhi from Gwalior and profile the power of more than 100,000 people demanding their land rights. Other support programs are in different countries and are all calling for a poverty-free society

The Broader Campaign

The Retrieving People’s Dignity Campaign aims to bring many people together to support those who are suffering without dignity and self-worth. By raising people’s consciousness to the need for equity and justice in their communities and society at large, the campaign works to create structures that retrieve people’s basic dignity and self-worth. It is self-evident in India that the present economic order continues to appropriate wealth in spite of the massive fall-out of poverty and injustice at the national, regional, or international levels and it is not mindful of the adversity effecting millions of people.

Raising the issues of people’s basic self-worth and dignity focuses us to redirect our energy away from the present trends i.e. where unregulated industrialization is causing people to lose land, water and forest – which are their livelihood resources, and where they are migrating to cities to perform work as cheap labour, left rootless with-out democratic rights. The Retrieving People’s Dignity Campaign is to assist with livelihood generation inputs for small landholders so that they can stay on the land; and to give land to those landless people who have no other means of survival; and to see small-scale agriculture as a basic building block to national development.

The Retrieving People’s Dignity Campaign uses non-violent and civil disobedience as its way to show dissent in the existing system and to resist the unethical behavior of leaving people to continuously suffer indignity. In this effort the Retrieving People’s Dignity Campaign uses methods from the gandhian tradition as a way to frame the struggle. It is noted that this method of struggle was fundamental to India gaining freedom from the British, and for South Africa to overcome the Apartheid System.

Few people have political power; few people have military might. All people possess moral power.

People can freely choose to be courageous when there is a deep sense of unrighteousness or injustice.

Moral power is expressed through non-violent action or unwillingness to subscribe or adhere to an unjust system or relationship.

If one has dignity, one has the moral power to stand up for what is evidently just, using the force of truth (Truth-Force).

The Retrieving People’s Dignity Campaign seeks to bring innovative social workers, voluntary organizations and mass based organizations together into a formation to:

Address the vacuum of societal leadership, especially the decline of genuine state leadership.

Demonstrate a new way of addressing the crisis of gross human rights violations in failed states without falling into the trap of imperialistic “humanitarian interventions”.

Resolve failure of states to live up to global norms of democratic governance and to redress the deepening crisis in governance and democracy without loss of direction to an equal, self-reliant and ecologically sustainable world.

Bring together people and movements around the world which in their respective countries, are in the process of advancing non-violent systemic change, and “peaceful societal revolution”.

Clarify and demonstrate what and how third generation civil society strategies are active in the world today.

The Retrieving People’s Dignity Campaign in India will also work to create a charter of demands to provide to different governments at the international, national, state and local levels. These charters are all geared towards “Retrieving People’s Dignity” and will be developed by millions of people across the globe over the next two years. It will then be submitted to governments around the world and to the United Nations General Assembly.

The Retrieving People’s Dignity Campaign in India will build up to a large action that will encourage hundreds of thousands of landless poor to march to the country’s capital and demand justice from the Indian State in Delhi. In spite of repeated efforts to dialogue has been made with various state and central government(s), little headway in terms of providing land to the landless and removing poverty. Given the vibrancy of so many social movements in the country, the landless people are themselves taking up the initiative to resist unjust state policies non-violently.

Non-violent civil disobedience can only move to a stage of total revolution if people are willing to suffer for the sake of others or for future generations and become the living social change process