Lerche Jens. Politics of the poor: Agricultural labourers and political transformations in Uttar Pradesh. Diary, Volume 26, Issue 2 & 3 January 1999, pages 182 - 241 ).
The paper talks of agriculture labourer relations, labour struggles and how caste assumes itself as a class. Also the article widely discusses political transformation of U. P, discussing how a local lower caste party, founded by a low caste dalit, evolved and dominated in the political sphere of the state and how it politicized labourers, how it cause to emancipation in dalits and what were the changes and conclusive improvements in rural agricultural labour relations, when compared to the past. the paper is rich in terms of literature coverage and Lerche has enriched his paper with valid earlier field reports, surveys, narratives and researches and findings. he has also snowed comparative analysis and limited his area of research by choosing two villages from two distinct districts, viz from west HE choosed Muzzafarnagar district and from the east it was jaunpur in U. P. he discusses labour relations and struggles of labourers in the villages up to 1993as he conducted fieldwork in 1993 in the spoken villages, he chooses these two distinct villages in that in both cases the villages represented important conditions for which their districts were published and which the author wished to insist on which makes us to guess that he uses representative part, he argues that the both villages were well developed and had colonial revenue history common to the area. Also he says, villages were dominated by land owners and chamars represented the labour caste. he himself conducts field surveys in east and west U. P over, he says, comparisions of variant regions of U. P are relevant as economic and social developments within this titanic state has followed regionally diverse trajectories. He revisited the villages in 1995 / 98 as well to refurbish his observations. He distinguishes Muzafarnager district ' s village as full land irrigated, sugarcane as the major crop and Jats as the land owner class and dominant class and Chamars at the lower apex. While as in Jaunpur district villages agriculturally developed, uppercaste that of Thakurs ( Rajputs ) as major land owning group and having access to government services and jobs. Chmars was the labor caste in this village also and the main crop being wheat and potatoes. he also argues about and gives empirical evidences of the decline in employment of labourers in agriculture since independence to a great extent purely because of the avenues outside the agriculture, landlord oppression, low wages, requirement of less manual labour because of the access to agricultural machinery, etc,. he says the practice of sharecropping had also declined to a greater extent. He says, from the laborers ' point of view, snce independence. agriculture wage labour and croppinghad lost their position as the most important sources, which gives the idea of his research techniques used in the study besides observation method he resorted to interview technique clear from the people ' s narratives. he talks of other changes in labour relations most importantly the transformation from free labour ( beggar ) to unfree labour, from permanent labour to changes in labour contracts, low wages to strikes of labourers and decline of debt bondage, etc,. he distinguishes Muzaffarnagar village and Jaunpur village also in terms of debt bondage ( higher in Muzafarnagar ), labour activism ( High in jaunpur ), wages outside agriculture ( higher in Muzafarnagar ), land owner ' s control on wage rates ( in Jaunour ), etc,. He then comes to comparative analysis and compares the earstwhile case studies since 1980 ' s like that of Rita Sharma ' s, Dipanker Gufta ' s, Ravi Srivastava ' s, Polemans '. etc, and found the trend of continuous decrease of agricultural labourers and in share cropping relations. He then turns to labour politicization and emancipation of laborers ' in 1990 ' s and the emergence of the BSP, which added an important dimension to the economic and political actions of low caste workers, he studies, how the rise of the party influenced labour relations and how at local level, the caste based party dealt with class issues and its success in mobilizing the rural laborers ' than the class based policies of communist parties. he talks of the BSP ' S contributions to the development and emancipation of untouchables and laborers ' like provision of funds, financial assistance to caste discrimination victims, punishments to caste offences cases, etc, moreover, their symbolic core of the installation of Ambedkar statues all over the U. P for the encouragement of Dalits, etc, last but not the least the paper argues, how BSP has played a vital role in the politicization of the untouchables, even though the exact strategic direction of this politicization is still being fought over. As for research methodology, the paper is a balanced piece of empirical data and theoretical inputs and enough field views, studies and reports. We can say a case study of the two villages of two distinct districts the interpretive method has also been employed as Lerche talks of other studies and interprets those reports, also content analysis; observation and interview techniques have been employed. He takes support from both primary and secondary sources to enrich his paper. The paper has been able to maintain objectivity as it was beautiful to see its narrating the plight of labourers ', role of BSP, etc, but simultaneously keeping scope for further inquires and improvements and also not generalizing the findings for whole of the U. P.
( Adfar Shah is a doctoral candidate at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. mail at adfer. )
