Remembering Jockin : Sheela Patel
Jockin has not still left this room
Jockin played such a larger than life role for the communities and in the gift he gave all of us in the form of the federation model of community organization that it is hard to believe, as the days go by, that he is not with us… especially after the last few years when his eye sight began to fade and his movements got restricted … yet with his two phones he directed all activity 24x7.
For those who don’t know about the federation model, this is what it is : Poor households take up many issues at personal and neighborhood levels, however the most critical issues that need recognition from city and national governments are rarely possible for neighborhoods to seek by themselves. By creating “federations” : associations of all neighborhoods at city level that create a critical mass, it becomes possible to explore recognition at city level and to support and strengthen each others’ confidence to stay organized as none of these outcomes are immediate and sometimes take decades. This self- organization ensures that they focus on their needs and not the needs of external projects brought in “for their good” for nonpriority purposes. He then further envisioned that just being organized at city level does not work as provincial and national governments need more pressure to design policies that are often outside the remit of the city, and so provisional and national federations emerged, initially in India, and in 1975 a movement began when Jockin started fighting for the relocation of Janata colony in Mumbai (see note).
We who founded SPARC in 1984, had visions of creating an organization which would be true partners to community organizations and to develop the organizations agenda through following up on their priorities. We assumed that we would have to create these organizations, and began with pavement dwellers.
It evolved as we envisaged, but we realized that they were invisible to the city and that their cause was very hard to place as a priority in a city and country where 50% of the residents were already living in slums. Jockin, whom I knew since I was at the university came to the press conference of the census we did for the pavement dwellers “We the invisible” and then showed up at our center on 8th March 1986 to say that he was willing to explore a relationship with SPARC and Mahila Milan …. the Indian alliance was born.
He mentored all of us into the true politics of who gets land and why and the need to develop community leadership which could negotiate, articulate and produce solutions that the state or NGOs had never conceived of. His biggest gift to the alliance was his acceptance and acknowledgement that NSDF had never considered the role and contribution of women in their work while always taking for granted their presence in large numbers in rallies and protests marches. He and the NSDF leadership made a promise that rather than ensuring that women have a 30% presence in the NSDF leadership there would be more than 50% presence, not because of a quota but because of their caliber and standing in their communities and in the organization.
Father Jorge Anzorena whom we lovingly call our Ambassador mentor and guide is an Argentinian Jesuit priest who has lived and taught architecture in Tokyo, Japan through all the times we have known him, and who took out six months every year to meet Asian African and Latin American slum communities and NGOs working with them, and he encouraged SomsookBoonyabancha from Thailand to set up ACHR. In 1988 our alliance joined ACHR which at that time was an organistaion that brought professionals from Asian countries working with communities to fight evictions and explore new forms of developmental solutions. Jockin introduced women’s savings groups and community data gathering that the Indian alliance was doing to this network, and demonstrated that these processes produced strong federations. Father Jorge also gave us modest but important start up finance for many activities that we undertook, the first being for women who were designing houses on the pavements of Mumbai for their new houses, to visit communities that had already been relocated in other cities in India. This produced the peer exchange processes we now see as the most valuable learning within our federations.
In 1991-2 father Jorge asked me to travel to South Africa to attend an event set up by the council of churches to meet the leaders of townships across Africa to share experiences of what they should do after getting majority rule in South Africa under Nelson Mandela. Instead of going myself I asked Jockin and Celine to go, and that I believe was one of the most unknowingly powerful choices I made because it set into motion the beginnings of the SDI movement with Indians and South Africans exploring the federation model for south Africa. Jockin in his inimitable style pushed for Peoples Dialogue (which was the name of the conference) and for Joel Bolnick to lead it; to become an organization which like SPARC would assist the emerging federations in South Africa to explore development solutions for the urban poor. ‘Why should others represent the voice of the poor’, he said, ‘why not create space and capacity for the poor to make their representations themselves?’
Jockin crafted a very new and different relationship for NGOs and federations to explore roles and relationships which were different from the standard model where NGOs identify needs and develop projects and deliver them to targeted populations they identify. Instead, we explored the possibilities of our core business becoming the creating and strengthening of community federations at city level that could make representations from local to global. Peer learning explorations and demonstrated solutions on the ground by senior, more experienced community leaders was the way this federation model evolved and continues to sustain itself locally nationally and now internationally.
There is a strategic and amazing insight that intuitively set this in place. Professionals, even the most supportive and committed ones move on, their lives and their need to earn money and evolve takes them on to other jobs, community leaders whatever they do to earn a living, are there and many get trained on an ongoing basis. Further, those professionals who work with the federations are often their friends for life and help and support them wherever they are.
Even when he was physically fit and in full spirit, I was often asked what we would do if something happened to him. I recall a commonly used phrase “what if Jockin gets killed crossing the road?” My answer then as it is now is “… many who initiate something unique and disruptive are a GIFT to a process that has to be celebrated as long as it is in your presence. And if it lasts for as much time as we had with Jockin, we hope we have learnt as much as possible of how he thought, what he viewed as acceptable and his strategies to be disruptive enough to explore new possibilities that we can take the process onward”. In fact our real challenge is to encourage now audacious explorations by a new generation of leaders who then truly take his legacy onwards in a world where time bound Climate Change and SDG targets make urgent demands for development investment to be really effective.
The federation model can possibly be the most effective way to develop sustainable aggregation of the poor with focus on women but not excluding others. Federations can demonstrate what solutions work for them, they can teach each other and they can explore new technology and manage and maintain it. It’s a valuable replacement for the micro project by project approach that mainstream development investment makes today, with professionals organizing the communities for a temporary period for the duration of the project, instead, the federations appropriate that process and teach and learn from each other using support and assistance from a small team of professionals.
Jockin’s values and perspectives as seen through this federation model have beaten a path, and also taught a whole generation of peers to create such paths for themselves. To not to fear what they don’t know and to seek ways to learn what they need to know and use that knowledge to create solutions that will serve their needs. Much still needs to be done and I feel that Jockin has not left the room.
HOW TO MAKE THE ORDINARY EXTRAORDINARY Celine D’Cruz. Board member SPARC writes about Jockin and his gift to the federation process he gifted the urban poor
THE PRACTICE OF COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION ACCORDING TO JOCKIN
Jockinrecognised early on that the ‘Big Change’ was not going to come from the Big Revolution but from the routine of simply doing the everyday rituals. By bringing presence to the ordinary rituals of the federation hundreds of communities discovered the extraordinary. For example, the simple practice of collecting savings and information is a new and different experience each day for every community in every city. When hundreds of communities stay with the practice they build their resilience necessary to adapt to man made and natural disasters. This chapter is a celebration of my mentor who taught me, above all, about the nature of power and vulnerability and the capacity of organized communities to transform their vulnerability into an opportunity for the benefit of all the urban poor across countries and cultures.
Jockin called himself a “flying slum dweller”. As the work of the federation grew Jockin had to literally fly to many cities and regions and meet new communities. While some treated him like god, those of us who worked closely with him in building the slum dwellers movement witnessed his magic and had the opportunity to experience his wizardry along with his frailties. The ecstasy and the pain felt on this journey with Jockin is not easy to talk about. However, the wisdom gained strengthened my belief in why going back to the basics is so essential for organization building. Jockin’s fundamentals of community organisation are as relevant today as they were when we started to walk this path with him in 1985.
Jockin’s very human approach to leading people came from his life’s stories. He was not perfect, nor did he try to become perfect but as Jockin grew in power he had to learn to walk the tight rope of pragmatism while responding with his heart. Some of us embraced the richness of this human endeavour as he was always striving to improve conditions for other slum dwellers. This was Jockin’s essence and his strength.
Jockin’spoliticisation started as a young boy in the mining district of Kolar Gold Fields, outside Bangalore city, where his father was a foreman and a union leader in the gold mines. Here he witnessed the death of many miners. Later the family moved to Bangalore where Jockin worked as a carpenter. He was a young penniless adult in Bangalore before migrating to Bombay in 1962.
On May 17, 1975, Jockin’s slum settlement Janta Colony faced evictions and 6000 people were forced to move to Cheetah Camp not so far away from the Baba Atomic Research Center. Despite all his efforts with local and national government Jockin was unable to stop the onslaught of the state machinery. His slogan for organisingwas“ People Power against Atomic Power” . This incident was a turning point for Jockin as it transformed the way he related to vulnerability produced by evictions, not just for himself and his family but for his community and for other communities in the city of Mumbai. Till date the residents of Cheetah Camp fly black flags to mark the 17th May.
For Jockin the real fight had just begun and he was determined to reduce the suffering of thousands of families that face the fear of evictions in the city on a daily basis. His own experience made him realize why it was so important to prepare communities to do their homework before a dialogue with government. As a young organizer Jockin adopted Saul Alinsky’s tactics of maneuvering and baiting the establishment. As he evolved as a leader, he saw the relevance of Paulo Freire’s work of deeper learning and reflection for teaching communities to break away from their “culture of silence”. In his work Jockin used a combination of both.
To stop evictions and provide secure tenure is not on the agenda of any political party or trade union. Politicians may promise the sky before elections but do not deliver on their promises. Jockin once stood for local council elections with the hope of delivering to the urban poor only to realise that this path of representative politics was very limiting and he was not equipped to carry his constituency along and build the collective leadership necessary for translating policy into homes for thousands of slum dwellers in the city. This reflection prompted Jockin to seek new ways of organising and mobilising poor communities outside of party politics and start a pan Indian movement of slum dwellers called the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF) of India which today works in over 50 towns and cities. Jockin did not know then that 20 years later he would pioneer a platform of inter regional urban poor organisations called Slum dwellers International (SDI).
In 1978, Jockin designed a one page questionnaire called the “settlement profile”. It was designed to collect information about the total number of slums in the city, the land they occupied, available basic services and also included the various social/ political/religious organizations in each settlement. Through this process he met other community leaders like himself. This was also a starting point when communities met each other for the first time and reflected on the new knowledge produced by them on the slums in the city. Through a process of learning and reflection, Jockin broke many myths about the urban poor. The information collected by them proved that the poor did not impinge on the city’s resources but in fact contributed to the city’s economy and gave them a right to a decent home and to aspire for a better life in the city.
My own encounter with Jockin was at the SPARC office in 1985, about 10 years after the evictions of 1975. I remember my first meeting with Jockin with great clarity and did not realize then that I was about to be re- schooled by him and that SPARC, NSDF, MM was going to be my new family. Jockin chose to partner with SPARC with the aim of strengthening the work of NSDF and was attracted to SPARC's work with women pavement dwellers. The pavement dwellers were poorer than slum dwellers as they squatted on the pavements, worked in the informal economy and had no access to land.
With Jockin I experienced his magic ever so often. He always made something out of nothing when it came to his people. I Iearnt that when lots of people aspire to something in an organized way they develop the power to manifest those aspirations. Jockin himself aspired for the happiness of all the urban poor and till the end of his life worked consistently to reduce their suffering. I also experienced the vulnerability of communities when they were not organised. When you are a poor community, to be organized and connected to a larger network of slum dwellers is a blessing.
The Basic Practice of Community Organisation according to Jockin:
Begin with the poorest and the most vulnerable communities. This ensures that all get included.
Organizing the better off communities does not always translate in opening up space for the very poor to be included. The pavement dwellers were not on NSDF’s agenda. In fact the pavement dwellers were an embarrassment to the slum dwellers as they squatted on the street. Jockin was quick to see that including them would only strengthen the overall agenda of NSDF. He consciously created systems that worked for the very poor communities. I learnt then that when you earn daily and spend daily it becomes easier to save daily. It was so much easier for the better off families with regular incomes to take loan after loan. However, it was not the same for poorer families who earned irregular incomes and often were unable to pay off even their first loan. A community leader from Johannesburg Rachael, opened my eyes when she said that she would avoid going to the saving meetings as she could not afford to give 30 Rand each month.
The greater the vulnerability, the greater the survival instinct and greater the motivation to act and bring change.
Vulnerable communities are ready to take higher risks as they have nothing to loose and often become good influencers of change. When other women from the slums locally and internationally met the women on the streets from Mahila Milan their reaction was, “ If they can do it, we can also do it”. The pavement dwellers of Mumbai had a burning problem of evictions that occurred daily or weekly. Similarly women and young girls living on the streets or along the railway tracks were even more vulnerable and without sanitation facilities they had to wait till dark to relieve themselves. They were highly motivated to change their condition and had the potential of influencing other communities. Jockin saw the value in looking after the more vulnerable groups of the urban poor and in their role in breaking the inertia for those settlements who took longer to change.
When communities organize citywide they bring together their collective wisdom, strength and resources to address their specific and collective needs.
Caring for each other’s agenda develops capacity to think about each other’s problems and solutions. By collecting citywide information and saving citywide, communities build capacity to negotiate for more robust alternatives. For example, in a city like Mumbai the land prices are high and city authorities were unlikely to give land to pavement dwellers. It took around 25 years for the pavement families to find a decent home. It was a long wait. Alone they could not have achieved what they achieved but by building that critical voice along with other groups of the urban poor in the city they were able to prepare for the marathon. For 25 years the pavement women leaders supported other communities locally and in other countries to find a decent home. In doing so they built the stamina and patience to wait till their turn came. This could only happen because the pavement dwellers were part of a the larger citywide network of slum dwellers. It was also easier for government to engage with a single organisation with a voice and identity. In the Mumbai Urban Transport Project II (MUTP-II) NSDF under Jockin’s leadership supported the Railway Slum Dwellers Federation and along with SPARC worked closely with the State Government and Railway authorities to resettle over 18,000 families living along the railway tracks.
Breaking the enormity of the problem into small parts makes organizing manageable.
Listing, counting and categorizing communities according to land ownership and type of vulnerability made it easier for communities to organize around the special needs, strategize and engage directly with a particular land authority. The 6 million slum dwellers in the city of Mumbai could be easily organised into federations according to the land they occupied. e.g. Airport Slum Dwellers Federation, Dharavi Vikas Samiti (DVS), Railway slum dwellers federation(RSDF) and Pavement Dwellers Association and Port Trust Federation. Jockin used the word “federation” to describe a network of communities organized according to the type of land occupied (e.g. state, central, municipal). Communities and their leadership identified issues that were land specific. For example, slums located on airport lands had no access to basic services like toilets. After the MUTP-II was completed iNSDF/RSDF engaged with railway authorities in other cities within the country and outside. Jockin arranged for the Kenyan railway authorities to visit Mumbai on a learning exchange. Today the Railway authorities in Kenya works closely with the federation in Nairobi to find joint solutions for families living along the railway tracks.
Women are natural organizers and yet traditionally most community leaders were men.
After the Janta Colony evictions Jockin admitted that he invited community women only when he needed to add to the numbers in the march against evictions. However, he was quick to realise that he had failed to empower them as leaders. Without women the organisation was much weaker. Jockin learned from that and after that opened the space for women to participate in the organisation. He was the first to acknowledge at community meetings that women had communication skills which when used for the collective good of the community had the power to accelerate change and improve the quality of the organization. Besides he noticed that women have a stamina to stay with discomfort and pain in order to make change happen.Their instinct to protect their children and families make women invaluable agents of change. Today Mahila Milan is a strong entity but there is need to be vigilant and guard their space as it is easy to erode in the presence of traditional leaders.
It is simply good practice to have separate spaces for men and women to organise.
By creating separate and safe spaces for organizing, young and adult women do not have to compete with the traditional leadership. Jockin’s life’s work was to build the capacity of Mahila Milan and redefine their relationship with the men in their community. Jockin and other members of NSDF were role models to the men and helped them set the tone for this new engagement. As women acted on issues that benefited the family and the community, men realized the need to support them. When large number of men do this it becomes easier for the community to accept and see value of having women in leadership positions.
Money and information are essential tools that have the potential to improve the collective bargaining power of slum dwellers.
A single family with their meagre income cannot afford a house in the city. It seemed like an impossible task but Jockin taught hundreds of communities to dream and realise their dream. When hundreds of communities collect their savings and bring it together as city level funds, they are in a much better position to leverage external finances for land, housing and basic services. Similarly their collective knowledge of the lands in the city makes them equipped to find better alternatives.This daily practice of collecting savings and information with diligence builds the capacity of communities to manage their more complex issues. Experience has it that communities who develop this discipline simply become more resilient when they have to deal with a crisis.
Everything is workable when communities are organised.
Building trust is essential for organizing communities and strengthening the movement. The methods Jockin adopted seem counter intuitive and challenged mainstream logic. For example, in the formal world, when you take a loan and default you get blacklisted and have no access to the next loan. When communities organize considering the needs of each member, they realize that those who default do so because of some good reason beyond their control such as a personal crisis or a bad family situation. Maybe only less than 1% of those who default do so willfully. Punishing people who default is not a solution and experience has shown that when given a second and third loan the poorer families tide better over their crisis and can get back on their feet faster. Building norms and procedures that work for the poorest opens the space for solutions in all kinds of situations. This can only happen when communities are organised.
Regular community meetings and exchanges open the space for collective learning, reflection & consolidation.
e.g. after an eviction Jockin often used the practice of narrating what happened before, during and after the eviction. Every meeting started with the story. This discipline and practice established the steps of evictions both from the perspective of the demolition squad and as experienced by the community. As women narrated their stories again and again they became stronger and confident. They understood the local government structures and the various departments and even the law. The people in the demolition squad and the officers became real people to them. This exercise of telling the story, listening, reflecting, learning and action became an art and a science and it was magical to see the shift and transformation in so many women. It removed the fear of evictions and strengthened their collective force to prepare for the next one. There were times when an eviction became a playing field for the community to discard unwanted junk and protect the items that had value to them. This would often surprise the demolition squad who completed their duty of “demotions” with minimum effort. Jockin turned this terrible experience of evictions into one that empowered the community.
Shifting from the politics of agitation to that of engagement changes the quality of the relationship of organised communities with government.
Jockin’s experience taught him never to go empty handed to the negotiating table. He always had information about the slums and the lands in the city in the palm of his hand. He always presented alternative solutions when talking to authorities and always had more information than the government. He trained communities on the importance of doing their homework. Going prepared with facts and workable solutions often surprises the officials, builds trust and opens the doors for further engagement. Very often Jockin gave government officials a taste of their own power. Bureaucrats are unaware that they have the power to influence change even with small actions. He always invited senior officials to visit the community and showed them how small things made a difference. e.g. to give permission to construct a toilet and inaugurate it. Sometimes it was just getting the officer to pick up the phone and talk to the right person. Jockin never left a single leaf unturned in his quest for bringing relief to the urban poor constituency.
Instigate change by walking the walk and not just talking.
By implementing precedent setting projects communities learnt to change policy with practice. Jockin always said that we have many beautiful state policies which do not get implemented. Showing and Doing is a testimony of what works and does not work. Through the implementation of small and large upgrading projects, communities bring authenticity to the practice and can show the city the workability of their solutions. Implementing projects is a proof of the capacity of the community to lead, administer, manage resources and work with the complexities of managing construction as well as post-project maintenance. This way of showing and doing has instigated many local governments to give small and large contracts to local federations to implement. In Uganda for example local government changed procurement rules to include communities.
Reflections:
Jockin’s journey of the last 40 years was about strengthening and building urban poor organizations to enable them to negotiate with the formal city. This endeavour led to thousands of families finding a home in the city.
These days the speed of development is so compelling and poor communities have to adapt constantly to the changing nature of our institutions. Community leaders today have to deal with increasing complexities. Jockin demonstrated that staying with the basics can help communities navigate the complex times.The daily practice of savings, collecting information, regular meetings builds capacity of communities to tide over internal and external threats.
Jockin’s authenticity as a leader came from his ability to navigate complexities and step into his vulnerabilities. Jockin showed through example, compassion, common humanity, centeredness and trust that we can collectively find solutions. Some of us took that leap of faith and stepped in by his side and I can only say that my journey with Jockin has marked me for my life time.
My experience with Jockin and other community leaders has made me contemplate the role of leadership in movement building. How do we navigate these complex times? What kind of check mechanisms need to be put in place to protect the back of our leaders while ensuring they stay accountable? How do we ensure that the integrity of the basic practice is not compromised? Why building authentic leadership is as important if not more important than building houses? How to find that balance between fulfilling the material aspects of poverty and the non tangible assets of building resilient communities? How can we do both without compromising one for the other? With Jockin I learnt that everything is workable when communities are organised.
Remembering Jockin : Sundar Burra
How shall I remember you then?
A poem for Jockin, my friend
Towards the end, mostly blind, body ravaged by disease, You fell without notice by the wayside, as you always wanted to: In Dharavi, great slum of Bombay and kingdom of your dreams Amidst your people, the wretched of the earth.
In the hospital, the fluorescent lights masked the pallor on your face, Your flock of men and women from the pavements and slums of Bombay Waited anxiously, prayers on their lips and love in their hearts while The currents of the Arabian Sea rose mightily in sorrow or anger.
How shall I remember you then, Jockin? As your eyes were failing, I brought you magnifying glass after magnifying glass to no avail. Even so, your vision gave sight to so many All over the world.
How shall I remember you then, Jockin? You know you came late for your daughter’s wedding dinner Because you were busy in the slums and shrugged it away As if it was just another day.
How shall I remember you then, Jockin? Crying when you spoke about your beloved grandchildren? Speaking to your daughters fifty times a day Making up for the lost years of their childhoods?
How shall I remember you then, Jockin? Rubbing shoulders with the Pope , Presidents and Prime Ministers of so many countries? But always, returning to the pavements and the slums – Where lay your soul, your sustenance, your salvation. That is how I will remember you, Jockin: Full of compassion and love.
Remembering Jockin : Gautam Chatterjee
Jockin- My Mentor
It was May 1988. As a young IAS officer, I had just finished my first rural sector field-posting in Thane Zila Parishad and was looking forward to my Collector and District Magistrate posting, like my other batch mates who had already been posted as District Collectors, when the rude shock came. My posting orders as District Collector, first to Ahmednagar and then to Wardha, got cancelled in quick succession, thanks to some overzealous political functionaries of Western Maharashtra and Vidarbha, and I got posted as Director, Prime Minister’s Grant Project (PMGP), Mumbai.
Though, there was disappointment of not getting a District Collector posting, the name Prime Minister in the posting heading did excite me with the thought that it would be a challenging assignment. Very soon I came to know what it entailed. The then PM had announced a Rs 100 crore (1 crore=10 million) grant for Dharavi Redevelopment, sometime in 1985 but since nothing was happening thereafter, the Government wanted a young energetic officer. That is what I was told when I took over as Director, PMGP, obviously to motivate me to take up a very challenging non-starter project.
In my first reconnaissance visit to understand Dharavi, I met and interacted with many stake holders, mainly with the functionaries of SPARC, NSDF and Mahila Milan. The one person who stood out among all the rest with whom I interacted, was the diminutive JockinArputham. This short guy who spoke with a heavy South Indian accent, was just superb in his communication. Language, whether it was broken Hindi or Marathi or English was never a barrier when it came to connecting and communicating with politicians, civil servants, developers or the urban-poor community. The first lesson I learnt from Jockin was that if you have to do something for the community, you need to listen to them and communicate with them. I knew, in this new sector of affordable housing and housing for the less endowed communities, the key to success is learning to communicate and Jockin turned out to be my mentor.
Thereafter, in my every interaction with the communities residing in RP Nagar and Netaji Nagar of Dharavi, Jockin was by my side helping me understand their problems, which needed to be resolved by using the PMGP funds. Indeed, unique solutions emerged in the form of in-situ slum redevelopment as we, along with the communities, planned and executed rehabilitation buildings. We agreed to disagree on many things but what stood out was that Jockin taught me the art of listening and communicating to understand a problem, articulate possible redressal in consultation with those who are facing the problem and involving the urban poor community in decision making.
This art which Jockin very subtly passed on to me, helped me throughout my career, most part of which was in the housing sector only. Whether it was formulating the relocation plan for the airport land slum dwellers of Rafique Nagar or it was communicating with the officials carrying out ruthless demotion of protected slum dwellers along the railway tracks, every time I found Jockin by my side and I continued to learn from him.
I am sad, my mentor is physically not by my side. But I am sure, he is pleased that his trainee, supporter and admirer in me, continues to fondly remember him.
Remembering Jockin :Srilatha Batliwala
Declassing Activism and Theory
Lessons Learnt from the Guru called Jockin
When I first met Jockin, I was a raw 20-year-old social work student, doing her community organizing field work in what was then called “Janata Colony”, one of Bombay’s largest slums. Jockin had lived there since he was a teenager, when his family was forcibly moved from a similar settlement in the heart of the city, and had begun building the nascent slumdwellers movement from this base. He used to routinely check out what these hapless students were doing to and with his people, and if he found us relatively innocuous, he would leave us to get on with it.
I was working with a group of adolescent girls, bringing them together in the evenings to talk about their lives, their hopes, their challenges. I had no idea what I was doing, but was “trusting the process” to reveal where it needed to be taken. He would stop by the meeting center, look benignly – if cynically – at what was going on, and then quietly fade away. But then, one day, he heard about my heroics – intervening in a case of domestic violence where the very drunk husband brandished a knife and threatened to stab me, and I defied him to go ahead and do it so that he could finally be in jail, where he belonged. This gutsiness piqued Jockin’s interest, and he decided to take more of an interest in me. He would stop by the meetings and ask provocative questions as I was leaving – “And then? What if they say they want to go to college but have no money, what will you do? What if they say they don’t want to get married and the parents are forcing them, what alternative will you offer? And after you leave Tata Institute, and you have raised all these hopes in these girls, what are they supposed to do then? Who will they turn to?”
I wanted to hit him – because I knew he was right, that I had no answers or solutions to offer, that this whole process was extractive, that I was getting a lot of experience but leaving behind nothing sustainable, nothing of value, nothing at all. I vowed I would do things differently when I graduated. That I would work in a way that would rise to these challenges. It took me years to understand that this was exactly what Jockin wanted – to make me question the facile, superficial approaches we were being taught in social work school, to provoke me into enabling the girls to find solutions that would work for them, to jolt me out of my middle-class assumption that I was there to liberate them, and had the capacity to do so! Most of all, I later saw that he was trying to make me commit, at a much deeper level, to working with marginalized communities in a much more effective and long-term process that might actually have some impact.
I did not meet Jockin again for more than a decade after this, when he arrived at our garage office in the early days of SPARC, having heard about our efforts to organize the women living in the pavement settlements to look for alternatives when the Indian Supreme Court Judgement went against them in a case challenging their right to live on the pavement. Again, his interest was piqued by our openly Freirian approach, and the way we were working our butts off, night and day, and that we had managed to pull off a real coup-de-grace by doing the first-ever census of pavement dwellers in the southern part of Bombay city to challenge the vague numbers being bandied about in the media. Who were these crazy women? He had to know.
There were heated debates – how the slumdweller movement of which he was already very much a founder and leader, had never embraced the pavement dwellers as part of their struggle, at how their movement was male-dominated and patriarchal, blind to the very different interests and priorities of women, on whom the impacts of housing insecurity, lack of water, sanitation, toilets, were not only different, but far worse. He took it all in, listening carefully, giving away nothing. Because he was the most intuitive, astute organizer on the planet, he immediately saw the power of what we were doing, of mobilizing women as a force for secure housing and tenure…. and for triggering much deeper transformations in the patriarchal social structure of informal settlement communities. He would never say it in these words, obviously [“Sri, put it into those nice big words of yours, make it sound nice” he would say] but he knew it – he knew we were onto something, and that if he joined forces with us, it could become something really powerful. And so it did.
Thus the “Alliance” was formed – our very own SPARC, the emerging Mahila Milan, and Jockin’g National Slum Dwellers Federation.
From the beginning, I watched in awe as Jockin ruthlessly declassed our activism. He was soon a presence in all our meetings with the pavement women, and the first thing I noticed was that his language openly poked fun of ours, and his style of intervention made a mockery of our bourgeois politeness. When a woman whined that they were poor and had no money to find other housing if their huts were demolished, Jockin wheeled on her: “NO MONEY?” he roared. “If I picked you up and shook you right now, coins and notes would be falling from every part of your body, including parts I don’t want to name in front of these nice decent ladies!! Listen to me: Don’t ever go to the government with that sob story! Don’t humiliate yourself and imagine they’ll feel sorry for you. They’ll kick you like stray dogs, which is what they think you are! Go to them with money in the bank and demand land to build proper houses!”
I cowered in a corner, thinking that was the end – the women would either walk out or pounce on him. Neither happened. They roared with laughter, and hurled good-natured abuse at Jockin (who received it with equal aplomb). And in their eyes I saw something else: respect – a silent salutation – a recognition that here was someone who knows who we are; no need to play games or act out stereotypes now. We can just be ourselves and move ahead. I also saw clearly how much we, the outside activists, carried our class in our language, our manner, our way of interacting. I learnt to accept that while we could never “declass” ourselves fully – as Jockin would say “You are a ‘flat’-wala [an affluent apartment dweller], and they know it, so don’t pretend to be something else. But you are a flat-wala who wants to support their struggle – they appreciate that. Start from there.”
Before long, though, I found myself adapting his raucous, no-nonsense style of communicating, and capturing women’s interest more effectively as a result. Over the years, as I moved on to organize rural women in Karnataka [with his blessings and assurance of support], there had been a fundamental shift in both my understanding of how to mobilise people and build a movement, and consequently, a radical change in my way of engaging people. I was unafraid; I freely used humour, mockery, satire, perverse metaphors [one that he particularly liked, inspired by him, was: “If you want to climb a mountain, why are you starting by digging a well??!”]. Activists I was training, women in the villages, students in the classroom - they would respond this style immediately, sensing its authenticity, its lack of false veneers, sometimes to the shock and disapproval of colleagues still steeped in traditional ways of “talking down” to your “beneficiaries” or “target group” or students and trainees. When they challenged me, I would simply say: “This is what I learnt from my movement building Guru, Jockin – and it works, as you shall see!” They soon did.
For me, Jockin took the concept and practice of popular education and participatory research into an entirely different dimension.
With him I learnt that participatory research was not about you designing the research instrument and then getting people to participate in its implementation, but actually using the process – like the slum enumeration system he pioneered, building on SPARC’s breakthrough methodology of doing a people-led census of pavement dwellers – to mobilise people and build a movement. Participatory research was about enabling them to lead the design – to ask research questions that would never occur to you, because they know what it is about their reality that they want to show the world, and you can never see that as clearly as they do. I applied this insight years later when we designed a research study on the Status of Women in Rural Karnataka (a state in Southern India). We asked the women how to find out who really controls – as opposed to formally or legally owns – the private assets of a household (land, house, livestock, equipment). They dismissed the awkward, convoluted question we had drafted for this, and one of the women said: “Why not simply ask: ‘What can you sell in an emergency without asking anyone else’s permission?’ That’s the only thing a person really controls!” Sure enough, the question worked like magic, and the results were startling, unsettling all our assumptions.
Similarly, Jockin took popular education into realms Freire may never have imagined: illiterate women from slums surveying public lands where they could resettle, co-designing the homes they would live in, and building model houses, alongside hapless young architects and structural engineers whom they heckled mercilessly for the “foolish” flaws in their designs. He pushed them forward as the primary teachers / negotiators / advocates in meetings with the World Bank, with government and municipal authorities, with leaders of slumdweller movements from other countries. So for him, Freire’s “conscientization” was not to be limited to analysis of local realities, but something far more ambitious: how to claim a seat at the table in city planning, how to influence global urban infrastructure financing policies, how to command the meta-data, and how to be in the vanguard of building a global movement of the urban poor.
So it was that no matter where I was located institutionally, I always felt accountable to him, to his politics, to the struggles of the most marginalized that he symbolized. When I became a Program Officer for Global Civil Society at the Ford Foundation, I launched an initiative called “Grassroots Globalism” and funded a range of grassroots movements that were linking up globally, to speak for themselves in global spaces – including SDI! Later, when I found myself a Research Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government in Harvard University, researching and teaching about social movements, I found myself running every social movement theory through the “Jockin” lens: what would Jockin make of the idea that “political moments” make social movements? I would ask myself. And the answer would come, through the ether: “Movements must make the political moment, Sri! Not the other way around!”
This is why Jockin never disapproved of my moving from practice to research, theory and teaching – on the contrary, he strongly encouraged it, because he believed it was vital for practitioners like me to become theory builders, knowing that building theory from practice was a powerful way of shifting the dominant discourse, especially in arenas like development and social justice.
And he was right. Because many of the conceptual frameworks I went on to build – such as the now benchmark theory on women’s movements and feminist movement building and on feminist leadership - have ironically become not only required reading in academic courses around the world, but also extensively translated and used by organizations and activists working on the ground – and not just women’s organizations, but even major International NGOs! Their authenticity springs from their rootedness in practice, and this is what Jockin wanted me to do. As I wrote “Changing Their World”, in fact, especially the section on “Why do movements matter?”, and on the relationship between organizations and movements, I felt Jockin sitting on my shoulder, critically examining each idea, and I rested only when I felt his affirmation flowing into me.
* * * * *
In India, many believe that to be a teacher is noble, but to be a “Guru” – a guide who helps disciples actualize their potential – is the highest role a human being can play. It is also believed that your greatest achievement, if you are a true Guru, is that even as your disciples may surpass you in their chosen fields, they will never forget your role in their journey, and that through them, you will bring greater justice and wisdom to the universe.
Jockin was my Guru. I will never forget his role in my journey. He brought greater justice and wisdom to our universe.
; I freely used humour, mockery, satire, perverse metaphors [one that he particularly liked, inspired by him, was: “If you want to climb a mountain, why are you starting by digging a well??!”]. Activists I was training, women in the villages, students in the classroom - they would respond this style immediately, sensing its authenticity, its lack of false veneers, sometimes to the shock and disapproval of colleagues still steeped in traditional ways of “talking down” to your “beneficiaries” or “target group” or students and trainees. When they challenged me, I would simply say: “This is what I learnt from my movement building Guru, Jockin – and it works, as you shall see!” They soon did.