Media Coverage

Gandhian Activist Wins $100K Opus Prize
India West
Ashfaque Swapan
November 26, 2008

Krishnammal Jagannathan, an octogenarian Gandhian activist who has been fighting for Dalit rights in Tamil Nadu for over five decades, has won a $100,000 prize for her lifelong work.

Jagannathan is one of two $100,000 winners awarded by Seattle University and the Opus Prize Foundation, which also awarded the $1 million Opus Prize to Marguerite “Maggy” Barankitse for her 15 years of work providing safe havens to 30,000 child victims of ethnic strife in Burundi, Africa.

Michael Woodard, founder of Jubilee House Community and Center for the Development of Central America, who has spent the past 15 years creating self-sufficiency from poverty in Nicaragua, was the other $100,000 winner.

The recipients were announced Nov. 18 at a press conference hosted by Seattle University president Stephen Sundborg. Barankitse, Jagannathan and Woodard spent three days on campus visiting with students, faculty and staff.

“Seattle University is clear about its mission: empowering leaders for a just and humane world,” said president Father Sundborg. “Bringing these unsung heroes to our campus is a great opportunity to honor their work and provide our students an incredible educational experience by meeting inspiring individuals. Something is coming about from our students being global citizens.”

The announcement capped a year-long search that began with a confidential selection process, much like the MacArthur Fellowships in which anonymous nominators put names forward.

With over half a century of hard, arduous work in the cause of the underprivileged, one would think Jagannathan, 82, would be ready to take a break.

However, during a recent lecture at the University of San Francisco, she made it clear that there is little chance of that happening anytime soon.

Jagannathan, introduced by Vijaya Nagarajan, a professor of theology at the university who helped organize the lecture, took the audience down memory lane, and spoke with an infectious zest about her latest passion — building weatherproof housing for Dalits near the coast of Tamil Nadu who were devastated by the 2004 tsunami.

“I want to give them a good house. The tsunami 2004 (has) done a great damage to their huts. It’s only a cattle shed, covered with thatched roof.”

This year the world has been taking notice of her long decades of service. In addition to the Opus Award in Seattle, she has been named one of four winners of the Right Livelihood Award in Sweden.

The Opus Prize is given annually to recognize unsung heroes of any faith tradition, anywhere in the world, solving today’s most persistent social problems. It is the world’s largest faith-based, humanitarian award for social innovation.

The Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” is presented annually to four recipients in Stockholm at a ceremony in the Swedish Parliament. Winners share the prize money of 2,000,000 Swedish kronor ($260,000).

Born in a landless Dalit family, Jagannathan’s first experience of social injustice and Dalit discrimination was seeing her own pregnant mother Nagammal working long hours.

“My mission was to provide livelihood by abolishing landlessness among the poor and bring humanness and dignity to their lives,” Jagannathan once said. “The Dalits were banned from wearing chappals (foot wear), collecting drinking water in the village well and temple entry. They were tied to the trees and forced to eat cow-dung when anyone broke the norms. All of this happened during the 1970s and I resolved to change all of this, to bring an end to the worst form of apartheid in the 20th century.

“Bridging the gap between the rich and poor, bringing the landless and landed rich to the negotiating table to share and care for each other is most fulfilling to me.”

Jagannathan was inspired by India’s apostle of nonviolence Mahatma Gandhi, whom she had met, and another Gandhian, Vinobha Bhave, with whom she had spent time in the “Bhoodan” (land donation) movement, where Bhave traveled by foot from village to village requesting landowners to donate land for the landless.

“You are welcoming me, not this small frail body, (but) because I am connected with the philosophy of Gandhi, I have walked on the path of Gandhi,” she said.

For Jagannathan and her husband and fellow activist Sankaralingam, 1968 provided a traumatic reminder of the plight of Dalits.

In 1968, 44 Dalit women were murdered at Kilavenmani village in the Nagapattinam district of Tamil Nadu. This devastating occurrence provided the impetus for founding Land for Tillers' Freedom, or LAFTI.

“I saw the horrible incident,” she recalled, adding that she decided that “every inch of my energy and every part of life I must devote till the end” to empowering Dalits.

Land for Tillers' Freedom aimed to bring the landlords and the landless poor to the negotiating table, obtain loans to enable the landless to buy land at a reasonable price, and then to help them work it cooperatively, so that the loans could be repaid.

This was easier said than done. Banks were unwilling to lend, stamp duty was high, and landlords were not exactly thrilled.

Jagannathan simply refused to quit. By consistent, gentle persuasion rather than violence, she worked on the issue for decades, and by 2007, through LAFTI she had transferred 13,000 acres to about 13,000 families

Through LAFTI, she also conducts workshops to allow people to support themselves during the nonagricultural season by learning mat weaving, tailoring, plumbing, carpentry, masonry, computer education and electronics.

Injustice against Dalits continues to be one of the politically explosive issues in India, yet Jagannathan is remarkably free of bitterness and rancor.

She told the audience that her childhood faith and admiration of Gandhi had kept her going for all these years.

Her mother, a widow raising a large family, would wake up early before dawn, “facing east, seeing the wonderful bright morning star,” she recalled. Her mother believed it was the divine light. “I used to follow her, stand beside her,” she said, adding that she came to believe that “God is in the form of light, in the form of compassion.”

In 1936, Jagannathan met Gandhi, and she decided to give her life to the service of humanity.

“Every living creature, the plant, the animal, the human beings, everybody is gifted with the divine light inside,” she said. “The light is inside. . .why are you going out in search of light? When there is a light inside. . . everything is possible.”

That self-confidence stood her in good stead as she took on the prawn farming industry that was wreaking havoc in coastal Tamil Nadu.

In 1992, with her husband Sankaralingam, Jagannathan took on what had become a major land challenge to the poor of the region: the establishment of prawn farms along the coast. As big industrialists occupied 500-1000 acres of land in coastal areas, it left huge numbers of landless unemployed and turned fertile land to salty desert after seven or eight years. Seepage of seawater into the groundwater deprived people of drinking water.

Since 1993, led by LAFTI, Tamil Nadu villagers have offered non-violent resistance, through rallies, fasts, and demonstrations in protest of establishing the prawn farms. They have been beaten up by hired goons, their houses have been burnt, and LAFTI workers have been imprisoned, because of false accusations of looting and arson.

Undeterred, Sankaralingam filed a public interest petition in the Indian Supreme Court.

In December 1996, the Supreme Court issued a ruling against intensive shrimp farming in cultivable lands within 500 meters of the coastal area.

Jagannathan, either independently or together with her husband, has established seven non-governmental institutions for the poor. Besides this, she has been a Senate member of the Gandhigram Trust and University and of Madurai University.

Notwithstanding all her struggle and the hostility she has experienced in her work for Dalits, she continues to affirm her belief in the unity of mankind.

At her lecture here, she said that all people “belong to the universal brotherhood. The body is different, the food is different . . . (but) we are all having human culture — love and compassion is a great gift given by God to all the human beings.

More information on LAFTI is available at www.lafti.net.