Society Making a
Splash: Saraunjha's Water Babies
by Manisha Prakash
On a hot
summer day, Madhusudan Pandit, 42, a homoeopathy practitioner in
Saraunjha village of Begusarai district in Bihar blows his whistle as a
command to Payal, his daughter, to take another lap in the River Balan.
Meet Payal Pandit, 12, a state swimming champion in the Under-19
category. As she practices her butterfly stroke, curious villagers stare
at this girl, clad in a swimming costume moving ahead effortlessly in
the water. After an hour-long session of free style, backstroke,
breaststroke and butterfly stroke, Payal is out of the water and in no
time changed and ready to walk back home - about four kilometres away -
back to homework and household chores. While there is a pond - Kuranva
Soti - near her home she can no longer practice there because it is
filthy and under dispute.
Payal's tale is no ordinary story. Born into a lower middle-class
family, she is one of the five children of Rajkumari and Madhusudan
Pandit. Despite the odds, Payal is a three-time state swimming champion.
She has participated in a number of national-level competitions in
addition to the 24th Sub Junior National Aquatic Championships 2007 held
in Goa last year and the National Junior/Sub Junior Aquathlon
Championships in Pune in December 2005.
Payal began swimming at the age of seven - egged on by a father
determined to make his children excel at the sport. Even though Pandit
found it difficult to cover costs, he tried his best to give his eldest
two, Payal and son Pratinidhi, whatever facilities he could afford -
swimming gear, training equipment and the opportunity to travel to
national-level competitions beyond Bihar.
Petitions to the district administration and the state government for
assistance have fallen on deaf ears. The result - Payal has not yet won
a national-level competition. "Girls from other states are coached and
learn techniques required to win. Payal doesn't even have access to a
swimming pool for practice. But if she gets the required facilities, I
am sure she would do the state proud. I don't have the finances to
provide for her. But no one is interested," says a hapless father.
Ironically, Payal is a known face in the state. She, along with two
girls from the Mallah community of her village - Savitri Kumari and Baby
Kumari - was the star in the UNICEF calendar of 2007. (The Mallah
community is a lower caste fishermen's community found in states such as
Assam, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Gujrat and Madhya Pradesh.)
Despite the star status, there was no financial support forthcoming from
any quarter. The trio simply remained poster girls - creating a feeling
of optimism and hope for the state - even though not much was going for
them.
But perhaps Payal is better of with her poverty - when pitted against
her swimming cousins, Savitri and Baby, who now bear the consequences of
their families' Naxal leanings. Since March 28, Savitri, 14, has been on
the run and is untraceable. Members of the Mallah community explain that
the police are after her family. Her cousin Baby, 12, and her mother
have also gone underground, even as Faudar Sahni, her father, is in jail
in connection with the Kuranva water tax dispute case. (Faudar Sahni was
one of the 17 accused in the Kuranva water dispute case. The person who
has been granted the fishing rights of the pond had accused that Sahni
and 16 others were illegally fishing in the pond and they had also
resorted to violence.)
In the March 28 encounter between the police and the Mallahs - who are
believed to have given refuge to the Maoists - arms, ammunition and
Naxal literature were seized from them, according to SHO of Beerpur P.S.
Ram Dular Prasad. This resulted in the arrest of several people and the
disappearance of many male members with largely only women and children
being left behind in the village. Some policemen were also injured in
the crossfire, explained Prasad.
(Maoists/Naxals are part of the underground revolutionary group -
Communist Party of India (Maoist), formed with the merger of two
prominent naxalite outfits, the People's War Group and the Maoist
Communist Centre. Labeled a terrorist outfit by the government, the
Maoist outfit conducts guerrilla warfare and is currently active in
Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and tribal-dominated areas in the
borderlands of Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, West Bengal and Orissa.
Insurgents garner support mainly through violence, while some in the
hinterlands view them as champions of the poor.)
However, Draupadi Devi, Baby's mother, narrates a different tale.
According to her, the police attacked and looted nearly 20 homes of her
community after these families were wrongfully indicted by a bunch of
criminals. The criminals had a vested interest in the Kuranva Soti pond,
a source of fishing for the Mallah community and the swimming pool for
the budding swimming champions.
As a result of the recent turmoil, the sisters are no longer a household
name. While once the villagers of Saraunjha had eagerly pooled in to
send the girls for a national competition in Pune, today most families -
including their mentor Pandit - don't want to have anything to do with
them.
Baby seems to be losing her hopes to insurgency and certainly not
because of an absence of talent. A student of class VI - in the same
school as Payal - Baby stood first in the XXIX Bihar State Age-Group
Aquatic Championship-2006 and the 30th Bihar State Senior Aquatic
Championship-2007. She and her cousin have also participated in the
National Junior/ Aquathlon Championship 2006 in Bhopal, 24th Sub Junior
National Aquatic Championship 2007, the 53rd National School
Championship (Aquatic) organised by Sports Authority of Gujarat in Surat
and the 17th National Junior/Sub Junior Triathlon / Aquathlon
Championship held at Porbander in January.
Water babies of change for their community, the youngsters are now
engulfed by a sinking feeling.
Even as the glint of determination and visions of becoming the next Bula
Choudhary - the first Asian swimmer to swim the English Channel twice -
has not disappeared from their eyes, the consistent lack of facilities
quietly pulls at their hearts. So while Payal hasn't given up her dream
of crossing the Channel, she hears the harsh voice of reality when her
dejected father says, "I can't afford it any more."
On her part, Baby wonders when she will get to hear from her father, who
languishes in jail in connection with the very pond that once made her
buoyant with hopes?
Remove the poverty and political tangles and these 'Star Girls' have
shown that they can make a mark for themselves and stay neck-and-neck
with the more privileged of society. Perhaps, it's time society took the
plunge for them.
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