The Ganga Fisher Folk

Bharat Dogra

Recently several activists and supporters of the Ganga Mukti Andolan (Liberate the Ganga River Movement or GMA) got together first at Delhi and later at Bhagalpur (Bihar). This has been perhaps the leading movement of river fisher folk in India to protest against several exploitative practices. This was a peaceful struggle.

Despite several difficulties this struggle succeeded in the fulfilment of several of its objectives with some important demands being accepted by the government. This brought considerable relief at that time to tens of thousands of fisher folk living by the banks of the Ganga in its reach in Bihar. Later this movement entered a new phase, which was aimed at helping boatmen.

The first phase of the movement was confined mainly to the area in and around the Bhagalpur district. In this stretch of the Ganga River fishing rights had been arbitrarily given away to certain rich families (called the zamindars of the fisheries sector) who in turn subleased smaller stretches to contractors who exploited the fisher folk by forcing them to pay taxes and extortions.

Several Gandhian social activists took the lead in mobilising fisher folk against this injustice. They also encouraged the fisher folk to become aware of the weaknesses within their community and to try to overcome these. This process also took the movement closer to the women of the community and several of them stared taking an enthusiastic part in the movement.

Contractors and their goons attacked fisher folk or activists working with them on several occasions, but the movement maintained its peaceful character even in the face of grave provocations. Some big and colourful boat processions were organised, defying the threats of the contractors and raising the morale of the fisherfolk. Finally the obvious injustice of this situation was accepted and old zamindari rights over a particular stretch of the Ganga river ware removed.

At first it appeared that the social activists had bitten more than they could chew. Their new demand threatened contractors and politicians and officials in league with them over a much wider area. Hence the repression unleashed by them was much more than before. Moreover, some of these vested interests were operating in the guise of cooperatives so that there were also legal problems in resisting them.

Fortunately at this stage the situation was retrieved at least partially by the timely intervention of some enlightened officials who tried to convince the then Chief Minister that this was a good opportunity to help several hundred thousand fisherfolk, The then Chief Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav was quick to appreciate the political advantages inherent in the situation. He went one step ahead of the demand being raised for stopping taxes on the Ganga River and actually cancelled taxes on the other rivers of the state as well. He told the activists, ‘In any case you are going to come back after a gap of a few months to recoup your strength, so let me give you the advance benefit for all rivers.”

However, the order was easier to issue on paper than to implement. The reason was that there were several legal complications regarding the rights over smaller, remote river systems and even the GMA did not have the relevant information from all areas. Several surveys needed to be taken up to get the detailed information. As a result some areas remained untouched by the new orders of the Chief Minister for some time, but gradually the relief brought by the new orders continued to spread.

According to a study by Professor K. S. Bilgrami and J. S. Datta Munshi of Bhagalpur University in the stretch from Barauni to Farakka, fish had been dying in large numbers within hours of the discharge from some of the big polluting industries.

So the movement now started taking up these issues of pollution and river-valley projects, which in turn took them to still wider issues of floods and flood protection works involving not just fisher folk but also other people living around the rivers. 

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Frontier
Vol 57, No. 42, Apr 13 - 19, 2025