CGNet Focus – Lalsu Nogoti

Lalsu is from the Maria tribal group in Maharashtra state. His people – a subdivision of the Gond people that live across central India – are classified as a PTG Scheduled Tribe by the Indian government. The P in PTG stands for ‘primitive’ and this designation is given to groups who practice shifting cultivation, have literacy levels of less than 20% and a stagnating or declining population. After attending a residential school far from his village (he told me his brothers sent him there because the meals they offered would reduce the amount of food his family needed) and sticking with education long after all his classmates had dropped out, he won a place at another school in his District’s headquarters. From this school he made it to another in Poona and he stayed there for ten years, completing a bachelor’s degree from Ferguson College, then an LLB and a Masters in Communication.

Lalsu says when he tells his family what he does now they have no idea what he means. The experience he had of moving to the huge city of Poona as a teenager is unimaginable. Social activism, mobile communications platforms, policy research fellowships: his current life shares almost no frame of reference with the world he was brought up in.

 One thing, however, has remained constant. Lalsu has never forgotten who he is or where he came from. One of the disturbing consequences of the Gondi language’s unrecognised status is a tendency for those few Gondi speaking individuals who manage to get through education in a different language to lose touch with their cultural backgrounds. There are, undeniably, very few incentives to teach your children Gondi: the language does not open any doors for employment or government communication or economic activity. Gondi is also a difficult language to learn for North Indians: it is grouped linguistically with the language families of the South and only a few Hindi-speaking people have the determination to learn it.

 CGNet co-founder Shubhranshu Choudhary says this situation creates what he calls a ‘leadership vacuum’: educated Gonds move wholly into the mainstream of Indian society, leaving the rest of their society behind and vulnerable to the influences of others; most strikingly, the Maoist cadres that have infiltrated this area.

In any case, Lalsu is a rare man for working for his people after achieving success. After practicing law in Nagpur for a few years, Lalsu moved back to his own area and became the first lawyer there. Alongside the everyday work of a small town lawyer, many of his cases involved human rights work: prosecuting the police for custodial deaths of suspected Maoists, abuses by the forest department, extrajudicial killings. 

 In 2011 someone from his village was the victim of what has become known as a ‘fake encounter’ – the police murder someone (for whatever reason) and then dress them up in Maoist clothes, give them a gun and file it as a successful encounter with a terrorist – and he wrote to the State Human Rights commission about it. After this he was threatened by the police. Someone in the SP’s office told him if they ever saw him in the forest they would shoot him.

Naturally, he told his friends at law school about this and, through them, he was chosen as India’s candidate for a UN-run diplomacy training programme in the Philippines for human rights defenders. At this conference he delivered a presentation about his experiences that was subsequently published in a report. This report, in turn, led to increased pressure on the Maharashtra State Government to change the policing situation.

For context: although the photograph may suggest otherwise, Lalsu is always smiling. He is a hilarious man who seems to approach everything with a quiet sensitivity that is immensely impressive. After I finished the interview and I watched him kickstart his humble, battered motorbike for the long ride home to Maharashtra it seemed bizarre that this guy would ever be threatened by the police or that he would ever have to show the kind of bravery that he did. He says he is motivated by something larger than himself: expensive things and an easy life are not for him, it is work for his people that drives him.

Unusually, however, in spite of all these surely exciting things (death threats in the jungle, communists and police brutality), Lalsu says he often grows bored with practicing the law. Implementing the law, he says, goes only so far: more important is to change the law itself and the conditions in which it is practiced. CGNet is a part of this, he says. His connection to the organisation started after an all night conversation with Shubhranshu Choudhary ended with a job offer and he admires the way CGNet is trying to access and connect with these marginalised communities and people.

Throughout his studies at law school, Lalsu also contributed extensively to the drafting and revisions of the Forest Rights Act, 2006 – full name: The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 – and, now, is also a member of the NGO SRUJAN (Society for Rural and Urban Joint Activities Nagpur), a group that attempts to educate people about the Forest Rights Act, PESA (an act that concerns extension of local government to tribal areas) and the Biological Diversity Act. He has received two fellowships to support this work and an ongoing third one from the Maharashtra State Government for policy research.

All of these things have the common theme of improving life for the kind people and communities that Lalsu comes from. His life story (although he is only 35!) is an insight into the current status of tribal groups in modern India yet, for all this work, he still has big plans in store. One of the unique things about Maria culture is its tradition of youth ‘gotuls’ – a space where young people meet and stay and learn about their culture. Lalsu is in the process of setting up a NGO called, conveniently, GOTUL (Grassroots Organisation for Tribal Upliftment and Livelihood) which will start a Gotul revival programme that will attempt to preserve Maria ways of life and build confidence and pride in a community often under threat.