Farmers Movement Archive

30 years later, Comrade Bindu leads father’s fight

Bathinda: From a teenager who saw terrorists kill her father, Harinder Kaur Bindu has come far to become feminist face of the farmers’ agitation. On the bullet-riddled bodies of her father, Megh Raj Bhagtuana, and his 17 Leftist comrades at Sewewala village of Faridkot district on April 9, 1991, she had resolved to continue their fight. Three decades on, she has kept her word, at the cost of her marriage and with the challenges of raising a 14-year-old boy alone without land or own house. Now head of the women’s wing of Punjab’s largest farmer union, the BKU (Ekta-Ugrahan), she got here in five years of carrying farmers’ flag on her shoulders. The Naujwan Bharat Sabha comrades of Bindu’s father had formed ‘Jabar Te Firqaprasti Virodhi Front’ (against communalism and repression) in the times of religious killings and police encounters in Punjab. She recalled the front’s slogan: “Hindu Sikh ladan ni dena, mud santali banan ni dena’ (Won’t let Hindus and Sikhs fight and 1947 reoccur),” adding: “They staged the plays of Gursharan Singh and Ajmer Singh Aulakh in villages to promote unity.” As daughter of the front’s area convener, she would accompany him to these meetings. On one such afternoon of plays and revolutionary songs, terrorists came over and sprayed the stage with bullets. Woman activist Sada Kaur was among the 18 dead, while 22 others were wounded. Bindu was in Class VIII then. Somehow she passed Class X with those mental scars. In 1996, two Left bodies united to make the Punjab Khet Mazdoor Union and she got the task of motivating women to join it. She said: “Apart from women, even students and girls are part of the movement now, working as separate teams at the protest sites in Punjab and on the Delhi borders.” Amolak Singh and Lachman Sewewala of her father’s front and Chaman Lal, who has written books on Shaheed Bhagat Singh, endorsed her contribution to the farmer’s cause, saying that she increased the women’s partnership in the agitation singlehandedly.

The Times of India

2021-04-22

Chandigarh