The Secret Murder of Navleen Kumar
Non-Fiction by Leni T. Goggins
I was taught from a young age that regardless of the ideals that we uphold as a self-proclaimed “just society,” the private interests of corporations, and those of the rich and powerful, are often fulfilled at the cost of the rights of the average person, the worker, the indigenous person. It has been up to a small group of people to expose the duplicitous actions of governments who manipulate the law to take power away from those that the law should protect most of all. I met one such activist by the name of Navleen Kumar, who was trying to protect the land rights of tribal people by uncovering the secret dealings of powerful and corrupt developers in the growing suburbs of Mumbai. I met Navleen the night after a hired thug emerged from the darkness of the Nalasopara railway station and held a gun to her head and said: “Stop your work or you’ll die.” She did not stop, and a year later she was violently murdered.
When I was a kid my father was nearly killed at work, and the injury he sustained led to the near collapse of his life. He was a welder at the local pulp mill and when his boss asked him to move a heavy machine—normally pulled by another machine, not a man—he developed a blood clot in his shoulder that almost killed him and permanently damaged his left arm. He would never again be able to weld, a trade he had done since his youth. The response of his employer was to fire him and try to cover up their fault in the injury. He fought the decision for years and spent most of our family savings on costly court battles that led to his eventual rehiring and long-term disability. My father’s battle with the mill ignited a fire in him, and he became an environmental activist. He began to uncover illegal or suspect dealings of the mill such as illegal dumping of toxic waste, or secret proposals to burn tires for energy on the coast, to name a few.
He is likely one of the reasons I spent several years traveling Asia, Africa and Latin America volunteering with social justice organizations, while my friends went on to earn university degrees in the city. I did not have the capacity to stay in any one place, but wandered from country to country and I quickly became what one activist dubbed a “disaster tourist.” When I reached Mumbai in 2001 I had found mecca for disaster tourists, where today fifty-five percent of the population live in slums. Mumbai is a city of contrasts, obscene wealth and power alongside crippling poverty. I toured the city looking for volunteer work with an organization that would give me a better look at the city beyond the grand art deco and Victorian-era hotels lining Marine Drive and Girgaum Chowpatty beach. I was introduced to a human rights lawyer from the UK named Jane, who hosted me. She had come to India for work and had fallen in love with a South Indian activist. She was highly educated and fiercely intelligent, doing real work on the ground, not a disaster tourist like me. I asked Jane, “In all your work here in Mumbai, what is the most inspiring project you’ve come across?” She simply replied: “Navleen Kumar.” I asked, “Where is that?” She explained Navleen Kumar was not a place, or even an NGO, but a single person doing incredible work trying to save tribal land from expropriation by corrupt developers, or better known in Mumbai as “the land mafia.” I immediately wanted to meet her.
I had already booked a plane ticket to Tanzania where I planned to volunteer for a few months before returning to India, but I had to know about this woman she spoke of. I called Navleen and asked if I could stay with her and observe her work, and then upon my return to India in a few months, I would volunteer for her. She should have said no, knowing what I know of her now, but she said I reminded her of her daughter and the company would be good. Before I left Jane’s place, she told me that ten years ago Navleen’s husband, who was a journalist writing about the “land mafia” in Nalasopara, was pushed off his bicycle by an unidentified man and sustained a head injury that led to his premature death. She told me this, I believe, not as a warning, but perhaps to infiltrate my naïve vision of what an activist’s life is like in India.
When I arrived at Nalasopara Station in the Northern reaches of Mumbia, it was late. Navleen worked day and night pouring over legal documents, filing complaints to the local police station and small courts, hosting meetings between local officials and the Adivasi people. The Adivasi—an umbrella term for the aboriginals of South Asia— live in the northern region of Mumbai and subsist on fishing, rice paddy-field farming and vegetable gardening. They have lived this way for hundreds of years but have slowly been pushed to the margins as Mumbai’s suburbs expand.
I stepped onto the platform of Nalasopara Station realizing I had no idea what Navleen looked like, and that it was dark. It was very rare for me to be out in public alone after dark. The setting sun takes with it all the women, all the safety, and suddenly I was standing in the middle of a crowd of men with white eyes staring out from their dark faces. Navleen pushed her way through the crowd.
She was short and stout with big red-rimmed glasses. “Leni, come this way.” She took my hand and led me off the platform. “Come quickly,” she said in a calm, hushed voice. When we got to a quieter street she explained that the night before at the station, someone had held a gun to her head and threatened to kill her. “Who were they?” I asked. She explained that it was likely a member of the Thakur gang, the mafia who had control of much of the district where Navleen lived and worked. She told me she had gone straight to the police and gave them a list of names of gang members to question in the event of her death, an incredibly practical response. They had taken a sketch of the man she described, but she was realistic about them finding the culprit: “They won’t do anything about it. Half the police are corrupted and in with the gang, but it must be on the record.” She did not seem fazed by the threat, but rather concerned for my safety as her guest. She had been working for fifteen years to prevent tribal lands from falling into the hands of developers and many death threats had been made over the phone.
Indian constitutional law prevents tribal land from being bought or sold to non-tribal peoples, so gang members use intimidation to get the deed and then government officials, for a price, tamper with the records. If the mafia cannot achieve a full transfer, they find a way to get thumbprints on a document assigning the tribal person’s power of attorney over to a mafia member. Navleen’s main tasks were to expose the government’s role in colluding with developers and educate the Adivasi people about the legal mechanisms put in place to protect tribal land. In one case Navleen discovered officials went as far as changing the name of an entire extended family so that they would not be identified as tribal. India has an incredible bureaucratic system adopted from the British during occupation, but it has a large flaw: everything is handwritten on paper, and if no duplicates are made then it is difficult to prove a document exists.
In 2001 some sixty percent of tribal land was under the land mafia’s control and this utterly enraged Navleen. Her first case involved a family that lived near her apartment. They had twelve acres of land but the deed was literally snatched from the hands of the father by a gang member who then gave him a 500-rupee note ($10 Canadian) and promised to provide him with a house, which they never delivered. After years of being displaced from their home, the family discovered an English copy of the deed, which they couldn’t read, and gave it to Navleen. Two days later she came back to them and said they would get their land back, and she delivered on that promise.
Navleen’s neighbourhood mostly consisted of bungalows and small apartment buildings. Because it was night I couldn’t make out the lay of the land, but there was the distinct smell of fresh hay and the sound of cowbells chiming in the darkness somewhere. We entered Navleen’s apartment on the top floor. Her eighteen-year-old son Neel was playing video games. The apartment was small, with a chesterfield. Neel said an awkward “Hullo,” glancing at me with mild curiosity. Navleen took me to her room and told me where I could keep my things. She had boxes of paperwork stacked nearly to the ceiling. We would be sharing a bed because she said the couch was not very comfortable. I got ready for bed and went out to the living room to say good night to Neel. I asked him, “Are you an activist too?” He laughed in embarrassment and said “No, that stuff’s not for me.” He was studying to be a lawyer at college and stayed with Navleen during school breaks. He said he was certain he didn’t want to be a human rights lawyer.
That night I lay in bed next to Navleen. She turned on her side and fell asleep within seconds of her head touching the pillow. I watched the fan spin through the hot air above our heads and I felt a creeping sense of dread. A sadness came over me and I saw my father alone in his empty, drafty house, his family having long abandoned him, surrounded by boxes of paperwork, furiously typing letters on the computer. It is a lonely life, that of an activist. Navleen’s work consumed her completely and all others—her family, her friends—they would have to accept that about her, as me and my siblings had to accept that about my dad.
I woke up feeling like I hadn’t slept. Navleen was already washed, dressed in a red sari, and sitting on the couch drinking milk tea with an old woman. The woman had dark tanned skin and was very thin. Her grey frizzy hair was tied in a small tight bun on top of her head. She wore the under parts of a sari, the petticoat and choli blouse with a very ragged piece of cloth tucked into her petticoat and flung over her shoulder. Her name was Shamubai Jadhav, but Navleen introduced her as her “Mommy.” Navleen had helped Shamubai save a piece of her land, which had been taken by the mafia. In the ’70s a mafia member named Manik Patil owned a bar in the area and befriended Shamubai’s father, then one day the family discovered the lands were no longer in the Jadhav name, but in Patil’s name. Her father soon died and Shamubai stayed in her thatched hut watching the plots of land around her turn into crass, grey apartment buildings. Navleen helped uncover the scandal and save the plot of land that Shamubai and her family lived on, and promised to continue to fight for the transfer of the land that had already been developed. Shamubai dedicated herself completely to Navleen. She brought me tea and smiled, but seemed fixated on Navleen.
I drank my tea while they talked and then headed out to the landing to see exactly where I was.
Navleen’s apartment sat in an oasis of tribal land she had saved alongside the Adivasi. Right below her building you could see thatched-roofed huts, yarded in with stick fencing. Women and children carried water on their heads, men plowed the vegetable gardens, and goats grazed the brush growing against the huts. Beyond the huts I could see more apartment buildings and a sea of grey. To this day I’ve never seen such a dramatic contrast between urban and rural, and it was all because of this one woman’s determination. I was breathless with hope and pride to be allowed into her world.
Mumbai is India’s economic centre and has the highest property values in India (top ten in the world), and the highest cost of living; hence why the world’s third largest slum exists in Mumbai. Throughout the ’70s and ’80s there was a housing boom and massive developments were built in the cheaper suburbs such as Nalasopara. It was at this time that Navleen moved to the area with her journalist husband and two small children. She wrote about the effects of urbanization on the tribal Adivasi in an essay, published posthumously: “They are systematically and methodically being disposed of the ownership of their means of production and of the products of their labour and of their means of human existence.”
I left for Tanzania a few days later and promised my return. But I did not return. Instead my mother came to join me and we travelled India for a month like “real” tourists. Less than a year later I got an email from Jane. Navleen had been murdered while walking on the roof of her apartment.
Shamubai found Navleen’s body in the morning. She had been stabbed nineteen times by a group of men, some of the stab wounds going straight through her body. She was fifty-four years old and left behind her son Neel, who at the time was away at school, and her daughter Neela, who was living in Qatar. Eleven days after Navleen was murdered, the Nalasopara police arrested four people, several from the Thakur gang, but they were discharged due to a “lack of evidence.” After a few weeks of little action from police, more than four thousand people, Catholics of Vasai district diocese, individuals from twenty-five NGOs, and hundreds of Adivasis left their paddy-fields and walked the long distance to Nalasopara to hold protest, demanding the arrest of Navleen’s killers.
Navleen understood that she had made powerful enemies. In the 1990s she had uncovered a plan by developers from the Thakur gang to build a complex that would usurp ninety acres of tribal land. Navleen legally challenged their ownership, resulting in forty acres being returned to the Adivasi owners; this halted the development and the complex was never built. There was one other key motive in her killing: in the early ’90s she had been a witness in a murder trial of a developer who was in competition with the Thakur gang. He was gunned down at the train station in broad daylight. All the witnesses that came forward were killed or silenced. After decades of being an unsolved murder, six people were eventually arrested for the crime, and Navleen helped identify one of the killers, Manik Patil, the bar owner and mafia member who had manipulated Shamubai’s land from her father. He was charged with the murder of the rival developer and put in jail.
After nearly a year of political pressure from Navleen’s following, two men were arrested for Navleen’s murder, both members of the Thakur gang. They claimed that Manik Patil had hired them from jail. Allegedly he rented the hitmen an apartment in the building adjacent to Navleen’s. They watched her from the apartment for nineteen days before they made their move, waiting for a time when she would be alone. These men also helped identify several killers of the murdered rival developer, but all perished in gang fights before they could be tried and charged. To this day, no one has served time for the killing of Navleen Kumar.
Did she know she would die for this cause? I imagine that she had purchased a one-way ticket, and that she was, if not aware, willing to die fighting for what she believed to be right, trying to uncover as much injustice as she could before that day. When the old woman Shamubai found Navleen’s body, she said in her police report that the rain had washed all the blood away. That’s how I imagine her, laying there on the roof of her apartment, eyes wide open with her stare fixed straight ahead where she always knew she was willing to go.
Today the Thakur gang is still in a position of power, finding ways to gain more lands through illegal, secretive means. Few activists have been able to step forward and do what Navleen Kumar accomplished in her time in Nalasopara. It takes an incredibly courageous person to pursue the truth and uncover that which governments and corporations seek to keep hidden. »