Just seven months ago, Chunni Vaidya walked 370km to stop a Nirma cement plant in Mahuva village because he agreed that it would poison water bodies.
Nowadays, if the Gandhian is not travelling to coastal Mithivirdi to join the agitation against a proposed nuclear power plant, he must be advising villagers how to stop the Abuja cement plant in Khodinar from polluting their fields.
He doesn’t miss the meetings to protest the Narendra Modi government’s actions against whistleblower police officer Sanjiv Bhatt, either. After all, he works 16 hours a day and so has enough time — even a few hours to edit the monthly Lok Swarajya magazine.
When Anna Hazare was in Ahmedabad in May, Vaidya twice shared the dais with him.
Vaidya confesses that fellow inmates at the Sabarmati Ashram keep asking him to take it easy.
“I’m 95 now. Yes, I have often thought of retiring from public life. But I keep having second thoughts,” he recently told a civil society meeting in support of Bhatt.
“There is an Emergency-like situation in Gujarat: anybody can be put in jail for speaking against the government. If we don’t raise our voice, the situation will get worse.”
He learnt that 81 years ago, as a lad of 14, from the best teacher possible.
Vaidya, who saw the Mahatma only thrice in his life, remembers the first time. It was during the Dandi march of 1930 when Gandhi was passing through Navsari, where Vaidya’s family had just moved in from hometown Patan.
The boy joined the freedom movement after matriculation. Later, in 1953, he became a Sarvodayee, influenced by Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan movement. After stints in Varanasi and Assam, he has been at Sabarmati Ashram since 1974.
Vaidya’s persuasive skills are legendary. Fellow Sarvodayees cite how, during the Emergency, when Intelligence Bureau officials raided the Bhoomiputra office, they ended up paying for the copies they had come to seize.
Vaidya, the magazine’s editor, had refused to hand over free copies. He was later arrested and the publication suspended.
The Gandhian turned an icon of the anti-land acquisition movement in 1997 when the Shankersinh Vaghela government allotted a plot to a foreign company near Ahmedabad over the protests of local villagers. He coined slogans that agitators now chant like mantras.
In Khodinar, his presence has made a difference, prompting Abuja to agree to erect a wall to hold back polluting water. The Supreme Court has stalled the Nirma plant in Mahuva, from where Vaidya had led the 370km march to Gandhinagar.
Vaidya had camped in Mahuva for days and worked out the strategy over months, joining hands with local BJP MLA Kanu Kalsaria to take on the Modi government.
“Agitations are like oxygen for him. He needs them to survive,” says social activist Dwarkanath Rath.