The Nobel Peace Prize committee can, when it gets it right, present to the world unlikely heroes who can inspire us to rethink what it means to “wage peace.”
This year, the committee got it right by honoring not only Malala Yousafzai, whose first name alone elicits widespread recognition, but also Kailash Satyarthi, a little-known hero with a big story. We have both been privileged to work with Kailash over decades of involvement in two groups, which he helped to shape, that are at the forefront of the fight against child labor: GoodWeave (formerly RugMark) and the International Labor Rights Forum.
The Nobel committee got it right in part because its members embraced the wisdom of the adage that “you can’t have peace without justice.” And they were clever in drawing attention to the conflicts between Pakistan and India by honoring a person from each of these countries, one female and one male, one younger and one older, one Muslim and one Hindu.
Malala’s story is well-known, Kailash’s far less so. What can he teach us about peace and justice? Well, quite a bit.
Early on, Kailash built organizations that freed children from lives of grueling “bonded” slave labor, some of them as young as 4, shackled to carpet looms in horrific conditions. If the children tried to escape, Kailash explained, “they were hanged upside down on trees and beaten with stones. Their legs were broken so they couldn’t run away again.”
Among the many aspects of Kailash’s work missed by most journalists is just how dangerous being a “liberator” is. Few parts of his body have been spared broken bones, and he has been in numerous situations where he could have been killed. He and his family and colleagues have been jailed, and at least two of his co-workers have been murdered.
Kailash began this work in his native India with the Bachpan Bachao Andolan, which he founded in 1980. He also helped found the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude, which links his group to similar ones in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and elsewhere.
Hence, one of the first things we learn from Kailash is that it is a dastardly myth that only richer people in richer countries care about ending child labor. Indeed, it was Kailash and his co-workers who took the lead in acting to end the dreadful plight of these children. His simplest goal was to ensure that every child has a childhood.
Kailash quickly grew to understand that the struggle was about much more than freeing children, and he pulled the global anti–child labor movement in this direction. These children also needed—and wanted—education.
Pushing even deeper to name the roots of the problem, Kailash found himself facing India’s brutal caste system. He recounts asking a cobbler why his son was not in school. The response: “We are born to work.” Kailash refused to accept that. As he and his colleagues stress, contrary to widely held beliefs, child labor does not solve poverty. Indeed, he pointed out that “child labor perpetuates poverty” by perpetuating the inequities that lead to child labor in the first place.