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Editorial and Perspective, The Statesmen, India
OF course, the actual contours of the most violent caste conflict in independent India are much more horrifying than the bare recital of massacres would suggest. Women are raped, their breasts cut off, men and children are shot at random, and, since Dalits live in segregated ghettos, all their houses are attacked simultaneously so that no one gets away. The state is at best a guilty bystander, at worst an accomplice. It knows this is not a law and order problem and its correct accommodation within the norms of parliamentary democracy would lead to a major upheaval whose dimensions are, as indicated at the outset, more than political.
The proof of this proposition was given by the emergence of what is possibly the most successful Dalit political formation yet — the Bahujan Samaj Party. The uniqueness of the BSP has to be measured against what went before and the rival claims made upon Dalit consciousness. It is the first Dalit political entity that speaks the language of caste, with a strong Dalit accent.
DITCHED
There was Ambedkar, of course, who, in December 1927, burned a copy of the Manusmriti, to widespread indignation even among his own caste Hindu followers, converted to Buddhism in 1956 along with a million of his Mahar followers, recognised that Dalit solidarity must be founded upon their common exploitation at the hands of the upper castes and, therefore, required a direct ideological challenge addressed to Hinduism itself, a challenge he took up in two different texts, The Untouchables written in 1948 and Riddles in Hinduism, never published in his lifetime.
Yet, the style and rhetoric of Ambedkar’s leadership was by and large regulated by the norms of liberal, democratic discourse. This was partly because of his extraordinary qualifications, abilities and background which made him a natural interlocutor of the upper caste nationalist leadership and the colonial government on the Dalit question, but also because militancy taken beyond a certain threshold would be seen to be jeopardising the nationalist cause.
Unlike Jinnah, he didn’t have the option of inventing an alternative nationalism. He gave in to Gandhi on the issue of separate electorates for the Dalits and realised his mistake when the Congress walked away with the most of the general seats Gandhi had promised to reserve for the Dalits. This is the obstacle that most Dalit parties find very difficult to surmount: how to give expression to Dalit oppression in a system that is based on majority rule and, therefore, requires a certain degree of collaboration with the oppressors.
The party that Ambedkar began, the Scheduled Caste Federation which later evolved into the Republican Party of India, failed to either mobilise the Dalits on any significant scale or to radicalise their consciousness, while the strategy of conversion to Buddhism was an absolute failure, because all it did was to distance the Dalits from Hinduism without providing them with a modern ideology against caste oppression or creating opportunities for social and economic advancement. Christianity has been much more successful in taking Dalit identity out of the ambit of caste by providing them with a messiah with whose suffering they can identify, a social philosophy where the poor and the oppressed are central to the practice of faith and an education that humanises them and helps them to understand their condition, even if it does not make them equal. It is this successful model of emancipation through religion that arouses the spite, rancour and jealousy in the VHP.
CASTE PREJUDICE
The Naxalites see in the Dalits a rural proletariat and, therefore, do not even bother to address the symbolic and religious dimensions of their situation. Their challenge, in a way, is addressed more to the Indian state than to the upper castes whom they see as no more than landlords. As a response it is inadequate.
The BSP is the first party to understand that Dalit militancy needs its own political rhetoric based not on the norms of liberal parliamentary discourse, but on the prevailing idioms of caste politics. It must be a language that talks to the Dalit masses rather than to the upper caste elite.
It is not a concession-seeking language, it is a rights-seeking language, a language of empowerment. The ideological attack on Hinduism must obey the same logic of anger and aggression, not just of rational discourse. Slogans such as “Brahmin, Bania, Thakur Chor, Baki sab hein DS-4 (Dalit Soshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti)” or “Tilak, Taraju aur Talwar, Maro unko joote char”, the virulent attacks on Gandhi, the staging, in Madhya Pradesh, of The Ramayana rewritten by the Dravida ideologue EVR Ramaswamy Naicker to portray Rama as an effete and delinquent villain and Ravana as a virile hero, became, for a time, the most visible expressions of militant, non-communal anti-Hindu politics in the country.
Ironically, it is the reservation policy pursued by the government of India, in favour of the Scheduled Castes, which created a Dalit intelligentsia sufficiently aware of the nature of the Indian state and the functioning of the government. Kanshi Ram, the founder of the BSP, began his political career by organising Scheduled Caste government employees into the All India Backward and Minority Employees Federation (BAMCEF). The ideal of Dalit empowerment, which necessarily implies a direct attack not just against caste as power structure, but against Hinduism as an ideological construct, is derived from this awareness of caste prejudice inside government and the administration.
EMANCIPATION
The future is not radiant with promises. The BSP subsequently thoroughly compromised itself with the BJP, an essentially upper caste formation, and seems to have lost its militant sting. Like most other mainstream Dalit parties, it represents only a few Dalit sub-castes, such as the Jatavs in UP. The sub-caste factor has also played an important role in the failure of the reservation policy: only those sub-castes, such as the Malas in Andhra Pradesh, the Mahars in Maharashtra, the Ezhavas in Kerala, who had access to education have benefited from job reservation.
Even though Dalit literacy has been constantly rising and now stands at a little over 37 per cent, governments still find it difficult to fill vacancies reserved for the Scheduled Castes and have to launch special recruitment drives from time to time. In any case, as the example of Kanshi Ram and the BSP shows, reservation is not an answer to the Dalit question: who will pay for all this oppression and when?
This is not a question that can be answered even by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It touches the very heart of our civilisation, of our personal identities, our value and belief systems, our way of life, of everything that we are and believe in. This is what sets it apart from Apartheid in South Africa and Racism in the United States: Dalit emancipation will necessary require a cultural revolution.
Posted on 2001-09-06
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