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Dalit discontent in India
By Praful Bidwai
Just as reports come in of a further increase in India's GDP growth rate to 9.1 per cent in the first half of this fiscal year, the nation is beginning to confront an unpleasant reality: namely, lack of inclusion of large numbers of its citizens in economic, social and political processes. Some of the starker aspects of this reality were recently highlighted when the report of the Sachar committee on the social, economic and educational status of Muslims was tabled in parliament.
Since then, yet another group that faces discrimination, the Dalits or former untouchables (officially called scheduled castes), has figured prominently in the headlines. A rash of militant Dalit protests has broken out in various Indian cities, most prominently in Maharashtra, the cradle of modern Dalit politics. Sparked by the desecration of a statue of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar in Kanpur, these protests have lent a sharp focus to the community's large-scale mobilisation on his 50th death anniversary three days ago.
Despite the unfortunate destruction of public property, the protests highlight Dalit anger, frustration and alienation. They are also a grim reminder of the distance Indian society must travel to accommodate its historically most underprivileged and excluded minority.
The protests were largely spontaneous. No political party, including any of the dozen factions of the Republican Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party, or Dalit Panthers, led them. But a carnage of Dalits, at Khairlanji in Maharashtra on September 29, hung heavy over them.
In that episode, four members of the Bhotmange family, including two women, were killed by a caste-Hindu mob because two of them appeared as witnesses for another Dalit victim of caste discrimination. All four were paraded naked and the women gang-raped before being killed.
Khairlanji's shame was compounded by the monumental callousness of the Maharashtra government -- especially the police's failure to register the crime under the special SC and ST Atrocities Act --, and the supine response of the Dalit leadership, which didn't even mention the outrage in hundreds of well-attended meetings held days later, on the 50th anniversary of Ambedkar's conversion to Buddhism.
Khairlanji exemplifies the intensity and pervasiveness of the discrimination Dalits continue to face despite decades of job and educational quotas. Education doesn't guarantee better treatment, nor does economic status. The Bhotmanges were educated and owned five acres of irrigated land. They were lynched probably because they confidently asserted their rights.
Despite its exceptional violence, Khairlanji conforms to a pattern of exclusion, sanctioned by religion custom, which stretches all the way from the remotest village to elite institutions in the heart of India's capital. At the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), India's best-known teaching hospital, Dalit students suffer what's best described as a system of apartheid, run with the authorities' connivance.
Dalit students cannot live in upper caste-dominated hostels or eat at the same table. The government recently appointed a committee to investigate AIIMS. The institute administration refused to cooperate with it.
Numerous other medical colleges too have been sites of upper caste domination. They played a pernicious role in recent agitations against educational quotas for the Other Backward Classes. Dalit students are particularly vulnerable in such colleges given the system of internal evaluation, typically by prejudiced upper-caste examiners. Indeed, they cannot even protest against discrimination for fear of being further victimised.
Ordinary Dalits are, expectedly, worse off than those who make it to professional education courses. For instance, the repugnant practice of manual scavenging still persists. An estimated 680,000 to 1,300,000 Dalits continue to remove and carry human excreta. It's clear that the deadline (2007) for eradicating this disgraceful practice won't be met, perhaps not even by 2010.
Annual reports of national and state-level Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Commissions reveal persistent, ramified and all-encompassing anti-Dalit discrimination, reflected in unpaid labour and humiliating practices such as barring Dalit women from covering their heads while passing through the upper-caste segment of a village. Khairlanji is only one thread in this entire web of unequal and hierarchical social relationships and victimisation by virtue of birth, sanctioned by casteist interpretations of religious myths and legends.
Khairlanji also exposes the yawning gap between Dalit masses and political leaders. The leaders have lost touch with reality. Many of them are distrusted by the masses for their growing lack of identification with their constituency's problems, their lavish lifestyles and corruption.
India is now witnessing the emergence of a third-generation post-Ambedkar Dalit leadership. The first generation was comprised of veteran Republican and Congress leaders like Dadasaheb (Bhaurao Krishnarao) Gaekwad, BP Maurya, Dadasaheb Rupawate, RS Gavai and Babu Jagjivan Ram. It got quickly discredited. The second generation, represented by the Dalit Panthers -- who made a revolutionary beginning in Maharashtra 35 years ago --, has also been co-opted.
One of the brightest stars of Maharashtra's Panther movement, the great poet Namdeo Dhasal, now sings paeans to tinpot dictator Bal Thackeray! Other leaders, like Prakash Ambedkar, Ramdas Athavale and Jogendra Kavade only have a limited following. Most of the rest stand marginalised.
Mayawati is the unquestioned leader of UP's Dalits, whose influence is growing in other states too. Although she's emerging as India's foremost Dalit leader, she lacks a perspective and strategy for social transformation along secular and egalitarian lines.
None of these leaders combines Dr Ambedkar's dual agenda -- of Dalit representation and radical, inclusive social change. The sole exceptions may be Udit Raj of the Justice Party.
The present Dalit protests have put the third-generation leadership on test: It must prove sensitive to the mood of the masses and articulate their aspirations and demands. It's not clear if it can meet the challenge.
However, Khairlanji makes one thing clear. Most Dalits have no use for the brand of identity politics that intellectuals like Chandra Bhan Prasad propound, centred on celebrating the birthday of Thomas Babington Macaulay, the founder of the colonial system of training loyal local clerks! Some Dalits have even invented a new deity, the English language!
Prasad & Co are more concerned to create a new class of millionaires than to redress the Dalit masses' problems. These are worsening under the impact of the very processes of globalisation, privatisation, and liberalisation -- leading to greater inequalities, and displacement and dispossession of the poor, etc -- which these globalisers favour. It's doubtful if their agendas will strike a chord among ordinary Dalits.
At any rate, the present moment confronts Indian society with a challenge: how should it address continuing Dalit oppression? If reservations haven't done the job adequately, should the state try other forms of affirmative action, including aggressive special education programmes, sensitisation of upper-caste and other privileged people, and stricter laws to punish caste discrimination and untouchability?
Similar questions arise for the Indian subcontinent and South Asia as a whole. All countries of the region suffer from the same kind of social pathologies, involving deep-rooted discrimination based on birth. In the long run, only a combination of public education, state-level action, and above all, a vigorous social reform movement, can deliver results in the form of a more inclusive society.
It won't be easy to produce this combination. But one thing can be said with certainty: the need for social reform has never been greater in South Asia.
By Praful Bidwai
Just as reports come in of a further increase in India's GDP growth rate to 9.1 per cent in the first half of this fiscal year, the nation is beginning to confront an unpleasant reality: namely, lack of inclusion of large numbers of its citizens in economic, social and political processes. Some of the starker aspects of this reality were recently highlighted when the report of the Sachar committee on the social, economic and educational status of Muslims was tabled in parliament.
Since then, yet another group that faces discrimination, the Dalits or former untouchables (officially called scheduled castes), has figured prominently in the headlines. A rash of militant Dalit protests has broken out in various Indian cities, most prominently in Maharashtra, the cradle of modern Dalit politics. Sparked by the desecration of a statue of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar in Kanpur, these protests have lent a sharp focus to the community's large-scale mobilisation on his 50th death anniversary three days ago.
Despite the unfortunate destruction of public property, the protests highlight Dalit anger, frustration and alienation. They are also a grim reminder of the distance Indian society must travel to accommodate its historically most underprivileged and excluded minority.
The protests were largely spontaneous. No political party, including any of the dozen factions of the Republican Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party, or Dalit Panthers, led them. But a carnage of Dalits, at Khairlanji in Maharashtra on September 29, hung heavy over them.
In that episode, four members of the Bhotmange family, including two women, were killed by a caste-Hindu mob because two of them appeared as witnesses for another Dalit victim of caste discrimination. All four were paraded naked and the women gang-raped before being killed.
Khairlanji's shame was compounded by the monumental callousness of the Maharashtra government -- especially the police's failure to register the crime under the special SC and ST Atrocities Act --, and the supine response of the Dalit leadership, which didn't even mention the outrage in hundreds of well-attended meetings held days later, on the 50th anniversary of Ambedkar's conversion to Buddhism.
Khairlanji exemplifies the intensity and pervasiveness of the discrimination Dalits continue to face despite decades of job and educational quotas. Education doesn't guarantee better treatment, nor does economic status. The Bhotmanges were educated and owned five acres of irrigated land. They were lynched probably because they confidently asserted their rights.
Despite its exceptional violence, Khairlanji conforms to a pattern of exclusion, sanctioned by religion custom, which stretches all the way from the remotest village to elite institutions in the heart of India's capital. At the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), India's best-known teaching hospital, Dalit students suffer what's best described as a system of apartheid, run with the authorities' connivance.
Dalit students cannot live in upper caste-dominated hostels or eat at the same table. The government recently appointed a committee to investigate AIIMS. The institute administration refused to cooperate with it.
Numerous other medical colleges too have been sites of upper caste domination. They played a pernicious role in recent agitations against educational quotas for the Other Backward Classes. Dalit students are particularly vulnerable in such colleges given the system of internal evaluation, typically by prejudiced upper-caste examiners. Indeed, they cannot even protest against discrimination for fear of being further victimised.
Ordinary Dalits are, expectedly, worse off than those who make it to professional education courses. For instance, the repugnant practice of manual scavenging still persists. An estimated 680,000 to 1,300,000 Dalits continue to remove and carry human excreta. It's clear that the deadline (2007) for eradicating this disgraceful practice won't be met, perhaps not even by 2010.
Annual reports of national and state-level Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Commissions reveal persistent, ramified and all-encompassing anti-Dalit discrimination, reflected in unpaid labour and humiliating practices such as barring Dalit women from covering their heads while passing through the upper-caste segment of a village. Khairlanji is only one thread in this entire web of unequal and hierarchical social relationships and victimisation by virtue of birth, sanctioned by casteist interpretations of religious myths and legends.
Khairlanji also exposes the yawning gap between Dalit masses and political leaders. The leaders have lost touch with reality. Many of them are distrusted by the masses for their growing lack of identification with their constituency's problems, their lavish lifestyles and corruption.
India is now witnessing the emergence of a third-generation post-Ambedkar Dalit leadership. The first generation was comprised of veteran Republican and Congress leaders like Dadasaheb (Bhaurao Krishnarao) Gaekwad, BP Maurya, Dadasaheb Rupawate, RS Gavai and Babu Jagjivan Ram. It got quickly discredited. The second generation, represented by the Dalit Panthers -- who made a revolutionary beginning in Maharashtra 35 years ago --, has also been co-opted.
One of the brightest stars of Maharashtra's Panther movement, the great poet Namdeo Dhasal, now sings paeans to tinpot dictator Bal Thackeray! Other leaders, like Prakash Ambedkar, Ramdas Athavale and Jogendra Kavade only have a limited following. Most of the rest stand marginalised.
Mayawati is the unquestioned leader of UP's Dalits, whose influence is growing in other states too. Although she's emerging as India's foremost Dalit leader, she lacks a perspective and strategy for social transformation along secular and egalitarian lines.
None of these leaders combines Dr Ambedkar's dual agenda -- of Dalit representation and radical, inclusive social change. The sole exceptions may be Udit Raj of the Justice Party.
The present Dalit protests have put the third-generation leadership on test: It must prove sensitive to the mood of the masses and articulate their aspirations and demands. It's not clear if it can meet the challenge.
However, Khairlanji makes one thing clear. Most Dalits have no use for the brand of identity politics that intellectuals like Chandra Bhan Prasad propound, centred on celebrating the birthday of Thomas Babington Macaulay, the founder of the colonial system of training loyal local clerks! Some Dalits have even invented a new deity, the English language!
Prasad & Co are more concerned to create a new class of millionaires than to redress the Dalit masses' problems. These are worsening under the impact of the very processes of globalisation, privatisation, and liberalisation -- leading to greater inequalities, and displacement and dispossession of the poor, etc -- which these globalisers favour. It's doubtful if their agendas will strike a chord among ordinary Dalits.
At any rate, the present moment confronts Indian society with a challenge: how should it address continuing Dalit oppression? If reservations haven't done the job adequately, should the state try other forms of affirmative action, including aggressive special education programmes, sensitisation of upper-caste and other privileged people, and stricter laws to punish caste discrimination and untouchability?
Similar questions arise for the Indian subcontinent and South Asia as a whole. All countries of the region suffer from the same kind of social pathologies, involving deep-rooted discrimination based on birth. In the long run, only a combination of public education, state-level action, and above all, a vigorous social reform movement, can deliver results in the form of a more inclusive society.
It won't be easy to produce this combination. But one thing can be said with certainty: the need for social reform has never been greater in South Asia.
