The militant Dalit protests provoked by the Khairlanji carnage highlight India's failure to combat social exclusion and the need for an alternative strategy, writes Bidwai.
Militant Dalit protests in various cities and towns in Maharashtra sparked by the desecration of a statue of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar in Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh have lent a sharp edge to the community's large-scale mobilisation on the occasion of his 50^th death anniversary last week. Despite the unfortunate violence and destruction of public property involved, the protests highlight the anger, frustration and alienation prevalent among Dalits. They are also a grim reminder of the distance Indian society has to travel to become minimally inclusive, indeed barely civilised, in the way it treats its most underprivileged and excluded minority.
The protests were largely spontaneous. No political party, including any of the dozen or so factions of the Republican Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party, or Dalit Panthers, led them. But they were all compelled to support them after they were catalysed by SMS messages on the Kanpur incident from BSP activists in UP to their Maharashtra colleagues. The protests didn't focus on any one issue, but the Khairlanji carnage of September 29 was their real backdrop.
In Khairlanji, in Maharashtra's Bhandara district, four members of a Dalit family, the Bhotmanges, including two women, were barbarically killed by a Kunbi-Maratha mob because two of them appeared as witnesses for another Dalit who had been assaulted by caste Hindus for refusing to grant them the right of way through his field. All four were paraded naked in the streets and the women were 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 or investigate the crime under the 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 on October 2 and 14 held to observe the 50^th anniversary of Ambedkar's conversion to Buddhism. When Bhandara and its neighbourhood erupted in angry demonstrations, the government disingenuously blamed Naxalites!
Khairlanji had to wait for 40 days before the Maharashtra Chief Minister visited it. By then, his Deputy had ensured that the original damage would be aggravated by his insulting offer of a lowly government job to the sole survivor of the carnage. Even the Congress party's central leadership woke up to the gravity of Khairlanji two months later.
Khairlanji exemplifies both the intensity and pervasiveness of the prejudice and persecution Dalits continue to face despite decades of job and educational quotas. Education doesn't guarantee better treatment, nor does economic status. The Bhotmanges were all educated and owned five acres of irrigated land. Their 19 year-old daughter was a school topper. Their lynching proves that a rise in the Dalits' educational status and more self-confidence on their part often breeds even greater savarna (upper-caste) hostility towards them.
While exceptional because of its inhuman violence, Khairlanji conforms to a pattern of caste discrimination and exclusion, sanctioned as much by religion as by custom, which stretches all the way from the remotest village to elite institutions in India's capital. Take the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, the country's best-known teaching hospital, where you need exceptionally high marks-barely a couple of percentage-points below the general category-to get admission under the SC quota.
AIIMS's Dalit students suffer what's best described as a system of apartheid, run with the full connivance of the authorities. They cannot live in savarna-dominated hostels or eat at the same table. The Central government recently appointed a committee to investigate charges of untouchability in AIIMS. The AIIMS administration refused to cooperate with it and didn't permit it to put up notices inviting aggrieved persons to approach it.
AIIMS has been called "a hub of anti-reservation activists". But it's not alone in this regard. Numerous other medical colleges, especially in the Hindi belt, played that role in recent agitations against educational quotas for the Other Backward Classes. Dalit students are particularly vulnerable in such colleges because of the system of internal evaluation, typically by savarna examiners. Indeed, they cannot even protest or complain under the SC and ST Atrocities Act for fear of being further victimised.
Clearly, our affirmative action measures haven't proved adequate even to redress the injustices heaped upon the Dalits who make it to professional education courses. The situation of poorer, more underprivileged Dalits is worse. For instance, the repugnant practice of manual scavenging still persists. An estimated 6.8 to 13 lakh Dalits continue to remove and carry human excreta from toilets unconnected to a drainage system. It's clear that the deadline (2007) for eradicating this disgraceful practice won't be met, perhaps not even by 2010.
One only has to read the annual reports of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes Commissions of the Centre and the states to note how persistent and ramified anti-Dalit discrimination is. It is all-encompassing, from erasure of the names of Dalits from land records, to humiliating practices such as unpaid labour or barring Dalit men from wearing shoes or Dalit women from covering their heads while passing through the upper-caste segment of a village.
Khairlanji is only one strand in this web of unequal and hierarchical social relationships and victimisation of a specific group by virtue of birth, sanctioned by the Dharmashastras and myths and legends such as those of Lord Rama beheading Shambuka, a Shudra, for reciting the Vedas.
Khairlanji also exposes the yawning gap between the Dalit masses and political leaders of avowedly Dalit parties. Not only have the leaders lost touch with ground realities; they're often distrusted by the Dalit masses for their growing lack of identification with the problems of their constituency, their lavish lifestyles, their preoccupation with mere symbols of "empowerment" (read, privilege) such as suits, and their corruption.
India is now witnessing the emergence of what might be called a third-generation post-Ambedkar Dalit leadership. The first generation was comprised of veteran Republican Party and Congress leaders like Dadasaheb (Bhaurao Krishnarao) Gaekwad, BP Maurya, Dadasaheb Rupawate, RS Gavai and Jagjivan Ram. It got quickly discredited.
The second generation, represented by the Dalit Panthers-who made a revolutionary beginning in Maharashtra 34 years ago-, has also been co-opted into the system in a conservative manner. One of the brightest stars of the Panther movement in Maharashtra, the great poet Namdeo Dhasal, now sings paeans to Tinpot Dictator Bal Thackeray! Other leaders, like Messrs Prakash Ambedkar, Ramdas Athavale and Jogindra Kavade, who command factions, only have a limited following. Most of the rest stand marginalised.
Ms Mayawati is in a different league-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, indeed even for translating the Dalits' organisational strength into bargaining power on a secular, egalitarian platform.
None of these leaders combines Dr Ambedkar's dual agenda-of Dalit representation and radical, inclusive social change. The sole exceptions may be Mr Udit Raj of the Justice Party, who mobilises substantial numbers on a progressive plebeian platform, and Mr Ashok Bharati.
The present Dalit protests have put the third-generation leadership on test. It must prove its sensitivity to the mood of the masses, its own political relevance, and its ability to articulate the Dalits' aspirations-or face further isolation. It's not clear if it can meet this challenge.
However, Khairlanji makes one thing amply clear. Most Dalits have no use for the kind of identity politics that Dalit intellectuals like Chandra Bhan Prasad propound, centred on celebrating the birthday of Thomas Babington Macaulay, he of the "Minute on Education" fame and founder of the colonial system of training loyal local clerks! Some Dalit intellectuals have invented a new goddess, the English language, modelled grotesquely after a White woman with a floppy hat. They launched her on October 25 in Delhi.
Mr Prasad & Co are more concerned to create a new class of Dalit millionaires than to redress the problems of the Dalit masses. These problems 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-which these globalisers favour. It's doubtful if their agendas will strike a chord among ordinary Dalits.
The present moment confronts Indian society too 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 savarnas, and stricter laws to punish discrimination? At the level of civil society, can we afford not to have a social reform movement which advocates an inclusive order? How can such a movement be launched? These questions can no longer wait for an answer.
A shorter version of this article appeared in The Khaleej Times
