The caste struggle
The promise of globalization, for Prasad, is
not in its consumerism but in the gains made by African Americans. Both
Ilaiah and Prasad write of the struggles of African Americans.
Vijay Prasad
Biblio: A Review of books,
September-October, 2005.
Dalit Diary: 1999-2003. Reflections on Apartheid in
India, Chennai: Navayana, 2004.
Chandra Bhan Prasad
Buffalo Nationalism. A Critique of Spiritual Fascism,
Kolkata: Samya, 2004.
Kancha Ilaiah
Tucked behind the posh Khan Market, and rapidly overrun by shops, is Lok
Nayak Bhavan. To bystanders it is better known for the liquor store on the
ground floor than for its more elevated occupants. Shabby in the way of
such buildings, Lok Nayak Bhavan holds a host of Central Government
offices. The Central Bureau of Investigations has an office there, as does
the Tariff Commission. The Home Ministry's Foreigners Division is there,
and lest anyone believe that the government is partial to them, let me
assure you that its offices are as bare as any other. Between the 5th and
the 9th floors, there are other kinds of offices, not given to either
investigation or extraction. These are the Central Government bodies such
as the National Foundation for Communal Harmony and the National Commission
for SCs and STs.
In the early 1990s I had gone to the SC Commission to garner information
for a Ph. D. that I was writing on the Balmiki community of northern India.
At the time the officers at the Commission had been singularly unhelpful.
They had no reports at hand, which is a logistical problem that no one
seemed interested in or willing to remedy. But the most scandalous aspect
of my visit was that no one, not one officer, evinced any interest in the
research, neither in my questions nor in my findings. What is the point, I
thought, of such a fundamentally important Commission if its officers are
unmotivated to grapple with the burning question of Indian social
democracy: caste and the systematic exploitation of dalits?
During the summer of 2005, as I read these books by Chandra Bhan Prasad and
Kancha Ilaiah, I decided to pay the Commission another visit. Lok Nayak
Bhavan had not changed in the decade between my visits (although Khan
Market is now posher). I went up to the SC Commission, which had the same
air of resignation as it had earlier. The Chairman saw me without an
appointment, which is both a mark of his courtesy and a statement of his
availability. We spoke for about half an hour, and faced only modest
interruption. After seeing him I spent about two hours trying to get my
hands on the most recent published report from the Commission (which as it
turns out is a combined report for 1996-97 and 1997-98). Trips between
floors led to my discovery of a copy of the Hindi version on the floor of a
secretary's office. That, I learnt, was the copy that the Chairman used as
a reference. Only when he saw the look of dyspeptic disappointment did the
Chairman's Personal Assistant very kindly let me have it. His parting words
resonate, "I don't want you to leave here feeling pushed around by the
stereotype of a government bureaucracy." For a moment, his smile and
gesture made me forgive the entire structure.
The reports of the Commission make for dreary reading, particularly the
section on "Cases of Atrocity and Harassment." The number of violent
incidents is astounding, and either it is on the rise or Dalits are now
able to report these cases to government authorities. The level of violence
against working-class Dalits both in rural and urban areas is matched by
the inability of middle-class Dalits to attain posts that befit their
talents and education. The Commission's 1997 Report notes on the politics
of this violence and deprivation, "Whenever Dalits have tried to organize
themselves or assert their rights, there has been a backlash from the
feudal lords resulting in mass killings of Dalits, gang rapes, looting and
arsoning, etc. of Harijan basties." Given this context, it is easy to see
why Indian liberalism and its main instrument, the Indian state exasperate
Prasad and Ilaiah. Their volumes are collections of their newspaper
columns, where they have scrupulously recounted their frustrations with the
hypocrisy of the state and of those who control its institutions. Prasad's
book bristles with instances of institutional apartheid, whether it is the
overall suppression of Dalit economic advancement or the lack of Dalit
presence in intellectual and political institutions. He cites statistics
that damn liberal institutions for their failure to conform to the
Constitutional mandates that they otherwise celebrate. The enigma of caste
discrimination rankles: everybody admits its presence, but no-body owns up
to being anti-Dalit or anti-OBC. Everybody is against caste discrimination,
but few seem willing to stand up and change those parts of the system that
they control. No wonder then that these two books appear bitter, for it is
circumstances that are bitter and these books reproduce them.
The indictment of the national project is quite formidable. Ilaiah argues
that Congress-led nationalism adopted secularism as its principle social
philosophy, where secularism posed a solution to division by creed not
division by caste. "Secularism in India," he notes, "always remained a
cover for the caste operations of the Indian brahmanical elite" (77).
Prasad trods the same terrain when he asks, "Why does the chatterati never
regard varna/caste conflict as the fundamental crisis of Indian society?"
Communalism is important, no doubt both authors point out, but the emphasis
given to communalism might be considered in light of the relative silence
on casteism or dalit-cide. "If one makes a sincere effort to compile
statistics about the number of dalits murdered since India evolved into a
republic in 1950, the figure may well go beyond the number of soldiers
killed during the wars with Pakistan, China, and in Sri Lanka," points out
Chandra Bhan Prasad. "It could also be manifold higher than the total
number of casualties in all the 'communal' conflicts in post-1950 India"
(65). For Prasad, and to an extent Ilaiah, there are only two choices for
politically active groups - either to join the dalit or anti-caste
movement, or else to concede that India is an anti-dalit society.
Nationalism, for both authors, cannot deign to adopt the former route, so
it must be condemned as a cover for Brahminism.
The evidence accumulated by Ilaiah, but more by Prasad, is unimpeachable.
Without a doubt, the statistical data shows that Dalits are under-
represented in the well-paid white-collar jobs of the public institutions,
and over-represented in the menial sectors. And, from the Mandal
Commission, we already know that the argument for "merit" is highly
dubious, "What we call merit in an elitist society is an amalgam of native
endowments and environmental privileges.The conscience of a civilized
society and the dictates of social justice demand that 'merit' and
'equality' are not turned into a fetish.To treat unequals as equal is to
perpetuate inequality" (pp. 21-22 of the Mandal Commission). Dalits (and to
a lesser extent OBCs) remain socially, politically and economically
suppressed in India, but not silently so.
Where both Ilaiah and Prasad err is in their characterization of Indian
nationalism as one dimensional: they believe that Dalit (and OBC)
liberation will not be available within the confines of Indian nationalism.
For that reason, they either turn their sights toward globalization or else
the United States for liberty, to the extent that Prasad argues, "It is
easier to negotiate with Bill Gates than with Birla; it will be easier
still to negotiate with George W. Bush than A. B. Vajpayee," and that
diversity will be initiated in India by "an MNC, probably an American one"
(132). Their own critique, however, is engendered less by the exported
liberty of the US or globalization, than by the inner contradictions of
Indian nationalism, by the field of political thought that includes both
Gandhi and Ambedkar, both the liberal and the radical approach to social
inequality. The "Harijan Atrocity" of the 1970s was not part of an ancient,
unchanging, story of varnashramadharma. It is legible only in the social
relations of the caste struggle that intensified after Dalits felt
emboldened by their constitutional protections. When Bihar Chief Minister
Kapoori Thakur (1977-80) opened space for Dalit advancement, for instance,
the dominant castes, the Kurmis, massacred some of Pipra's Chamars. Pipra
was in line with a host of such massacres whose etiology should be sought
in the insecure revenge of the dominant castes as they tried to hold onto
power that seemed to be on the wane. The atrocity, in other words, is not a
manifestation of the dictates in the Manudharamshastra, although it might
be justified by it. Rather it is a result of a struggle within the
framework of Indian nationalism, a struggle that produced not only the BSP
and the other Dalit political formations, but also the move by the
Communist Parties to put caste at the forefront of their organizational and
political work. This struggle, furthermore gave voice to writers such as
Ilaiah and Prasad. Our texts on Dalits and our frustrations with the
general tenor of Indian nationalism are not external to the very forces we
criticize. In other words, that Ilaiah and Prasad write, and that their
critiques are important is part of the struggle. To see liberty elsewhere
(from the US model, for instance) is a blindness to one's own ability to
speak, and it assumes far too much about the merits of US liberalism.
Prasad argues that the national model of social development has not
liberated Dalits. In rural areas, he argues, the import-substitution model
produced a rich peasantry not from among the Brahmins, but from among the
OBCs, namely Yadavs and others. The power of the OBC class within both the
BJP (represented by Kalyan Singh and Narendra Modi) and the SP (represented
by Mulayam Singh Yadav and others) is patent. Ilaiah recounts in detail why
he is "terribly disturbed" by the growth of the OBCs "as a mercenary social
force" (1), indeed, this is the impetus for his own reflections on the
caste struggle and it is the reason he has strongly promoted the idea of
OBC-Dalit unity both politically and conceptually (through the category
"Dalit-Bahujan"). Prasad too identifies the emergence of the "upper" OBCs
who, "after defeating the dwijas, are seeking dwija-like social status,
which the dalits are refusing to accord. The result - the 'upper' OBCs are
unleashing dwija-like savagery of the medieval times" (69). To counter
this, Prasad remains at the level of the symptom and demands that rich
farmers, the kulaks (who are often OBCs in the areas that Prasad writes
about), must be abolished. "Kulaks, by definition, are unlawful elements,
the fountainhead of obscurantism, and they commit atrocities on dalits.
They are the nation's headache. The state must discipline them by ushering
in a new era of land reforms, and administer a genuine shock treatment lest
the headache turns into a social cancer" (88). The hammer to knock down the
OBC enemy, for Prasad, is globalization. Bring on the WTO, for "What could
be a happier moment for dalits than witnessing the total collapse of
farmers who do not pay minimum wages and humiliate dalits in their day-to-
day life?" (131).
To consider the OBCs as the principle enemy of the Dalits is to miss the
wood for the forest (Prasad's position is not unlike that of Gail Omvedt
and Sharad Joshi, who called the GATT Dunkel Draft the muktidata of the
farmers). Three quarters of the total Dalit population works on the land,
and about fifty percent of them are agricultural wageworkers. The state did
intervene between the 1950s and the 1980s with various inputs to landed
peasants, whose workers, as a consequence, were able to raise food
production quite dramatically. The decline of state intervention has
resulted in a shift from food to non-food crops, which has meant a lower
number of workdays available for landless laborers, most of whom are
Dalits. In the short run, at least, both the OBCs and the Dalits have been
adversely affected by globalization. Sociologist P. G. Jogdand summarized
the results of globalization on agriculture thus, "(a) decline in rural non-
agriculture employment and income, (b) decline in the per capita
availability of food grains and cereals, (c) reduction in central
expenditure on anti-poverty programmes, and (d) decline in expenditures on
sectors which improve social consumption" (New Economic Policy and Dalits,
2000, p. 2). Working-class Dalits, like other working-class Indians, will
be adversely effected by the cannibalization of the state, indeed because
of the rot of Brahmanism, they might face the consequences of distress even
more deeply than others. To see globalization as the savior is to miss the
very best of Ambedkar, who despite being clear that the British had a
contradictory legacy in India gave a powerful speech in Ludhiana in 1951
with the title, "British have betrayed the Untouchables" (collected by the
inestimable Bhagwan Das in vol. 2 of Thus Spoke Ambedkar). The "second
empire," as Prasad calls it, might not be any better than the first (to
wit, Ambedkar's remark, "In 1947 when the British people left India, the
Untouchables were in the same deplorable condition as they were in before
the British came to India"). Phule, Ambedkar, and others understood that
any social situation will pose challenges and opportunities, within which
one must strive for reforms and fight for structural change. Prasad
mistakes this assessment of the opportunities posed by authoritarian rule
as a celebration of that rule itself. This is a major error.
While Ilaiah valiantly tries to find some means to secure Dalit-OBC unity
against the social forces that are arrayed against the working class,
Prasad wants to demolish the power base of the OBCs by any means necessary
- preferably through the instrument of globalization, particularly if it
comes with an American face. The promise of globalization, for Prasad, is
not in its consumerism but in the gains made by African Americans. Both
Ilaiah and Prasad write of the struggles of African Americans. "In every
branch of the university," Ilaiah writes during his trip to Duke
University, "African Americans get their quota of seats and they have been
excelling in many fields, including medicine and business management"
(182). Prasad draws on the statistics of inclusion of African Americans
into these fields, but also into the media, the entertainment industry and
into the academy. It is without question that African Americans have broken
into some areas, not because of the "guilt" of white society, as Ilaiah
puts it, but because of the long struggle for Civil Rights launched in the
aftermath of the US Revolution in 1776 and brought to fruition in the Civil
Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of the mid-1960s. This immense social
and political movement, which included people of all backgrounds and
classes, won African Americans the franchise, and most importantly a
political space to argue for cultural presence.
As the movement changed from a Civil Rights one to an anti-poverty one, the
Nixon administration engineered the theory of Black Capitalism. A few years
before the emergence of this term, the eminence grise of the Black
liberation movement (and its Ambedkar), Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, pointed out
that a theory of Black Capitalism "will insert into the ranks of the Negro
race a new cause of division, a new attempt to subject the masses of the
race to an exploiting capitalist class of their own people." This is
exactly what has occurred, and we now have this situation: the median
income of African Americans is 66% that of whites, whereas the net worth of
African Americans is only 15% that of whites (in the two top income
brackets, African Americans hold only about a third of the wealth of
whites). It should also be pointed out that there are more African
Americans in prison than ever before, indeed that there are more African
American men in prison than in college. Neither Ilaiah nor Prasad appear to
register these sharp reversals: the former writes of an atrocity against
Dalits and then says "Imagine such a thing taking place against African
Americans today" (139), to which I shall offer two words, Jasper, Texas;
and the latter writes that the "American bourgeoisie is filling the black
holes created by its ancestors" (222), just when Affirmative Action is
being cut down by the US Supreme Court.
The President of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People, Julian Bond, laid out the problems of today in his July 2005
speech, "One central issue on the civil rights agenda - economic justice -
remains unfulfilled and largely unaddressed.That there are more black
millionaires today is a tribute to the movement King led. That there are
proportionately fewer blacks working today is an indictment of our times
and our economic system, a reflection of our challenges in keeping the
movement coming on." To draw links between African Americans and Dalits is
important, as is any attempt to craft solidarity across national
boundaries. However, to borrow a strategy from elsewhere (Black Capitalism
morphs into Dalit Capitalism) is Sisyphean. (Prasad is quite on cue with
Black Capitalism, "It is better to be exploited by a dalit bourgeoisie than
by the varna bourgeoisie," he writes, 171).
In 2002, various intellectuals and activists gathered in Bhopal for a
conference on the Dalit struggle (both Prasad and Ilaiah actively
participated). After much deliberation, the participants drafted "The
Bhopal Declaration," which should have been reprinted in both books under
review. Indeed, this document needs to be read by every concerned person.
The 21-Point Action Agenda raises several important issues, but for all the
talk of globalization and the death of the state, nineteen of the points
hold the state up as the instrument of deliverance. The state must conduct
land reforms, ensure adequate wages, end manual scavenging and bonded
labor, implement compulsory education, regulate reservations, prevent
atrocities and ensure that the various national and state women's
commissions pay attention to the struggles of Dalit women. One point raises
the demand for reservations in the private sector, and another asks the
state to provide start-up capital for Dalit entrepreneurs. What is very
striking is the similarity between the Bhopal Declaration and the nine
points of the All-India Democratic Women's Association's 1998 Convention in
Support of Dalit Women's Rights Against Untouchability and Oppression, and
indeed there is little here that would be disputed by the political
programs of the Left parties. So why do Ilaiah and Prasad find themselves
in fundamental opposition to the Left, who are their natural programmatic
allies?
Both Prasad and Ilaiah point out that there are few leaders in the Left
parties from Dalit and OBC backgrounds (here they reflect Ambedkar, who
told the American political scientist Selig Harrison that the Maharashtra
Communists are "a bunch of Brahman boys"). They also evince dismay at the
alleged lack of attention paid by the Left to the centrality of caste in
the Indian social revolution. The Left, for them, is part of the horizon of
Indian nationalism that they see as bankrupt. Prasad indicates that while
the agenda of Ambedkar and Marx is quite similar (76-79) the Left has not
taken up either Ambedkar or his views. Ambedkar himself wrote at length
about Communism, and while he saw its value, he felt that Indian social
reality needed to address the spiritual dimension as much as the material
one. The gulf between Ambedkarism and Communism is, therefore, not so much
ideological as institutional and personal, which makes it all the more
bitter and tragic.
The cavalier divisions reproduced by Prasad and Ilaiah make a mockery of
the important role played by Communists like Nripen Chakraborty and
Dasaratha Deb in Tripura and Shamrao and Godavari Parulekar and R. B. More
in Maharashtra among Adivasis and Dalits. More, a close friend of Ambedkar,
attracted several important figures from the Dalit movement into the
Communist Party (notably S. B. Jadhav who was the Bombay secretary of the
Scheduled Castes Federation, Captain Sasalekar of the Samata Sainik Dal,
and Shahir Annabhau Sahte, founder of Dalit Sahitya). This history weighs
heavily on the Left movement. One of the great gains for Dalits came in
West Bengal, when, under Left Front rule, the government distributed land
to two million landless cultivators, 56% of whom come form socially
oppressed communities (37% to Dalits and 19% to Adivasis). None of this is
taken seriously in the writings of Prasad and Ilaiah, who, while they are
spot on in their condemnation of Indian liberalism, are far too anecdotal
in their assessment of the place of the Left in the fight for Dalit
liberation.
If the Left comes in for harsh criticism from both Ilaiah and Prasad, both
are very tender with the BSP. Without a doubt, the emergence of the BSP is
very important for Indian social democracy. The party has placed the
problem of Dalits squarely on the national agenda, and it has trained many
activists who will not allow Dalit issues to be put on the back burner.
However, simply because the BSP is a party led by Dalits is no guarantee
that it will work for the welfare of all Dalits. Take the example of Chakia
Tehsil of UP,where the BSP government has worked against the interests of
the local Dalits to the extent that in 2002 Dalit women marched with a
banner that said, "Mayawati Open the Treasury and Give us Red Cards,"
referring to the red-coloured Antyodaya cards that would give them access
to the public distribution system. A callous disregard for land reform and
a strange alliance with the BJP pose no problem for Prasad and Ilaiah. In
this, their politics based on identity (rather than a politics of
identification) goes someway from Ambedkarism (he himself had this to say
of his adversary, "By Brahmanism I do not mean the power, privileges and
interests of the Brahmins as a community. That is not the sense in which I
am using the word. By Brahmanism I mean the negation of the spirit of
liberty, equality and fraternity. In that sense it is rampant in all
classes and is not confined to Brahmins alone though they have been its
originators. The effect of Brahmanism was not confined to social rights
such as inter-dining and inter-marrying. It also denied them civic rights.
So omniscient is Brahmanism that it even affects the field of economic
opportunities" (Times of India, February 14, 1938). Dalit-cide is a
problem, and it must be grasped politically, but the political solution
should not be a mirror of the ailment itself.
The SC Commission is several years late in the production of its annual
report to parliament. Its new Chairman is Dr. Suraj Bhan who combines a
life-long struggle for Dalit rights (he was the President of the Punjab
Scheduled Castes Federation from 1947-49) with a life-long attachment to
Hindutva institutions (he was in the Jan Sangh, and then became a Lok Sabha
Member for the BJP four times, a Minister once and then Governor of three
states). When I met Dr. Suraj Bhan he laid out several plans for the
advancement of the Dalit agenda. On land reform, the central issue before
Dalits, Dr. Suraj Bhan proposed that the state donate (or sell at a reduced
rate) the land that skirts railway lines. Dalits would develop this land
and add to the patrimony of the nation, he stated. Such a tepid approach,
especially compared to the land reforms in Bengal or the Bhopal
Declaration, are a hall-mark of the bait and switch approach of Indian
liberalism and Hindutva toward the question of Dalit liberation. The
insights and invectives of Prasad and Ilaiah emerge from such
contradictions. Their writings are important to read, and necessary to
engage with. The greatest work they do is provoke us to think about the
centrality of the caste struggle to Indian democracy, and to put things on
the agenda that the Commission has not done.
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