The militant Dalit protests provoked by the Khairlanji carnage highlight India's failure to combat social exclusion and the need for an alternative strategy.
There are three ways of looking at the militant Dalit protests that recently broke out in Maharashtra, and caused the unfortunate destruction of public property, including the torching of the train Deccan Queen and more than a hundred buses. The first view holds that the protests were essentially irrational - a form of Dalit rage triggered by the desecration of a statue of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar in Kanpur. They were spontaneous and anarchic and bound to die out. They also exposed the limitations of an obsession with symbols such as statues.
The second view sees the protests as having been caused primarily by Dalit anger against the carnage in Khairlanji in Maharashtra's Bhandara district, in which four members of the Bhotmange family were lynched by a Kunbi-Maratha mob. All four were paraded naked and the family's two women were raped. Khairlanji formed the backdrop to and cause of the protests; the Kanpur incident was merely the last straw on the camel's back.
The third view holds that the protests represent a new mood and heightened awareness among the Dalit masses, if not rebellious self-assertion, similar to the eruption of Dalit anger after the Ramabai Nagar incident in Mumbai in 1997.
The protests had many dimensions: they were a spontaneous outburst of disgust at the barbarity of Khairlanji; they condemned the Maharashtra government for having failed to book the culprits in time; they signify a powerful rejection of conventional politics and methods of protest; and not least, they warned the Dalit political leadership that it risks being utterly marginalised unless it relates to the new mood in the community, especially its youth.
On sober analysis, it is the third view that captures the protests' essence and significance. It also underscores the grave crisis of leadership in the Dalit movement. The first view ignores the fact that defilement of Ambedkar's statues conveys a very precise message: namely, rejection of the principles of inclusiveness and social cohesion, with equality, freedom and dignity, which Ambedkar stood for.
Ambedkar was not merely one of the principal authors of the Constitution; he was also a theorist of substantive democracy, in which "social democracy" and "economic democracy" would breathe life into political democracy, or formal equality of citizens. This would mean levelling the deep and structured inequalities that have long characterised Indian society.
Ambedkar's agenda of radical social transformation was inseparable from the project that India's freedom movement embraced: to build a modern, open, equal, inclusive and just society free not just of foreign domination, but of all forms of prejudice, superstition, hierarchy, discrimination and subjugation. That said, the importance of Khairlanji itself should not be minimised. The carnage testifies to the intensity of the discrimination and prejudice that Dalits continue to face all over India despite decades of affirmative action.
It requires more than mere economic rivalry, combined with a criminal mindset, to commit the atrocity perpetrated at Khairlanji: the ferocity and bestiality of that violence cannot be explained without reference to casteism and the quality of hatred, backed by complete self-assurance and self-righteousness, that it can generate.
Needless to say, such blind hatred enjoys the sanction of faith, the Dharma Shastras, and religious scriptures and legends; for instance, the beheading by Rama of Shambuka, a Shudra, for daring to recite the Vedas, and numerous other stories from the epics. Regrettably, Indian society is no longer interrogating the assumptions that underlie such legends. It has turned its back on the social reform agenda.
Khairlanji also proves the fatuousness of the claim that a combination of economic growth and spread of education amongst Dalits would combat their exclusion. In fact, education does not ensure better treatment of Dalits at the hands of caste Hindus. Nor does economic status. The Bhotmanges were all educated and owned five acres of irrigated land. They were punished precisely because they confidently stood up for their rights and refused to be browbeaten by the dominant caste group. (Two of them had appeared as witnesses for another Dalit who was assaulted by caste Hindus.)
Although noteworthy for its sheer brutality - and for the government's supine response - Khairlanji conforms to a familiar pattern of Dalits' systematic exclusion, which extends all the way from the remotest villages to elite institutions such as the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, our best-known teaching hospital. AIIMS' Dalit students cannot live in savarna (upper-caste)-dominated hostels or eat at the same table. The administration is fully complicit in this. It recently refused to cooperate with an official committee appointed to look into allegations of caste discrimination.
What holds true for AIIMS applies to a number of other institutions of higher education. Clearly, affirmative action has not redressed the discrimination and injustice suffered by Dalits even at the tertiary education level.
The situation of ordinary, underprivileged Dalits is worse, as documented year after year by the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Commissions at the Central and State levels. Anti-Dalit discrimination is indeed all-encompassing and rooted in the deepest interstices of this super-hierarchical society. Khairlanji is only one thread in this web of inequality and discrimination based on birth.
The protests confront Dalit political leaders with a unique challenge. Many of them have lost touch, indeed credibility, with their constituency. Their credibility crisis is aggravated by their lavish lifestyles, their willingness to trade whatever little influence they have with Dalits for small-time personal gains, and the fragmentation of their organisations, including the dozen factions of the Republican Party of India, the Dalit Panthers, and groupings like the Bahujan Mahasangh.
The first generation of the post-Ambedkar Dalit leadership has now faded out. Comprised of veteran Republican Party leaders like Dadasaheb (Bhaurao Krishnarao) Gaekwad, B.P. Maurya, Dadasaheb Rupawate, R.S. Gavai and Congress leaders like Jagjivan Ram, it was largely co-opted into the mainstream through paltry concessions made to individuals.
The second generation was born fragmented. It was represented at one end of the spectrum by the Dalit Panthers - which made a thundering beginning in Maharashtra 34 years ago - and at the other end, by the Dalit Soshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti, which morphed into the Bahujan Samaj Party, which today commands the allegiance of the bulk of Dalits in Uttar Pradesh. Others like Ram Vilas Paswan built small niches for themselves.
The Panthers have been co-opted into mainstream parties like the Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party and even the Shiv Sena. Nothing testifies more eloquently to the pitiable state of this once-militant movement than the recruitment on a passive and subordinate basis of one of its brightest stars, the remarkable Marathi poet Namdeo Dhasal, into the Sena. Other leaders, like Prakash Ambedkar, Ramdas Athavale and Jogindra Kawade lead small, unstable factions.
These leaders failed to build a viable social coalition between Dalits and other marginalised groups like the Most Backward Classes, and thereby ensured their own isolation. Mayawati is an exception in some respects. She has at least managed to attract a significant section of MBCs. But her alliances are largely election-driven: she has had few compunctions in joining hands with the Bharatiya Janata Party.
The real tragedy of the Dalit leadership is that it lacks a strategy for social transformation, indeed even for translating Dalits' organisational strength into bargaining power on a secular, egalitarian platform. It is at best looking for niches within the system, not for transforming it or giving it a radical plebeian push. None of these leaders combines Ambedkar's dual agenda - of Dalit representation and inclusive social change.
The Dalit protests may catalyse a third generation of leaders. This will succeed only if it can establish political relevance by articulating grassroots aspirations and crafting a credible strategy for social change. It must develop an orientation and a programme of participatory democracy while firmly rejecting neoliberal globalisation and all forms of parochialism, such as the worship of Thomas Babington Macaulay (of the "Minute on Education" fame), and a new Dalit deity, the English language - the latest fad among a small group of Dalit intellectuals.
The real agenda of Dalit emancipation does not lie in creating a new class of Dalit millionaires or expanding "the creamy layer". This is simply incompatible with Ambedkar's perspective of empowering ordinary Dalits through land reform, expansion of rights and entitlements, and real power-sharing - as part of a larger programme for far-reaching social reform. That perspective has never been more relevant than now.
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