New turn to India’s caste conflicts
Dalits are being attacked across India for asserting their strides in education, jobs, income, through the way they live, dress, marry and party. Unlike earlier, they are refusing to back off
Sanjay Jatav would have travelled to his bride’s village in a helicopter if he had his way. His plans for the big day ballooned as the hour drew closer — from the number of cars in his baraat (finally fixed at 100) to the number of VIPs in his guest list. “Minister, MLA, DM, SP, ADG, DIG...,” Jatav, 27, screamed into his phone.
The law graduate from Uttar Pradesh’s Basai hadn’t always planned on a spectacle. All he wanted, after he was matched with a girl in the adjoining district, was to lead his wedding procession through her village before arriving at her house. The Thakurs of Nizampur village wouldn’t hear of it, though. No Dalit man had ever crossed a Thakur home on the way to his wedding; no exception would be made to the rule. In a village where the Thakurs outnumber Dalits 9:1, their word was law. Not this time, though. “The Jatavs of Basai do what they say. And Sanjay Jatav is one of them,” said Jatav, his T-Shirt collar turned up and his eyes spitting fire. Starting this February, Jatav’s fight for an equal wedding hit national headlines at a time when caste violence seems to have turned on their axis.
MOVING UP, BEATEN DOWN
Aided by affirmative action, India’s most marginalised communities, the scheduled castes, are slowly but steadily breaking out of a centuries-old cycle of penury and oppression. They aren’t only registering one win after the other -— they outpaced the rest of India in growth of literacy rate according to last census — but also broadcasting them on WhatsApp and Facebook.
In India’s rural hinterland, where about two-thirds of the country still lives, this assertion is inverting power structures and triggering backlash from upper-caste communities.
This year alone, several states have reported incidents of upper-castes attacking people for owning a horse, taking out a wedding procession, cutting their hair, sporting a moustache, adding a suffix to their name, asking for a raise, attending a traditional dance, and for swimming in a well. But unlike earlier, Dalits have struck back.
“Reservations have helped Dalits gain a measure of economic stability. When you feel economically uplifted, you feel at par with the rest, your social status is not at the mercy of the dominant communities any more; you refuse to accept oppression,” explains Amit Thorat, an assistant professor at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.
In the past few years, Dalits have increasingly moved away from villages and traditional occupations, thereby loosening the grip of upper-castes on their economic status. A 2016 paper by Amrita Dutta showed that in Bihar — which reported numerous mass killings of Dalits throughout the nineties and early 2000s — remittances had the highest share in incomes of SC/ST communities, which also reported the largest increase in the share of households with at least one migrant.
The first signs of the turning tide was shown in a 2006 paper by Debashis Chakraborty, D. Shyam Babu and Manashi Chakravorty that spanned 334 districts and found Dalits got attacked more in areas where they were upwardly mobile. In the following decade, the trend deepened, with caste practices doggedly persistent among upper-castes — Thorat and Omkar Joshi found in 2015 that 27% of the country practised untouchability, including 30% in rural areas.
In a 2016 analysis in Mint, Roshan Kishore found that in most cases, states where Dalit asset ownership was closer to the average also reported higher crimes against them, such as Rajasthan and Gujarat. So, what does it take for Dalits to assert their right to live, dress and marry the way they like? More importantly, what is the price they pay for such rebellion?
THE BARAAT BATTLE
On 21 June 1990, a Jatav man rode into a Jat-dominated village 100 kilometers away from Nizampur on an elephant, his entry announced by the beats of a provincial armed constabulary band specially hired for protection. By the end of the next day, eleven Dalits had been killed, dozens of Dalit houses burnt, and all but four Dalit families evicted.
“The Jats were shouting ‘Chamaron, saalo bhaago’ at the baraat,” said Bharat Singh Kardam, the bride’s brother who was 18 at that time.
Back in Nizampur now, the bride Sheetal Kumari’s family is on tenterhooks. In the centre of the village stands an imposing three-storey yellow mansion belonging to one of the prominent Thakur families.
The Dalit families are located in a clot of households on the outskirts. Since April, when Jatav won the baraat battle, Sheetal’s family has received a bouquet of threats from the Thakurs. The water supply to the field from a common tubewell remains snapped since April. “We have been told that the price of this baraat will be heavy. We have to live in the village. We hope nothing bad happens,” said the bride’s brother, Beetu Kumar Jatav. “We are feeling afraid. Who knows what the price of this assertion will be,” said Kalu Jatav, a neighbour. “But we are proud of this day.” The road to this day was rocky. First, Jatav appealed to the police station officer in charge of Nizampur. “He told me Dalits are not allowed to lead their wedding procession across an upper-caste dominated village according to a Supreme Court order,” said Jatav. The letter the station house officer wrote to Kasganj’s SP makes a note of this mysterious apex court ruling of which no evidence exists.
Kasganj’s disrict magistrate, RP Singh, said Jatav’s request clashed with the “tradition” and “geography” of the village. The tradition allows the Thakurs to roam the length and breadth of the village on decorated mares and limits the Dalits’ procession between the entrance of the village and the bride’s house. The geography enables this by placing Dalit houses on the peripheries of villages.
Then, Jatav made an appeal to Yogi Adityanath on the chief minister’s personal website. He appealed to the Allahabad high court to be allowed to wed “in full dignity, as other people in the village Nizampur.” The court dismissed his petition and suggested he seek the support of the district’s authorities. The district magistrate saw Jatav’s demand to wed like upper castes as “badmashi (attempt to make trouble)”.
Jatav then wrote to the prime minister. He also announced his decision to move the Supreme Court. An active member of the Bahujan Samaj Party at the block level, he also mobilised political support for his cause. By this time, a series of Dalit BJP leaders from UP had already complained about the atrocities against the community, and things began to move. In March, Kasganj’s district administration called for negotiations. The Thakurs refused to give in to Jatav’s demand, so the officials drew up an alternate route for the baraat that cut halfway through Nizampur.
Everyone agreed to it, at last, though the wedding was delayed because Sheetal was still a minor.
Jatav’s battle for equality is inextricably tied to the BSP. To young Dalits, especially Jatavs — the largest Dalit subcaste, and one to which party chief Mayawati belongs — the BSP gives not only a sense of a collective but also an ability to strike at power structures and ensure that their side is heard in police stations and panchayats.
Every young member of the BSP is taken through an orientation programme, explained Kasganj district party president Raj Kumar Jatav. They are taught the history of the Dalit community and its leaders and the importance of politics. For a community whose history and culture is systematically erased from mainstream consciousness, the impact is profound.
“We teach them about BR Ambedkar. We teach them to feel pride in themselves,” Raj Kumar added.
A distant cousin of Sanjay Jatav, Prem Kumar has just begun his foray in village-level politics. He said people are already taking him more seriously. “We don’t get much but we get social recognition, we get the respect that no human being can live without,” he said, tidying his white shirt for the baraat.
THE WEDDING DAY
On July 15, Rupendra Chauhan stuck out his arm from the rooftop of his two-storey house and swept it in a wide circle. He was tracing the route his brother-inlaw’s baraat took. “All Thakur baraats make the same rounds,” said Chauhan, eager to witness the Dalit wedding procession. Jatav was going to take his own sweet time, though.
Dressed in a powder-blue suit tailored in Aligarh, Jatav sat in a pristine white car followed by an armed bodyguard and holding a filigreed dagger in his hands. The groom grew more and more excited as his vehicle approached Nizampur, jostling in the front seat with his personal gunner, even sitting on his lap at one point. One moment he declared he looked as lavish “as a Thakur”; the next he said he felt like a “cabinet minister.”
Waiting for the baraat at her house, Sheetal reminded herself of the right path: “India is a free country and the Constitution gives everyone equal rights”.
As Jatav’s convoy entered the village, greeted by a phalanx of press, senior police and administration officers and political leaders, the Thakur families rushed to their rooftops to witness the breach of “tradition”. Chauhan scowled as Jatav’s horse-drawn buggy passed his lane followed by a DJ cart and surrounded by hundreds of baraatis clamouring to click selfies.
Dissatisfied with the income from his family’s fields, Chauhan recently moved to Delhi to work in building construction. His city life isn’t always guided by caste rules, but he sticks to “tradition” in the village. “No Thakur in this village will attend their wedding,” his sister, Rajni, said.
Out in the fields, a group of Thakur men had got into a huddle by then, deciding to lie low for a week, until the media and the police left. “This is too much. We will show them we are still the thakurs of the village,” said their leader before walking off.
STATUS UPDATE
On May 9, Maulik Jadhav, a resident of Dholka in Gujarat, received a panicked call. A young Dalit man had been threatened by local Darbar (a Kshatriya subcaste) men, for adding “Sinh” (lion) to his name. Many Dalit men in Dholka say they have added the suffix for at least three generations, but this was the first time trouble had flared up. Jadhav helped the young man lodge a police complaint and gathered about a hundred people for a protest that played out live on Facebook.
The 22-year-old’s personal battle, however, begun years ago.
His “carefree life” was punctured when he passed the Class 10 board exams, and moved to a bigger school in the hope of better prospects. Instead, what he got was a volley of caste slurs the moment his classmates realised he was Dalit. “I was young, I didn’t know what slur, bias, discrimination meant. I went home and asked why are they calling us low? That day, I understood they are upper, we are lower,” he said.
A few months later, he started reading Ambedkar, aided by an uncle who was in the Air Force, and returned after retirement to rouse young Dalit men into action. That was also the year Jadhav made an account on Facebook and installed WhatsApp.
In 2016, a group of Dalit men in Una were flogged by cow protection vigilantes, the violence beamed live across the country. The attackers had intended to brag but the videos galvanised Dalit communities instead, sweeping up hundreds of young men like Jadhav into the movement.“Our voices used to be muted. We worked in their fields and feared our masters. But now some of us moved to cities, and realised what they do is wrong. We won’t tolerate it any more,” said Maulik.
By May 10, reports had started pouring in of other Dalit men being intimidated for using the Sinh suffix. Maulik changed his first name to Mauliksinh on Facebook, and hundreds followed. His house was attacked soon after, and on May 22, a group of bike-borne men brandishing guns cornered him off a highway. Jadhav fled, but returned to the local police station with a group of 5,000 men and a clear message that they won’t back off. “Many people asked, what is the need to do this? But where is it written that we cannot do this? How long will we live in fear?” he said.
Jadhav told his comrades not to take on frontal attacks but organise on social media and involve the police. He is a member of 300 WhatsApp groups himself and more than 40 Facebook groups. In addition, he tutors kids in political awareness. “In my village, even if you ask a 10-year-old Dalit boy where Dr Ambedkar was born, he will know. I teach them how we have to fight and get out of here.”
But resistance comes at a price. Last October, groups of Dalit men put up profile photos on Facebook sporting moustaches after an attack on some of them for doing the same, but the campaign soon unraveled, with one of the young men claiming he orchestrated the attack on himself. Subodh Parmar, a lawyer and activist, said this happened under threats and coercion, and that in many other cases, Dalits are forced to back off and withdraw complaints.
“The pressure is too much. Dalits think they have to return to the village, and so they compromise.”
› Reservations have helped Dalits gain a measure of economic stability. When you feel economically uplifted, you feel at par with the rest, your social status is not at the mercy of the dominant communities any more AMIT THORAT, professor at JNU
› Our voices used to be muted. We worked in their fields and feared our masters. But now some of us moved to cities, and realised what they do is wrong. We won’t tolerate it any more. MAULIK JADHAV, Gujarat resident
LEADING THE FIGHT
Often the heaviest price is paid by Dalit women, who not only bear the brunt of caste atrocities, but also find themselves erased from the annals of resistance. In Gujarat, for example, despite the increased focus, countless crimes against Dalit women have been brushed under the carpet — Dalit women in Junagarh whose arms were broken in a land struggle 20 years ago, a 15-year-old girl who burnt herself to death after being raped, a minor girl raped in Bhavnagar by the man in whose fields she worked.
“What comes out is the man’s assertion against caste, as leadership is seen as masculine. But often, Dalit women lead the fight,” said Manjula Pradeep, a scholar and activist who has worked in Gujarat since 1992.
Ranjanben knows this well, having faced a social boycott for almost a year. Last year, the resident of Rantej village in Gujarat’s Mehsana district gave up manual scavenging and picking up animal carcasses. Breaking out of the exploitative profession she has been locked in for generations, she persuaded her family to do the same.
The retribution was swift: they were cut out of local employment, denied services in the market and forced to travel even for basic amenities.
But Ranjanben remains undeterred. She said she cannot condemn her children, who study in Classes 4 and 5, to the same fate.
“Scavenging is a hereditary fate. I wanted to study and go to school but my father said, ‘come pick up carcasses.’ We didn’t have anything to eat, so I couldn’t refuse him. It strips your dignity; even if I starve I won’t go back.”