DALIT SPRING IN THE HINDI HEARTLAND
The April 2 Bharat Bandh, organised by non-political Dalit groups, has revealed a new capacity for mobilisation among the historically oppressed community in the Hindi heartland. Their fight to protect their constitutional rights seems to have acquired a new dimension during Narendra Modi’s regime, dispelling the myths of his slogan, ‘Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas’.
The Dalit crisis began when the BJP came to power in the Hindi heartland and western part of the country. While the prime minister claims an OBC (Other Backward Class) background, he has done little to secure educational or economic opportunities for the Dalits. This is because the BJP cannot run the government independently; the government machinery is actually run by the party’s mother ship, the RSS.
The RSS and the BJP have spread their network into every structure in the Hindi heartland and western India because that is their main operational base. For decades, they have trained their upper caste cadre that the varnadharma, including the practice of untouchability, needs to be preserved to establish a Hindu Rashtra. The RSS has no cultural history of being Dalit/ Adivasi/ OBCfriendly. It has only worked for the economic and cultural advancement of the
vyapari, pujari, sadhu, sanyasi and, of course, the cow. Its literature does not talk about the dignity of labour. As an organisation, it has neither studied nor worked for the agrarian masses because in their literary/ cultural history, these people have never figured as the base of the Hindu motherland. Even the Shudras do not figure as the critical component of the ‘Hindu motherland’; only the dwijas— Brahmin, Vaishya, Kshatriya—are part of it. Their slogan ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ is not an echo of an inclusive mood. Their Bharat Mata is a ‘Brahminic Mata’, an embodiment of the cultural code of Manudharma. Dalit history and heritage are the antitheses of this concept.
The north Indians started their anti-Brahmin movement quite late. In south India, social reforms happened rather smoothly, before an organised Brahminic force like the RSS could entrench itself, though caste and untouchability do persist in the region. The RSS’s Hindu Rashtra agenda is an anti-social reform agenda. Though it does not have an agenda to reform caste-ridden Hinduism, it is highly motivated to reform Indian Islam. In their own Hindu society, they are all for reversal of reform laws. The March 20, 2018, judgment of the Supreme Court on the SC/ST Atrocities Act reflects such an atmosphere in the central law ministry. There is a consensus in Hindutva circles that all reservation laws must be reviewed. RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat has been consistently speaking against reservation. The fear among Dalits/ Adivasis is heightened because their middle class emerged from this reservation system.
Unlike Indira Gandhi, Modi cannot bulldoze the administration to implement his promises to people. The party and his ministers are not under his control, they are in the RSS’s hands. Therefore, his call “kill me if you want to, but not my Dalit brothers” made no dent in the antiDalit mindset of the BJP/ RSS ranks. Now more Dalits are being killed in the cow belt. The cow protection policy of the RSS has become a Dalit destruction policy. Dalits, across political affiliations, realise that in the name of cow protection, the Dalit/ Adivasi cattle economy and food resources are being destroyed.
Scared that their reservation and scholarship will be withdrawn, Dalit students live in fear of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad in higher educational institutions. It is this fear that has made the new mobilisation possible. Call it India’s ‘Dalit Spring’.
Damage control
Despite the occasional missteps, electoral compulsions have also driven the BJP to court Dalits with a number of outreach programmes. Unwilling to lose the support base that has served the party so well since 2014, it has been trying very hard—from celebrating birth anniversaries of Dalit icons to tom-tomming the selection of Ram Nath Kovind, a Dalit, as the country’s president.
It has already taken a sharp U-turn on Ambedkar over the last decade—from the time of Arun Shourie, a senior minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, calling him a “false god” to the series of programmes launched by the Modi government to celebrate his contribution to the social and political fabric of India. Even the RSS mouthpiece Organiser now hails him as the “ultimate unifier”.
The RSS, in fact, has coined the slogan ‘One well, one temple, one crematorium’ to take a position against discrimination in villages. Manmohan Vaidya, the new RSS national joint general secretary, calls this “the most powerful programme of Dalit inclusion in the country” but laments that “the country’s ugly brand of politics still comes in the way of Dalit empowerment”.
The Union government claims an impressive number of beneficiaries of the Modi government’s welfare schemes such as Mudra, Jan Dhan, Ujjwala and rural housing are Dalits. Under Mudra, a total of Rs 4.73 lakh crore of loans have reportedly been disbursed to over 106 million people, of which 15 per cent are Dalits. In the Ujjwala scheme, 30 per cent of the total 40 million beneficiaries are Dalits. In Jan Dhan, 20 per cent of the total 310 million account holders are Dalits. In the PM’s rural housing scheme, some 28 per cent of the 4.6 million beneficiaries so far are Dalits.
On April 5, 2016, Modi announced the Stand-up India scheme under which 15,000 Dalit entrepreneurs have been given loans, ranging from Rs 10 lakh to one crore. A special venture capital fund of Rs 250 crore has been allocated to 70 leading Dalit entrepreneurs. The central government PSUs have given about 2,000 Dalit entrepreneurs business worth Rs 373 crore in three years. “No government has done as much to empower the Dalits as the Modi government is doing now,” says Milind Kamble, president of the Dalit India Chamber of Commerce and Industry. BJP MP Udit Raj, though, is unconvinced. “Schemes like Stand Up India, Mudra Loan etc are well intentioned, but many Dalits and tribals are yet to get their benefits. A government job is a lifeline for Dalits, and these are hard to come by now. The issue hasn’t been addressed,” he says. He feels there is a big communication gap between the BJP’s top Dalit leaders and the community.
The aggressive Dalit outreach has also created a Catch-22 situation for the ruling party. In 2017, the Madhya Pradesh government had announced a scheme for training of Dalits as priests but withdrew it after protests from upper castes, especially Brahmins, who form the BJP’s core vote bank.
One of the Modi cabinet’s most prominent Dalit faces, Ramdas Athawale, has also come down heavily on the government for not making public the caste census data from the Census Report 2011. The NDA government is yet to make it public even as it released the data on rural and urban socioeconomic indicators more than two years ago.
Dalit struggle continues
It’s not just the caste data: what gets hidden in the political slugfest over Ambedkar’s legacy and the court ruling is the ground realities of the socioeconomic conditions of the Dalits in the country. The ability of Dalits to influence electoral fortunes as a political unit, especially in states such as UP, Punjab, Bihar and MP, has ensured that every political party routinely professes its love for them. But the abyss between lip service and the socioeconomic reality of India has fuelled a social conflict that has now reached a flashpoint. As Udit Raj puts it, today a crime is committed against Dalits every 15 minutes in India. And six Dalit women are raped every day. Between 2007 and 2017, crimes against Dalits saw a 66 per cent hike.
Gupta sees this phenomenon as a consequence of the growing resentment among upper castes about sharing social and political privileges with Dalits. “When oppressed classes start asserting themselves, backlashes happen. In the US, the lynching of Blacks started in the latter part of the 19th century when they began asserting their rights. The same is happening with the Dalits,” he says,
UPPER CASTE HEGEMONY, RISE OF HINDUTVA POLITICS AND DALIT PRIDE ARE FUELLING CRIMES AGAINST SCs
Not that Dalit atrocities have risen only under BJP dispensations. For instance, UP saw a 25 per cent rise in crimes against Dalits between 2015 and 2016—the highest in the country—as against a national average of 5 per cent during the same period, according to a recent National Crime Research Bureau report. The SP ruled the state during that period. At the same time, several BJP-ruled states such as MP, Haryana and Gujarat also showed a sharp rise in crimes against SCs. Prof. Sundar attributes the rise to a combination of three factors—an atmosphere of impunity due to Hindutva politics, a resurgence of upper caste hegemony and increased Dalit assertion.
Seven decades after Independence, more than three-fourths of India’s SCs still live in rural areas and 84 per cent of them have an average monthly income of less than Rs 5,000. And it’s not just a rural phenomenon. According to Prof. Acharya, an IIDS study on rental housing in the NCR in 2012 showed evident prejudice in offering rental accommodation to SCs. “The bias was also evident in hirings in private firms in urban areas. Many more applicants from upper caste backgrounds were called for interview compared to SCs and Muslims despite all other characteristics—educational and social—being similar,” she says.
The 2011 Census data shows that more than 60 per cent Dalits do not participate in any economic activity. Of the working population, nearly 55 per cent are cultivators and agricultural labourers. Around 45 per cent of rural SC households are landless. Only 13.9 per cent Dalit households have access to piped water, only 10 per cent access to sanitation compared to 27 per cent nonDalit households. A staggering 53.6 per cent Dalit children are malnourished.
Some argue that the current assertion of Dalits reflects the aspirations of the post-liberalised economy. “The number of educated Dalit youth has grown exponentially after the 1991 economic liberalisation,” says K. Raju, head of the Congress’s SC cell. “However, jobs and opportunities in government sectors have shrunk. And they still do not have significant access to the private sector. These disillusioned Dalits are looking for a change.” Certainly the dilution of the Atrocities Act was not the change they were looking for.