When religion and caste collide in Punjab
In her piece, The anatomy of a Dalit labourer’s lynching, published in this newspaper on November 7, Sujatha Gidla outrages at the lack of outrage by liberals over the brutal murder of Lakhbir Singh at the Singhu farm protest site. Outrage we must, at the loss of human life, but certain assertions by the author are deeply problematic and need to be addressed.
Gidla speculates that the murder may have been committed because of Sikh disgruntlement over the appointment of a Dalit as the interim chief minister (CM) of Punjab. Channi’s appointment, full-time and not “interim”, has been widely cheered by the Sikh community which has historically had no separation between Church and State. Religion and politics are still inseparable in Punjab. The acting jathedar (head priest) of the Akal Takht, the highest temporal body of the Sikhs, Giani Harpreet Singh, is a Dalit Sikh and Channi’s appointment creates a welcome situation where the state government and clergy are both headed by Dalit Sikhs.
At nearly a third of the state’s population, Dalits are not politically insignificant in Punjab. The Akalis, the other big political force in the state, tied up with the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and announced that their deputy CM face would be a Dalit, before the Congress went one better and gave a community leader the top job by firing Amarinder Singh, the most powerful Jat Sikh leader in the country.
It is nobody’s case that caste fault lines and everyday discrimination don’t afflict Punjab’s society. While the Sikh religion is explicitly casteless, Sikh society is not. However, a one-size-fits-all approach to viewing caste dynamics across the country carries risks. The much-maligned Brahminism, for instance, remains a byword for caste oppression among activists, though, in reality, Brahmins are a marginalised group in modern-day Punjab. One could argue that caste discrimination by Punjabi Hindus is benign relative to what’s seen in the cow belt and elsewhere. On the farm, it’s not uncommon to find a Bihari worker, a Savarna Hindu with farmland of his own back home, being mildly bossed around by the Jat landlord’s Dalit Sikh assistant/henchman, a landless person, who asserts himself as the native, speaks Punjabi and acts the Sardarji before the “bhaiya” as parochial heft trumps caste.
The question of caste is too complex anyway to be broken down into a simplistic binary of caste Hindus/Sikhs and Dalits, as castes and sub-castes exist even within the Dalit fold. Whether the Singhu murder was a spontaneous act or a conspiracy is for the police and other investigators to ascertain but it’s farfetched to speculate, as Gidla does, that Dalit Sikh men killed a Dalit Sikh man perhaps in response to a Dalit Sikh man becoming CM.
The accused who surrendered publicly stated they punished Singh for sacrilege, suggesting prima facie that the motivation was religious rather than caste-based. Though that makes the crime no less despicable, it’s safe to say an upper-caste person in Singh’s place would have been similarly targeted by the Nihangs, a still medieval warrior sect living on the fringes of society (Sikhs have no concept of a monastic order). In a country where much of the mystical, the occult and the ancient survives, it’s no surprise the medieval does too.
A visit to the protest sites would quash the belief that Dalits are staying away. Dalit cadres make up the bulk of several of the Left-leaning unions leading the movement. The capital-labour compact is skewed in the former’s favour everywhere, but when the employer’s business is threatened, the employees protest too. Class interests don’t always collide; they collude too.
Gidla says the new farm laws will end freeloading through price support. The government has repeatedly clarified that price support is here to stay. If it amounts to freeloading, what would one say of the 800 million beneficiaries of the PM’s free food programme PM-GKAY? Unviable agriculture and mass starvation aren’t good alternatives, after all.
The elephant in the room is that there are far too many stomachs to feed and far too many people dependent on old-school agriculture for a living, things that have no easy legislative fix. The government is forced to step in and achieve the conflicting goals of price support for the producer and price control for the consumer. Another elephant, of course, is the dire environmental impact of groundwater-intensive agriculture. What really needs reform is farming per se, much more than the trading of farm produce as the new laws aim to do.
Gidla says the protest is doomed; its participants hotly contest this. The farmers say they have already succeeded — the laws wouldn’t be in abeyance if there was no protest — but they want to succeed more. Their liberal friends may be driven by a lust for likes in a woke new world but the farmers don’t care much about social media, choosing instead the rough street where they’re more at home and harder to wish away.
As BR Ambedkar explains in The Annihilation of Caste, the practical application of caste differs across Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism. Gidla’s assertion that Dalit Sikhs are not allowed by caste Sikhs in their langars is not true. Despite all the ills that religion may have wrought in this world, the Guru’s langar remains a beautifully egalitarian and all-inclusive practice. Nothing needs to be said about this humanitarian institution that has won admirers in East and West alike except that if anyone can truthfully claim they were not allowed in a langar, I’ll eat the proverbial hat, which in my case happens to be a turban, the whole seven yards of it.
THE DYNAMICS OF DISCRIMINATION ARE ALLPERVASIVE BUT HARDLY UNIFORM ACROSS THE COUNTRY. STEREOTYPES DON’T CAPTURE PUNJAB’S COMPLEXITY